Berliner Theater

The Berliner Theater once stood on Charlottenstraße in the Kreuzberg district, a short walk from the city’s busiest thoroughfares. The site had been a circus tent in 1850 before an architect named Eduard Titz designed a permanent building. A local businessman, Friedrich Gottlieb Großkopf, bought the theatre and ran it first as a home for comic plays and then as Berlin’s first café-chantant called Walhalla. By 1869 the house had become the Walhalla-Volks-Theater, offering operettas and one-act plays to working-class audiences. In 1888 the building reopened as the Berliner Theater under director Ludwig Barnay, who rebuilt the interior and assembled one of Germany’s finest acting companies. The stage saw the world première of Alt-Heidelberg in 1901 and a celebrated guest appearance by Sarah Bernhardt in 1905. After the First World War the theatre specialised in operettas, introducing new works by Walter Kollo and Willy Bredschneider such as Wie einst im Mai and Madame Pompadour. The final chapter began in 1933 when the building was assigned to the Jüdischer Kulturbund, the only place in Berlin where Jewish performers could legally work under Nazi rule. Today the site is occupied by a modern office block that houses the regional office of the Federal Employment Agency. A small plaque on the wall marks the vanished theatre’s history, recalling its years as a centre of operetta and its tragic role during the 1930s. The ensemble moved to a nearby studio before the building itself was demolished in 1935, leaving only this quiet corner of Kreuzberg to remember the stage that once stood there.