Apollo-Theater

The Apollo Theatre stood in Pfannenschmiedsgasse 22 in central Nuremberg, built in 1896 as a grand hall combining theatre, variety and cinema. It rose beside the old Zeughaus, its large auditorium seating over two thousand in stalls and boxes, with a stage wide enough for operettas, acrobatics and full-scale revues. The architect Emil Hecht designed the building for the hotelier Johann Baptist Zetlmeier, who ran both the adjoining Wittelsbach Hotel and the new theatre. The house drew many famous performers in its first decades. Harry Houdini appeared there as the ‘legendary escapologist’, the Japanese wire artist Little All Right drew crowds, and the Australian dancer Saharet thrilled audiences with her style. Variety stars such as Otto Reutter, Bird Millman and the acrobatic family Sylvester Schäffer regularly topped the bill. In 1914 Ludwig Ruff remodelled the interior and added early film shows, and by 1927 the space had become a cinema of 1700 seats, fitted with a Welte cinema organ. After war damage in 1945 the theatre reopened as a makeshift cinema in 1947. Hertie Kaufhaus later replaced the ruins with a department store, and today the same address houses a modern shopping gallery. A second Apollo cinema briefly operated nearby in Sterngasse from 1961 to 1996, but the original building’s memory lives on in local histories and picture collections.