The story
1947 to 1952: From Leer to Wilhelmshaven
The history of the LBNN began immediately after the end of the Second World War when the predecessors of the Landesbühne, the Ostfriesische Kammerspiele founded in Leer and the Neue Bühne established on the North Sea island of Norderney, began their performances. The financially shaky theaters merged to form the "Ostfriesische Landesbühne GmbH" in Leer from June 1948, which, according to the plans of its directors, was to supply various guest venues with theatrical art from all divisions. It soon became apparent, however, that Leer had decisive disadvantages for the undertaking of a touring stage: on the one hand, the town was not central enough for the trips to the various venues, and on the other hand, the catchment area of the town itself was too small. A move to the nearby city of Wilhelmshaven, which had a rich theatrical tradition since its founding in 1869, was therefore the obvious choice.
In the course of post-war reconstruction, a "theater construction association" was founded in Wilhelmshaven in April 1947 to promote the construction of a new theater to replace the municipal stage in the Seemannshaus, which had fallen victim to the air war in 1943. After much discussion, a new stage building was created by converting the centrally located former naval director's office from 1904. The light court of the building at the intersection of Virchowstrasse and Peterstrasse, an area measuring 13 by 31 meters, was roofed over, thus creating space for the stage and the auditorium. The former service rooms gave way to the newly created foyer and offices for the employees on two floors. The seats in the theater - 718 in the parquet and 155 in the tiers - were donated by the people of Wilhelmshaven, who expressed their support for the new cultural institution.
However, the new Stadttheater Wilhelmshaven was initially a "house without an ensemble". It was not until 1952 that the Lower Saxony Minister of Culture Richard Voigt reorganized the Ostfriesische Landesbühne into the Landesbühne Niedersachsen Nord, with its administrative headquarters in Wilhelmshaven, the municipal theater began to enjoy regular drama performances. At the same time, it was agreed that the municipal theater would also host musical productions by the Oldenburgisches Staatstheater, Low German plays by the Niederdeutsche Bühne, which had existed since 1932, and concerts by the Städtisches Orchester. In turn, the Landesbühne had to cover a large performance area from the Emsland to the Lüneburg Heath and in its first years gave guest performances in the following towns, communities, and health resorts in addition to its hometown of Wilhelmshaven: Ahmsen, Aurich, Brake, Emden, Esens, Jever, Juist, Leer, Meppen, Norden, Norderney, Oldenburg, Papenburg, Pewsum, Rotenburg/Wümme, Sögel, Soltau, Stade, Varel, Weener, Werlte, Westrhauderfehn, Wittmund and Zeven. Some of these towns later did not have their permanent theater, while others fell under the jurisdiction of the Landesbühne Hannover, which was also founded in 1952. (today: Theater für Niedersachsen, based in Hildesheim), so that the LBNN's performance area initially varied from season to season.
The "Zweckverband der Landesbühne Niedersachsen Nord" was founded in 1947 to put the Landesbühne on a solid legal and financial footing, with representatives from the kreisfreie Städte, the cities belonging to the district and the Landkreiss in the performance area. The direct organizational model for the body, which still has its headquarters in Aurich today, was an institution outside of cultural work, namely the "Zweckverband zur Kadaverververwertung in Ostfriesland". Since 1953, the association has acted as the sole shareholder of a GmbH. One of the tasks of its supervisory board is to appoint the artistic director of the Landesbühne. The members of the special-purpose association pay contributions based on their population, which, together with the subsidies from the state of Lower Saxony, form an important economic foundation for the Landesbühne.
1952 to 1958: The first seasons
The first artistic directors of the LBNN were still working in Leer: Wilhelm Grothe and Herbert Paris. From 1952, the latter also took on the role of artistic director of the Wilhelmshaven municipal theater. This personal union - director of the Landesbühne and artistic director - was the rule in Wilhelmshaven until the mid-1990s, but there were also exceptions. Between 1958 and 1964, for example, Rudolf Sang, the former head stage manager in Oldenburg, headed the municipal theater, while Rudolf Stromberg was the artistic director of the LBNN during this period.
The first production of the Landesbühne Niedersachsen Nord, a rehearsal of Hamlet, had its premiere on 19 October 1952 in Wilhelmshaven. The title role was played that evening by guest Bernhard Minetti. In the morning of the same day, the Stadttheater was officially opened with a matinee event; the ceremonial address was given by the Berlin theater scholar Hans Knudsen. In the first seasons, performances of classics predominated. In addition to several plays by the young Schiller (The Conspiracy of Fiesco of Genoa, Don Karlos), the program included large productions that challenged a limited Ensemble such as A Winter's Tale by Shakespeare or The Knight of Zalamea by Calderón. But the modern drama of the first post-war years also found its way into the Landesbühne; Sartre's Closed Society was shown, as were Arthur Miller's plays All My Sons and Witch Hunt. The stage proved intrepid with several world premieres and the production of Rolf Honold's play Der Stoß nach Ssogrebitsche, an early examination of the war years. As a local specialty, the drama Nicht im Hause, nicht auf der Straße was performed, whose author Hans-Joachim Haecker worked as a teacher at a Wilhelmshaven grammar school. The production, which contained a procession of lamentation and thematized the protagonist's waking dreams, challenged the actors to adopt a non-mimetic style of acting and was rejected by the audience. style and was rejected by the audience. Nevertheless, the critics attested to the fact that those responsible were producing contemporary theater: "There is no longer one accusation that can be made against the Wilhelmshavener Landesbühne: Lack of willingness to experiment and failure to reflect the intellectual trends of our time."
In the summer of 1955, Herbert Paris moved to Hamburg to the Staatsoper, while Wilhelm Grothe also moved to the Hanseatic city and worked there as an actor. His successor Hermann Ludwig, who had previously directed the Volksbühne in Hanover, opened his directorship with Lessing's Nathan the Wise. He continued the work of Grothe and Paris in many respects. With View from the Bridge, for example, he presented another drama by Arthur Miller and tackled current problems. In Wilhelmshaven, Gerd Oelschlegel's play Die tödliche Lüge premiered, which sheds light on the fate of a married couple from the Soviet Occupation Zone and their attempts to gain a foothold in West German society.
1958 to 1973: Rudolf Stromberg
Rudolf Stromberg became director of the Landesbühne in 1958. The father of the later director of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, Tom Stromberg, had gained experience as an actor, dramaturge and director in Vienna, Graz, Stuttgart, Mannheim and finally Wilhelmshaven, and had also worked for a time as a theater critic. He was therefore familiar with the theater from all sides. The frequently absent Intendant Ludwig had also entrusted him with management tasks and appointed him as his successor.
Read the full text
From the very beginning, Stromberg was committed to improving the working conditions of the Landesbühne and its ensemble at all venues. The west wing of the Stadttheater in Wilhelmshaven was extended, creating new storage rooms, a new tailor's shop and a small rehearsal stage. However, Stromberg's name is primarily associated with a series of new auditorium buildings that were erected according to his concept at various locations in the performance area. The newly acquired performance spaces were usually located in school buildings, where they were available as auditoriums, but at the same time had to meet the requirements of theater operations (stage with minimum area, sufficient lighting, ascending rows of seats, dressing rooms, etc.). A desirable side effect of this building activity was that pupils often made up a considerable proportion of the audience. The idea of the hall construction chain, which attracted nationwide attention and was copied in Schleswig-Holstein, also had the advantage that similar conditions prevailed at the various locations and, for example, the stage design did not have to be adapted to the local conditions in each case.
Stromberg also had clear artistic ideas. He tried to minimize the number of guest performances by other theatres in Wilhelmshaven and thereby strengthen the ensemble spirit at the Landesbühne. His productions of classical plays (for example by Shakespeare, Schiller, Ibsen and Shaw) were in the tradition of Regietheater, adapted to the respective contemporary backgrounds with sometimes comprehensive strokes and were also noticed outside the state borders. Above all, however, Stromberg opened himself up to contemporary drama. The absurde Theater, which had been emerging since the mid-1950s, was represented at the Landesbühne by authors such as Eugène Ionesco (The Bald Singer; The Lesson; The Rhinoceroses) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer (The Delay)early on. In the course of the 1960s, the emphasis shifted in favor of deliberately socially critical literature. The anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht, a series of bitter comedies by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the cabaret-sketchy Nachrichten aus der Provinz by Jochen Ziem or Heinar Kipphardt's hotly debated period piece In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer. Stromberg also made his audience familiar with contemporary French theater; the repertoire included plays by Sartre, Camus, Giraudoux, Anouilh and Queneau. Stromberg rejected light, non-committal entertainment and defended his repertoire with a term derived from Sartre as "committed theater". We want, he wrote in a first summary after five years, that the events on stage... call the visitor to reconsider old thoughts and convictions, admonish him to reflect on himself, to recognize and criticize his virtues and vices, challenge him to live with a clearer, better consciousness [sic] to give him courage to go his way more self-confidently, more individualistically, more courageously and more consistently.
This approach to the theater sometimes led to conflicts with the audience, which no longer attended the performances in such large numbers, especially in the smaller venues of the Landesbühne (for example in Varel and Jever). The theater responded with a series of "debate evenings", in which, in addition to the artistic director and directors, representatives of the adult education centers or municipal libraries also took part. In the spring of 1969 alone, representatives of the Landesbühne took part in no fewer than 21 discussion rounds throughout the entire theater area. However, the LBNN was not prepared to compromise on its repertoire policy. The directorate wanted to meet the need for a non-accusatory, non-oppressive theater, which the older generation, in particular, had asserted in the discussions, by staging Peter Handke's spoken play Publikumsbeschimpfung. However, the author forbade the theater, as well as other theaters at the time, to perform his play. Out of this necessity - and out of a certain amount of anger - the Landesbühne, under the aegis of actor and dramaturge Moritz Boerner, developed the production Die Publikumsbesänftigung, which, satirically broken, entered into a dialog with Handke's text and also confronted the audience with its demands.
The production Victor or the Children in Power (based on the drama of the same name by Roger Vitrac) was invited to the 2nd Norddeutsches Theatertreffen in Hamburg in 1972 and won a prize, which consisted of the production being broadcast on the Third Television Program of NDR, Radio Bremen and Sender Freies Berlin. In the fall of the same year, the Landesbühne celebrated its 20th anniversary. On the long journeys to the various venues, from which the actors and technicians often did not return until well after midnight, 724,822 kilometers had been covered by this time. Rudolf Stromberg, who had made a significant contribution to permanently establishing the Landesbühne as a cultural institution, was awarded the Niedersächsischer Verdienstorden in December 1973. By this time, he had already left Wilhelmshaven after 15 years as director and taken over the Städtische Bühnen Augsburg.
1973 to 1979: Mario Krüger
Stromberg's successor was the former chief dramaturge in Kiel, Mario Krüger. During his six-year directorship, a long-planned project was realized. In 1976, new premises for workshops were opened in a side wing of the Wilhelmshaven municipal theater, so that the painters' hall, assembly hall, joinery, furniture warehouse, decoration hall, props rooms and an electrical warehouse for spotlights were now all under one roof. Previously, the stage sets had to be made in a barracks building in Schellingstraße, several kilometers away from the theater. As the rooms there were only three meters high, brochures and other large surfaces could only be produced or processed with the help of a complicated folding technique. For the technical staff of the Landesbühne, the new workshops, which were built for the relatively small sum of one million marks, made their work considerably easier.
The technicians at the Landesbühne also benefited from another of Krüger's measures. In addition to the BfA pension, a second pension, and thus greater social security was agreed for this group of employees. In this respect, the technical staff were put on an equal footing with the actors.
In his repertoire policy, Mario Krüger deliberately set a different tone to the enlightened, socially critical theater of his predecessor. In the advertising booklet for the 1977/78 season, for example, he announced a newly understood popular theater, which he defined as a "theater for majorities". He described the "general comprehensibility of the subject matter" as an essential aspect of this. In a retrospective article 25 years later, on the occasion of a book publication about the Landesbühne, he saw the theater as an institution that had less to provoke or disturb than to "ensure the cohesion of society, to stabilize society". The result of these views was a theater that, according to the theater scholar Karl Veit Riedel, produced fewer experiments or even "depressive" works and instead "granted more space to the cheerful genre". Serious dramas, for example Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, were thematically emphasized boulevardesque productions such as Der Trauschein by Ephraim Kishon - and the contrast was heightened by the fact that the same actors, Barbara Dembeck and Klaus Hofer, played the central roles of the married couple in both productions. The summer season on Norderney, which traditionally marks the beginning of the Landesbühne's season, was once again dominated by lighter drama and crime plays.
Nevertheless, Mario Krüger and his artistic collaborators also occasionally took up contemporary themes. With the setting of Georg Kaiser's expressionist play Gas from 1918, the stage reacted to a series of major industrial settlements and bridge constructions in Wilhelmshaven that destroyed coastal landscapes in the 1970s, such as parts of the Geniusstrand in the Voslapp district. The lack of sensitivity in dealing with nature, which prompted young people in particular to protest, finds a counterpart in Kaiser's play in the ruthless exploitation of energy resources. Arnold Wesker's contemporary play Golden Cities, which deals with the failure of social utopias, was also particularly popular with young people. While Wesker's drama criticized the sober pragmatism of the Labour Party, Rolf Hochhuth's political comedy Die Hebamme, which the author himself staged in Wilhelmshaven in 1978, mocked it, among other things, the corruption of a senior city director of the SPD. Theatergoers in northwest Germany may have understood these attacks on the Social Democrats as an indirect confrontation with municipal decision-makers who had come under criticism in connection with the construction of a PVC plant of Imperial Chemical Industries on the Innenjade.
1979 to 1994: Georg Immelmann
The Landesbühne Niedersachsen Nord experienced a new heyday from 1979, when Georg Immelmann, the former chief dramaturge of the Theater Aachen, took over the directorship in Wilhelmshaven. He engaged Johannes Kaetzler, who had previously worked as an assistant to Ingmar Bergman at the Residenztheater in Munich, as head dramaturge until 1984. Together with the dramaturge Kurt Kreiler, a theater program was developed that self-confidently called for the refusal of provincial thinking became the focus of attention. As part of this program, however, there was also a "commitment to the province". In the 1986/87 season, Georg Immelmann staged the only play in world literature set in Wilhelmshaven, namely Ernst Toller's historical play Fire from the Boilers (1930), in which the author reconstructs the Kiel mutiny of fall 1918. The production was staged during the Filbinger affair and the heated discussions surrounding the death sentences of the former naval judge. The LBNN worked on the topic of naval jurisdiction, especially during the First World War, in cooperation with various departments of the German Navy; at the same time, an exhibition was set up in the foyer of the Stadttheater, the former naval directorate. The performances and accompanying events were well received by the public.
While artistic director Stromberg had still shown a preference for French drama, Scandinavian classics were now conspicuously frequent in the repertoire. Johannes Kaetzler staged the comparatively rarely performed Ibsen drama The Lady of the Sea, which was followed by Gespenster, An Enemy of the People and Nora or a Doll's Home. As early as 1981/82, the Landesbühne presented August Strindberg's relationship play Fräulein Julie; four years later, it ventured into the very short, dramatically concentrated monodrama Die Stärkere by the same author. In the area of Kinder- und Jugendtheater, the LBNN also relied on Scandinavian literature with Selma Lagerlöf and the Swedish playwrights Barbro Lindgren and Ninne Olsson, who had hardly been introduced in Germany at the time.
From Wikipedia’s article on State Theater of Lower Saxony North, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4