Schaubühne Lindenfels

The Schaubühne Lindenfels occupies a ballroom on Karl-Heine-Straße that the mason Carl Schmidt built as a dance hall in 1876 and that Emil Franz Hänsel, architect of Leipzig's Specks Hof, enlarged around 1900 with the Jugendstil west wing. Films were shown here from 1906 and in regular operation from 1913; under the GDR the house was the state-owned Lichtspieltheater Lindenfels until a heating failure closed it in 1987. Actors from Jena found the building derelict in 1993 and reopened it in September 1994. Since 2005 it has run as a gemeinnützige Aktiengesellschaft, the first theatre in Germany in that legal form, whose shareholders receive artistic certificates instead of dividends. It is a cultural centre as much as a cinema: theatre, concerts and performance fill the ballroom, while the film programme runs upstairs in the Grüner Salon, entirely in the original language with subtitles.

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