The Lichtburg

image author: Lichtburg Essen

The Lichtburg is a movie theatre in Essen. It was opened on 18th October 1928. With 1.250 seats the Lichtburg is one of the largest (and as many say also the prettiest) cinemas in Germany. The screen can be rolled up, behind it is a stage, so that the hall can also be used for events. The building is listed.
The Lichtburg was heavily damaged in 1943 during allied bombing raid on Essen. The cinema hall was rebuilt after the war in the clear design vocabulary of the fifties. The Lichtburg was in the fifties and sixties Germany's most important premiere cinema. Among the then premiere guests have been (apart from many others) Romy Schneider, Zarah Leander, Jean Marais, Heinz Rühmann, Buster Keaton and Gary Cooper. The Lichtburg saw as event hall artist like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie or Juliette Greco.
With the arrival of television in the mid-sixties all cinemas in Germany got into difficulties. But the Lichtburg could was able to continue until the eighties due to its size. In 1991 opened, also in Essen, Germany's largest  Multiplex-Cinema, the CinemaxX. At this time, the number of visitors to the Lichtburg (it was seen as technical dated) collapsed massively. Several times in the mid-nineties the Lichtburg was in danger of closing. The complex, where the Lichtburg is situated, was also in dire need of renovation, so that the Essen property management planed a conversion of the building to a pure event theatre. Protest by the Essen citizens and also prominent persons like Wim Wenders and Wolfgang Niedecken lead to a council decision to preserve the Lichtburg as cinema.
Picture Copyright : http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Lichtburg_Essen.jpg

image author: Lichtburg Essen

After a one-year, seven million Euro renovation phase, the Lichtburg was fitted with modern technique and on the 16th of March 2003 re-opened. In addition to the great hall another smaller cinema, the Sabu was installed.  This article is based on the article from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichtburg_%28Essen%29 the free Encyclopedia Wikipedia and is under http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU-Lizenz_f%C3%BCr_freie_Dokumentation . In  Wikipedia is a http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lichtburg_%28Essen%29&action=history available.