Ufa Palast am Zoo

History

The Romanesque-style building at Hardenbergstraße 29 was designed as an exhibition space by Carl Gause, one of the architects of the Hotel Adlon, and called the Ausstellungshallen am Zoologischen Garten after the adjacent Berlin Zoo. In 1912, Arthur Biberfeld converted the western section into a theatre. In 1913–15, projection facilities were installed by Oskar Kaufmann for the première of the film Quo Vadis, produced by the Italian Cines company, and from 1913 to 1914, the theatre was called the Cines-Palast. The other section of the building housed a café and variety theatre called the Wilhelmshallen.

In 1919, architect Max Bischoff rebuilt it for Ufa as a 1,740-seat cinema, which opened on 18 September 1919 with the première of Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry. The cinema had a rectangular auditorium with two levels of proscenium boxes and the remaining seating arranged in horseshoe-shaped rows. Siegfried Kracauer praised the sightlines from the amphitheatre-style seating and the "discreet" and "tasteful" colour scheme; the décor was simple, with faïence panels around the screen.

In 1925, the cinema was rebuilt by Carl Stahl-Urach; it was enlarged to 2,165 seats by the addition of a balcony, the lighting was improved, and an illuminated cinema organ was added. The interior décor by Samuel Rachman resembled that of Broadway cinemas. It was the largest cinema in Germany until the 1929 opening of the Ufa-Palast in Hamburg, which was at that time the largest in Europe.

The reopening on 25 September 1925 was overseen by Ernö Rapée, a former employee of the American cinema impresario "Roxy" Rothafel who was brought over by Ufa together with Alexander Oumansky, who had been ballet director at Roxy's Capitol Theatre, to introduce US-style cinema shows to Germany. They were given an 85-member orchestra plus a jazz band, and Roxy himself came to offer assistance. The New York Times reported that the American "combination of symphony concert, ballet and film" had been successfully imported to Germany for the first time. Rapee stayed on for almost a year as manager and as Ufa's senior music director, in which role he arranged music to accompany several films; he left after supervising the opening of Ufa's new Gloria-Palast across the square. Berlin's own Capitol cinema, designed by Hans Poelzig, also opened in 1925 as a nearby competitor to the Ufa-Palast; by 1928, when Joseph Goebbels made a speech denouncing the entertainment and other business venues there, Berlin's premier cinemas were clustered close together around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and some had deliberately sought to make it the "Broadway of Europe".

Following the renovation, the exterior was used for advertising, designed by Ufa's scenic designer Rudi Feld. This began with light displays and large posters and progressed to complete transformations of the appearance of the building. For example, for Spione in 1928, a gigantic stylised eye stared out of the centre of the façade and the letters of the title, written across the whole width of the central bay, became pupils which emitted searchlights; for Frau im Mond in 1929, the façade was draped in lights to evoke stars, and above the entrances skyscraper cities jutted out, from the centres of which model spaceships travelled to a moon globe and back; and for Asphalt, also in 1929, a huge transparency of a street scene—taken from the credits—was mounted on the front of the building, with speeding cars in the foreground, and alternately lighted and darkened; wooden gates swung closed in front of it, with the title written on them in letters blazing with light. The exception was Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which received a double première on 10 January 1927: the gala première at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo was attended by President Hindenburg but advertised only by a sign above the entrance reading Welturaufführung (world première), while the smaller première, primarily for the press, took place at the smaller Ufa-Pavillon am Nollendorfplatz (Germany's first purpose-built cinema, dating to 1912), which for the occasion was painted silver and illuminated "gleam[ing] like a beacon into the night", as a contemporary reviewer put it, and had a gong mounted over the main entrance; the film's brief German run continued there.

Under the Nazis, for important occasions like the 1935 première of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens and the March 1943 celebration of Ufa's own 25th anniversary, Albert Speer modified the façade and it was dressed with large numbers of swastika flags spotlighted from below and with a huge eagle. For the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Speer designed a false front in simplified classical style. The following year, the remainder of the façade was similarly covered and heavy masonry pylons evoking the entrance to the Olympic Stadium set on either side of the entrance; one architectural historian has noted that except for the lack of windows and the decoration with film posters rather than government symbols, the building then looked very like Speer's New Reich Chancellery.

The building was destroyed by bombing on 23 November 1943. The Zoo Palast was built on the site in 1957.

Use for premières

The Ufa-Palast am Zoo was one of the main locations for film premières in Germany. These included:

Premières under the Weimar Republic

Premières in the Third Reich until the outbreak of World War II

Premières during World War II

Gala premières following first showing elsewhere

The première of Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, like those of his earlier films, was scheduled to be held at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, on 23 March 1933, but was cancelled when the film was banned by the Nazis.