Behind the Scenes
A guided tour with Matthias Schäfer, Technical Director of Berliner Festspiele
Backstage aisles © Berliner Festspiele, Photo: Monika Karczmarczyk
Why is whistling forbidden on stage? And when does the Iron Curtain come down? A walk through the Haus der Berliner Festspiele provides exciting insights into the world of the stage. Technical director Matthias Schäfer will be on hand to answer questions during the guided tour on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and will take you to the special places in the building on Schaperstraße.
The construction of today's Berliner Festspiele building as the ”Theater der Freien Volksbühne” on the site of the former Joachimsthalersche Gymnasium north of Gerhart-Hauptmann-Anlage coincided with the building of the Berlin Wall. Under the directorship of Erwin Piscator, the building designed by architect Fritz Bornemann opened on 1 May 1963. Piscator and his successors Kurt Hübner and Hans Neuenfels made the house on Schaperstraße an important venue for political theater in Berlin. After a brief intermezzo as Musical Theater Berlin, the Berliner Festspiele have been based in the building on Schaperstraße since the turn of the millennium. Since then, the house has been the definitive home of all performative arts, i.e. theater, dance and music. During the Berlinale, the Haus der Berliner Festspiele also attracts cinema enthusiasts.
Learn many interesting details about the building and discover the traces of the house's rich past on a tour that takes you from the box office to the stage area and behind the scenes. The tour is led by the technical director of the Berliner Festspiele Matthias Schäfer.