Zoo Palast
Hardenbergstrasse 29a,
Berlin
10623
Hardenbergstrasse 29a,
Berlin
10623
3 people
favorited this theater
Showing 11 comments
Was there on the 25th April 2016, and had a look at the larger screen…and what a lovely, large and red interior, wide seats too. I then went to the screening of “Jungle Book” in the smaller and very quaint screen. This smaller room has the length & height of it walls as bookshelves, pick a book whilst waiting for the main-feature, and the reclining seats and four-seater couch-cum-settee was simply fantastic. The price of the ticket was 13.50 euros.
a 1970’s postcard i found in a fleamarket in Berlin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/3546906692/
phtots taken april 2009
exterior
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/3484355616/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/3483532645/
outer lobby and box offices
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/3484351806/
Here is another photo:
http://tinyurl.com/32kxnh
More infos and photographs on this theater (and many others) can be found on the German language only Berlin Movie Theater Guide – www.kinokompendium.de: Zoo Palast
Another shot from 1994 here:–
View link
A view across the Hardenbergstrasse:
http://flickr.com/photos/mr_simon/74380784/
An exterior view of the Zoo Palast in 2004:
View link
This cinema premiered “Madeleine und der Legionär”,according to
http://www.deutscher-tonfilm.de/mudl1.html
Zoo-Palast opend with the comedy “Die Zürcher Verlobung” (Getting Engaged in Zürich/The Affairs of Julie)
in April 1957. It is one of the most interesting cinemas of the fifties in Germany. Close to the station “Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten” it is right in the heart of West Berlin. Although there are shops in the front, everybody would identify it as a cinema.
It seated 1204, is built in stadium style with steps and a slightly oval shape. You enter a big lobby
with stairs on both sides going up to the cinema. The screen and stage is just behind the front.
Nowadays it has lost a lot of its glory. It is sadly refurbished and the front needs new paint.
When I visited it first in 1979, the seats were yellow. There was a oval ceiling with indirect lighting.
Walls were mostly made of wood. I went to the Bond movie “Moonraker” at a saturday night with
a lively and packed house.
Now they changed colours, installed pink seats, painted the ceiling white. Indirect lighting is gone,
the auditorium is sadly lighted, almost dark. The cinema and even the lobby and the big stairs are spoiled by poor looking floral design carpets. The worst thing is that they installed a smaller screen. The former one was about 20 meters long and 8 meters high and only slightly curved.
There were plans to destroy it, build shops or smaller cinemas into its shape, but it’s already destroyed
by the current owners. In former years it was saved by the Berlin film festival (“Berlinale”) which now
takes place in ordinary multiplexes.
I’m guessing that this is the theatre that actress Hildegard Knef mentions in her autobiography The Gift Horse when she talks about the disastrous premiere of her 1958 film for director Wolfgang Staudte, Madeleine und der Legionär. Someone correct me if I err.
She wrote, “The première took place in the newly-built UFA Palast am Zoo. The publicity and public relations offices had excelled themselves and the evening was launched with colossal pomp and ceremony; when the houselights went up at the end, however, the atmosphere was very similar to Pankow in 1946, at the premiere of Love at First Sight. Gingerly I took my bow and was heaped with UFA flowers by the cinema attendants and then sat in the manager’s office behind the stage listening to the doleful reporters' sporadic efforts to say something conmforting. No other representative of UFA was present at this conference…. Friends called and said how sorry they were that the papers, which, in a fit of self-preservation, I had not read, had placed the blame for the UFA catastrophe on me, surmising that the poor director had not a chance against the headstrong star and that therefore the bad script, amateurish camera work, inferior lighting and sets, could also be held against me.”
This was a replacement cinema building to the previous Ufa Palast am Zoo on the site, which was destroyed by bombs on 24th November 1943.
Built in 1957 as a purpose built twin cinema, the architects were Paul Schwebes, Hans Schoszberger and Gerhard Fritsche. The main auditorium Zoo Palast seated 1,204 and is located above the smaller Atelier am Zoo which seated 550.
Over the years between 1970 and 1980 an additional seven screens were added to the building around the sides and to the rear, retaining the original two auditoriums in their original sizes.