Producer
Leopold Hoesch
Director
Dag Freyer
Producer
Nicholas von Brauchitsch
Genre
Culture
Broadcaster
ZDFtheaterkanal / 3sat / ZDFdokukanal
Length
1 x 30'
Editor
Horst Jaquet
Year
2006
Theatrescapes
Landestheater Tübingen

Swabians are often ridiculed as house builders and thrifty. Wrongly so, as the Landestheater Tübingen shows, because it is precisely these qualities that the theatre owes its theatre hall to.

The then administrative director had the foresight to conclude a building savings contract and when the Landestheater, or LTT for short, finally gets its own building, a converted former chair factory, the extension can be realised.

Until 1979, plays have to be staged in a cinema. Students and schoolchildren are the preferred audience in the "wild" 60s and 70s, when artistic director Manfred Beilharz celebrates success with "left-wing popular theatre". During this time of student unrest, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the theologian Hans Küng and Alois Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, teach at the university. In the film, the rhetoric professor Walter Jens tells how the heated debates were also carried into the theatre.

Esther Schweins introduces the LTT and the student town of Tübingen and shows how far the political climate influences theatre work and vice versa. Since Tübingen was hardly destroyed in the war, many actors and directors came to the small town after the end of the war to play and direct. Erwin Piscator, for example, performed Arthur Miller's "Witch Hunt", Maximilian Schell, Theodor Loos, Klaus Maria Brandauer and many others appeared on stage in Tübingen. Artistic director Peter Spuhler, who moved to the Heidelberg Theatre this season, talks about his work and his successor Simone Sterr presents her programme.

Theatrescapes: Landestheater Tübingen

Swabians are often ridiculed as house builders and thrifty. Wrongly so, as the Landestheater Tübingen shows, because it is precisely these qualities that the theatre owes its theatre hall to.

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