2023-06-30 15:50:11
The tiled roof glows red in the afternoon sun. This pretty symmetrical building was probably once the town’s schoolhouse, one might think as you walk through Barby. Two houses down the household goods store with a colorful display, in the extension of the street the former butcher’s shop. Nobody far and wide. It’s Sunday, lilac bushes tower over fences, chestnuts are in bloom. Nothing going on in the small town in Saxony-Anhalt with almost 5000 inhabitants and the idiosyncratic name.
Anyway, the names! On the way through the lush green landscape all around, you had passed through Pömmelte, where you can admire the “German Stonehenge”: remains of an old cult site led to the erection of a huge circle of poles, which is supposed to remind of the ring sanctuary, the presumed sacred center of the region more than 4000 years ago. Another town sign on the other side of the Elbe had announced Güterglück. Especially cyclists are on the way here. The Elbe and Saale cycle paths meet near Barby.
Around 2 p.m. there was sudden movement in the town. A front door opens there, the second couple is already walking past the vicarage in the direction of Goethestrasse, and suddenly they are coming from all sides and have the same goal: two streets further, a slightly lower building that fits into the row of houses, the gable of which is neatly decorated with large brown ones letters “Cinema”. Go to the cinema in the old Cinema Barby!
It could have happened something like this on a Sunday afternoon in the years after 1912, when the Jewish master plumber Hugo Hirsch opened his “cinematograph theater” here. In 1908, with a good feeling for the spirit of the time, he had started constructing the cinema building: at that time, almost every town had its own cinema, and people ran in droves to see the moving pictures. A time that now seems light years away. The dying of art house cinemas in the big cities has long been in full swing.
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In Barby, however, the leap in time succeeds today: On this Sunday afternoon in early summer 2023, the Cinema Barby is the focal point of the small town. This would be unthinkable without the Berliners Helmut Kolb and Sigrid Weise. In 2018, the couple bought the dilapidated building, renovated it for three and a half years together with an active group of supporters and made it accessible to the public again in autumn 2021.
The Cinema Barby was closed for almost thirty years
Before that, the doors had been bolted and barred for nearly three decades. “As a Barbyer, you thought it was probably forever,” says Thomas Kummer, 36, who grew up in Barby and is now waiting in line in front of the cinema.
“Where we go into the cinema now, there used to be no entrance at all,” says Jutta Fischer, 74, and completes the view of the cinema’s past. She has lived in Barby almost all her life, so she knows the cinema from the 50s and 60s.
At this point, the Barby cinema had already gone through the major political upheavals. In 1933, at the beginning of the Nazi years, the Jewish owner was forced to sell the cinema. He himself was sent to a concentration camp, which he survived.
In 1949, at the beginning of the GDR, the cinema was expropriated and transferred to the municipal property of the Calbe district. In GDR times, socialist films were shown as well as those from “capitalist countries”.
After the reunification there were still half-hearted attempts, which Thomas Kummer also remembers, who returned to his hometown after ten years in Magdeburg and now works here as an IT expert. “There were people who invested in the demonstration technology before they repaired the roof. With the new owners, you soon noticed that their approach was completely different.” From a distance, Kummer watched as the cinema was gradually renovated inside and out. “Now it’s one of the nicest houses on the street.”
The line is advancing, the guests greet each other happily in the entrance behind the two steps. “Great… go in, man. Inside there’s coffee and cake.” Excited mood. Everyone is looking forward to the “stallion men”, the cabaret from Magdeburg, which is a guest in the cinema this afternoon.
In the small foyer, Jutta Fischer points to the old-fashioned ticket booth: “The box used to be where it is now. That’s where the couples sat,” she recalls. She was there too. “You were 17 and paid 25 cents. I have never forgotten a film that I saw here with my cousin. It was about Hiroshima.”
The back wall of the cinema now runs through the former part of the box. Usually nobody sits in the ticket booth: Admission is free. “There are people who don’t have a cent to spare. But the cinema is also for them,” owner Sigrid Weise will say later. On this Sunday, however, payment has to be made, as is always the case with special events.
And then you’re in. actually taken back to a time long gone. A parquet floor sloping slightly towards the front of the stage, clusters of lamps from the late GDR on the side walls, a stage in front with a long red curtain billowing along it. Seating from the very first generation of the cinema, now with golden cushions. And along the back wall, there are several people in high spirits offering apple pie and mole cake and bee stings from the tin. “We have a tradition of nudism,” says one: film with coffee and cake. “Especially with the old Defa films, the booth is always full.” Today it’s cabaret instead of film. Jutta Fischer has also taken her place behind the baking trays and cuts her sawdust cake “using grated coconut as sawdust”.
The “stallion men” during a performance in the Cinema BarbyHelmut Kolb
The cinema room is admirably in good condition and the event is well organised. High time to take a look at the pictures of the renovation hanging on a side wall, says Sigrid Weise, who has a moment before the performance. How did the purchase come about in the first place? Had she and her husband dreamed of having their own cinema? “Not at all,” the 59-year-old Berlin artist shakes her head. “It caught us off guard a bit.”
A picture of the pretty facade of the cinema in an auction catalog caught their eye and they went to Barby to have a look. The auction in Berlin then started low, two hands were raised, one being Helmut Kolb’s. With the second bid, Helmut Kolb and Sigrid Weise were alone and – hey, the owners of a cinema. “For the first, for the second, for the third… That was a strange feeling!”
So off to Barby, but the seller was in the hospital there at the time and couldn’t show the inside of the house. “When we stood inside with our sons for the first time, in all the rubble, they got the shock of their lives. They looked at their parents and asked: What are you doing here?”
Renovating the cinema was a mammoth project
We look at the pictures. The partially collapsed roof. The torn out screed. A gloomy basement hole where the toilets had apparently been in the past and where men are now digging underground. “It was clear that this would be a mammoth project that would consume time and money,” says Helmut Kolb, 59, who has just joined. As a real estate appraiser, he was able to quickly assess the situation. And as a universally talented craftsman, you can do a lot yourself.
There was no long way to think about it. The sleeves were rolled up. “Our friends all thought it was great,” remembers Sigrid Weise, “that was important. We had a lot of support right from the start, here in Barby, but also from Berlin.” Mending the roof. rip out the soil. “A company from Calbe laid a super screed, and then we were able to lay the entire floor ourselves in two weekends, click parquet, returned goods, luckily we got them cheap…” Invest, be lucky, keep going.
Before frames were built for the acoustics, covered with molleton and attached to the side walls, the room had to be cleaned of dust and dirt. “It was my birthday and I asked my friends to give me a cleaning day together, a Subbotnik!” Good luck, good friends, a good price from the Molton supplier. “But then one bad news came after the other. There was no second escape route. If Helmut hadn’t had the idea of putting him up front, everything could have failed.”
A silent film performance at the Cinema BarbyHelmut Kolb
The old sewage pit no longer existed, so a lifting system had to be installed. Neighbor Hans Fischer, 82, helped tirelessly. Pulling up the cinema screen with scaffolding without it creasing, Helmut Kolb accomplished this feat with his boss. Sigrid Weise describes: “When I sewed together 16 meters of red fabric from many lengths of fabric for the curtain, you slowly realized that you were designing a room.”
But now on your marks, the first bell announces the “stallion men”. The room is occupied down to the last of the 70 seats. The Magdeburg brothers confidently dissect political relationships and each other, to the great laughter of the audience. Pömmelte, the wonderful name of the neighboring town, is laughed at, as is the belly of one brother and the bald head of the other brother. Jokes are cracked along the way: If a man comes to the bakery, points to the display and says: “That one!” Says the saleswoman: “That means snail.” “Ok, snail”, says the man, “that one.”
Sawdust cake and coffee can be picked up again during the break. Even after the performance is over, it is difficult for the Sunday afternoon community to separate. Sigrid is beaming. “It is a great pleasure to have done all this. So much comes back – lots of gratitude and encouragement.”
Jutta Fischer is also satisfied. “I like these shows the most.” She and her husband are honorary members of the association founded in 2020: “We managed to found it just before Corona.” The program of concerts, cabaret, readings and films for adults and – very important – for Since then, children have been determined by the association. There are 30 members, new ones are very welcome. One is just as dependent on donations as on active members. “In the beginning, some people put a fifty in the donation box and said: We’ll do that for our cinema!”
“Basically, things are just getting started now that the construction phase is over,” says Helmut Kolb. Ideas have been coming to them from outside for a long time now. Festivals! school classes! Find and film contemporary witnesses! “We keep getting old documents as gifts,” says Sigrid Weise. “An archive is created. We need movie buffs!”
Moviegoer Thomas Kummer remembers his excitement at the first movie night well. “Nothing was missing here in Barby so much as culture! The small towns are increasingly being left behind, the transport connections are getting worse … And then people come along who manage to modernize a place worth preserving while preserving its old charm.” He writes down the dates as soon as they appear on the website , and keeps them free. Since then, going to Cinema Barby has been like “getting into a time capsule” and going far away for a little while. “I didn’t make it once last year. Then I went for a walk in the evening and saw an unusually large group of people walking down the street for Barby. Oh that’s right, I remembered they came from the Ringelnatz evening, so it was well attended – I was so happy.”
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