Capitol Mannheim

Mannheim's Capitol opened in 1927 as a cinema with a stage built in — a combination that has determined everything since. The Müller family, cinema proprietors of the city, commissioned Paul Darius, who worked in the sober geometry of the Neue Sachlichkeit on the site of an earlier picture house; the oval dome over the round auditorium spans twenty-five metres, and the house held some 1,200 with its balcony. The first film shown was Murnau's 'Sunrise'. The building came through the war intact, turned gradually towards live music across the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s had become one of the busiest music clubs in the Rhine-Neckar region. The arrival of the multiplex closed it in the 1990s. It reopened in 1998 as a concert house and now carries concerts, musicals, cabaret and children's theatre.