The establishment of the Volksbühne dates back to the Volksbühne (the people’s stage) movement, which was founded in 1890. Its goal was to allow workers to participate in cultural life and to finance theater productions and inexpensive tickets with the help of membership fees.
Konrad Schmidt, Käthe Kollwitz’s older brother, was chairman of the Freie Volksbühne association from 1897 to 1918. He was already a Social Democrat as a youth and had a great influence on his sister. In her diary, Kollwitz noted that she always looked up to her brother. Because Konrad studied in Berlin, his sister was also sent by her father to Berlin for training at the drawing and painting school of the Association of Berlin Women Artists. As a journalist, Konrad first wrote for various newspapers, then was a permanent employee of the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, for which Käthe also made political drawings.
On December 30, 1914, the Volksbühne’s own house, the enormous theater building on today’s Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, was inaugurated. At that time it was called Bülowplatz and took up a third of the area of the Scheunenviertel. Käthe Kollwitz regularly visited the Volksbühne.
In the 1920s, legendary artistic director Erwin Piscator established the Volksbühne’s reputation as a progressive, experimental theater. The artistic directors Benno Besson and Frank Castorf continued this tradition after World War 2.
On the square in front of the Volksbühne and around the building, brass plates with quotes from the politician are embedded on the sidewalks and street in memory of Rosa Luxemburg.
The listed Karl Liebknecht House, party headquarters of Die Linke, is located in the immediate vicinity on Kleine Alexanderstraße. The Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD – German Communist Party) bought the house in 1926, and the Central Committee moved in. Since when exactly the house officially bears the name of Karl Liebknecht, the co-founder of the party who was assassinated on January 15, 1919 during the November Revolution, is not known. Käthe Kollwitz drew the dead politician in the Charité morgue after his widow Julia asked her to do so.
