Georg
Fricker. Image supplied by Schauburg cinema, Karlsruhe, Germany
The great Karlsruhe cinema entrepreneur Georg Fricker is dead. He passed
away last Saturday [07.06.2008] in a clinic near Munich. Though weakened by cancer
and a stroke, he was still sometimes to be encountered, in his last
years, as an almost anonymous member of the audiences in his own cinema,
the Schauburg.
It has been four years since he handed over the
management of this cinema to Herbert Born, who continues to run the old
and much-loved Karlsruhe “picture palace“ in the style and spirit of his
predecessor.
During the preceding 33 years, Georg Fricker had succeeded
in making the Schauburg a Karlsruhe institution whose influence and
example extended all across the country. And this despite the fact that
conditions at the time of his taking over the cinema were far from
auguring well.
The owner of the Schauburg, Willy Mansbacher, had just
terminated the leasing arrangement with the firm “Olympic“, who had
taken over the cinema in 1968 and transformed the large Schauburg
auditorium into a Cinerama cinema with a screen designed for Todd-AO
projection. Despite this new attraction, however, the operator had soon
fallen into financial difficulties and was no longer able even to pay
the rent for the building.
It was at such a critical moment, in 1971,
that a young cinema enthusiast approached Mansbacher, who was already
advanced in years and looking forward to complete retirement, and asked
him whether it would be possible to rent an auditorium. Mansbacher, who
had been struggling to keep the concern above water by showing the
soft-porn features popular around 1970, replied that, though he wasn’t
any longer interested in renting, “you can, if you want, buy the whole
kit and caboodle from me“ – and so it was that Georg Fricker became the
owner and operator of the last of Karlsruhe’s “picture palaces”.
Born in
1936 in Zsambek, near Budapest, Fricker had arrived in Germany as a
refugee in 1946, when his family had settled in Bruchhausen, close to
Ettlingen. Already at the age of 18, he was organizing cinema shows in
an old gymnasium. A little later, he was touring through the small towns
and villages of the region with a travelling cinema, while at the same
time pursuing his profession as a salesman in the textiles department of
Karlsruhe’s Union department store (later to become Hertie).
Cinema,
however, remained his passion, leading him to take up a position as
assistant to the manager at the “Pali“ in the Herrenstraße, where he
learned all about the day-to-day running of a picture-house. Fricker
took out loans in order to buy several smaller cinemas in the
surrounding region, and also set up a workshop for the repair of film
projectors. But his great period began with his buying of the Schauburg
– an investment which appeared, at the time, to cinema-business
“insiders”, to be a serious misjudgement. Following the principle of
“learning by doing”, he set about making the cinema, which had teetered
for so long on the edge of commercial collapse, once again a going
concern and reorganizing its programme in such a way as to make it
noticed all over Germany.
He included in this programme international
“art-house“ movies and also provided a forum for the New German Cinema
emerging in these years, even having the Schauburg architecturally
reconstructed so as to be able to offer the greatest possible variety of
cinematic fare. The gallery of the original large auditorium was
separated off as the “Cinema”; and later the small “Bambi“ was built
directly onto the lobby. Fricker took part in the founding of the
“Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kino“, intended to help independent cinemas in
Germany survive in the face of the giant cinema chains and film
distributors. Each year the Schauburg receives honourable mention among
those cinemas distinguished, since 1976, by the German Minister of the
Interior for offering an annual film programme of especial excellence.
The cinema has consistently presented, and continues to present, to the
public a programme that, besides the latest big releases, also includes
a number of film classics and so-called “cult films“. Science-fiction
fans have been able to enjoy there, in the form of all-night shows,
several “Star Trek” movies shown end to end; showings of the evergreen
“Rocky Horror Picture Show” are guaranteed to turn, each time, into a
small “happening”; and classics in 70mm format have been showcased in
the Schauburg with inimitable style.
A particularly big hit have been
the Jazz Festivals, where all the auditoria, and even the foyer, play
host to musical and other performances on into the wee small hours. The Schauburg has taken part in Karlsruhe‘s Kulturmarkt and Europäische
Kulturtage, contributing several series of films to the latter. It has
worked closely with the Badische Staatstheater, the city’s music school,
and various other local cultural institutions. In the 1990’s, Georg
Fricker introduced an annual series of themed film-weeks devoted to the
cinema of specific countries.
In the summer of 1995 the Schauburg
organized for the first time the Open Air Film Nights at Gottesaue
Castle, one of the largest German open-air cinemas. Georg Fricker once
again proved his infallible business sense in taking part in the bidding
for the licence to operate a large-scale cinema in the immediate
vicinity of the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media (ZKM), eventually
taking over the management of the project himself as equal partner with
the Kieft Group. The Filmpalast am ZKM, which opened in March 2000, is
currently developing, in a period where much of the cinema industry is
in crisis, into one of Germany’s most successful larger cinemas.
Little,
however, in the appearance or manner of Georg Fricker, who did not
consider it beneath him to occasionally stand and take the tickets in
his own cinema, betrayed to the uninformed that the man had indeed
achieved such enormous success in business. Much more important to him
than money was the respect and recognition of those around him and it
was toward acquiring such respect that all his efforts were really bent.
It would, indeed, be false to describe him as an easy person to get
along with. He was, in fact, querulous and obstinate, a difficult and
stubborn partner both in conversation and in negotiation who, when it
came to his cinema, showed no willingness to compromise on any point.
Those who succeeded in getting to know him better, however, got to know
also a very generous and sympathetic side of Georg Fricker. It was
surely this side as well which contributed to enabling him to make the
Schauburg what it is today: one of Germany’s finest cinemas, and a place
which, for many citizens of Karlsruhe, possesses an almost magical
quality, having been associated with so many happy memories.
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More
in 70mm reading:
Wie Georg Fricker
übernahm Karlsruhes letzten Kinopalast
Schauburg Cinerama, Karlsruhe,
Germany. Home of The Todd-AO Festival
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