of the play Der Brandner Kaspar schaut ins Paradies by Joseph Maria Lutz. In the summer of 1939 Joseph Schlippe, the head of the city’s building department, redesigned the auditorium completely in the Neoclassicist style typical of the Nazi era. Most of the Art Nouveau stucco was removed so that the whole room appeared in a starkly stripped-down style. On September 1, 1944, Freiburg Theatre, like all German theatres, was shut down. A few months later, in November 1944, Freiburg was bombed and the theatre was badly damaged. Performances were resumed in October 1945 with Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The plays were performed in any undamaged halls in the city centre and in the Wiehre. In 1946, the Chamber Theatre moved to a new location in the Wiehre. Soon after the Second World War the original building was rebuilt by the mayor, Hoffmann. To promote the quick reconstruction of the theatre, the mayor himself put on piano concerts and so collected 120,000 German marks to finance the project. In December 1949 the Großes Haus (main stage) reopened with a performance of Richard Wagner's The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. The lower levels of the building had been reconstructed quite simply and now housed the two cinemas Kamera (today's Winterer Foyer) and Kurbel (today's small stage) – the commercial use of the building was intended to finance further reconstruction. The Chamber Theatre in the Wiehre was abandoned in 1958, but the Kammertheater (Chamber Theatre) opened in the main theatre with Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers. With the first renovation in 1962, a rehearsal stage was built right under the roof. In the course of this, the decorative Art Nouveau gable, which had survived until then, was removed. In 1970, the Kamera was relocated inside the building and a further stage, the podium, added to this space. In 1973, Horst Antes created a wall painting with enamel paint on metal panels attached to the huge and still provisory west front of the theatre. During the renovation and modernization between 1996 and 1998, the Kurbel ("crank") was also closed. In these rooms the Kleines Haus was subsequently installed as a performance stage. In order to do this an extension was added to the west front. In the course of reconstruction the art work by Antes had to be removed and is now, in its constituent parts, in storage. While the reconstructions were