(ffm) This autumn, "Die Schmiere" enters its 70th season - but its beginnings go back even further. Right after World War II, Rudolf Rolfs began entertaining audiences with a traveling stage. He found it in the squares of a destroyed country, including Frankfurt's Römer. In 1950 he settled down with his theatre - at that time still in the cellar of the Steinernes Haus. The theatre moved nine years later to the Carmelite monastery, to that central location where it still attracts a wide audience today.
Meanwhile, the theatre has been under the aegis of Effi B. Rolfs, who established a lineage and tradition all her own there. For her commitment and dedicated enrichment of Frankfurt's cultural landscape, she has now been awarded the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt. Lord Mayor Peter Feldmann said at the award ceremony in the Kaisersaal: "People then as now cannot escape the magic of theatre - and Effi B. Rolfs and her team have managed to move this attraction forward again and again, to open up again and again." In this way, she says, the house exemplifies an attitude that is a Frankfurt tradition: "Always open to new things, never losing sight of the past. The Schmiere is a proud piece of Frankfurt history."
For the honoree, "Die Schmiere" is precisely not a classic state or municipal theater: "We are always on the lookout for new talent, new artists, new plays - especially those who don't yet have a big stage." This included many young artists who later celebrated great successes throughout the republic. The theatre-maker succeeded her father with two comrades-in-arms, Matthias Stich and Klaus Teßnow - also very young in years. A true theatre alpha animal, as she says, but also a man who supported his young successors with the same verve. The transition succeeded, and the audience was curious about what the young theatre-makers were presenting. So it is still today, when the legendary cardboard curtain rises in the winding basement of the Carmelite monastery.
Effi B. Rolfs, born on January 3, 1968, was already on stage at a young age, also alongside her father and his partner Reno Nonsens. In addition to her theatrical activities, she also works as an artist and as an author. The Goethe Plaque is awarded up to twice a year to poets, writers, artists and scientists, as well as other personalities of cultural life, who through their creative work are worthy of a tribute dedicated to the memory of Goethe.
