Maxim Gorki Theatre

The Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin's Dorotheenstadt is the smallest of the city's four state theatres, with just 440 seats, located beside the chestnut grove on Unter den Linden. The neoclassical building was put up in 1827 by Karl Theodor Ottmer for the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, which still owns it today. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy conducted the historic 1829 revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion here, igniting the entire 19th-century Bach revival. In 1952 the GDR reopened the building as a spoken-word theatre and named it after the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky. Under directors Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hillje the Gorki has since 2013 become the first explicitly post-migrant stage in Germany. Visitors experience current pieces on identity, exile and diaspora in a tiny auditorium where the stage almost touches the audience.