The “St. Pauli Theater”, opened in 1841 as “Ernst Drucker Theater”, is not only the oldest private theatre in Hamburg, but also one of the oldest theatres in the whole of Germany. And even though today’s facade was designed decades later, it still dates from 1898. The building and its historic auditorium are both listed, and the latter bears a particularly intimate atmosphere. At the beginning, mainly Northern German folk plays were played, which were a huge hit with audiences back then. The biggest success of the house was a drama about a woman called “Zitronenjette”, a famous Hamburg original. The play was staged again and again for fifty years. After a few decades of almost entirely hosting guest performances, the “St. Pauli Theater” repositioned itself in 2003; since then it has been showing in-house productions again.