Anyone who travels to Bayreuth in August simply cannot escape it – Richard Wagner at every turn, even if you are actually on a completely different mission in the festival city: to explore the local subculture. A little breathless, you follow Matthias Mayer over the cobblestones through Bayreuth’s picturesque alleyways beyond the market square.
Since he was born, he knows every nook and cranny here, every shortcut, so he has a good pace and two very long legs. We pass the legendary “Owl”, the restaurant where Wagner himself drank his beer and ate “Blaue Zipfel” and which became the hangout for his descendants, worshipers, well, the dining Valhalla of the Wagnerians. We ignore it, our goal is very close to the “Nine and a Half”. Sounds unfinished, like something in between, like an open structure.
It was recently shortlisted in the “Creative Places in Bavaria” competition
It’s all true in a way, but it’s also quite unprosaic. Matthias Mayer has arrived at an old, four-storey house with a crumbling brick facade and points upwards: “9½. Kämmereigasse” is written on a rusty enamel sign. Then he invites you in, because he has the key to a place with a past, which for him and many Bayreuthers is something of a promise for the future, which hopefully will be here soon – and for which rehearsals are already taking place elsewhere. Sounds like utopia, but it’s very real, and the appreciation that “Nine and a Half” has recently experienced is also very real.
In the state government’s “Creative Places in Bavaria” competition, the Bayreuth cultural project, which paradoxically hangs between two venues, was shortlisted, after all it was among the first twelve of 180 applicants. And “Nine and a Half” has already won the Culture Prize of the City of Bayreuth 2023.
Invest quite a bit of their time in Bayreuth’s off-culture on a voluntary basis: (from left) Matthias Mayer and Markus Spona, board members of the association “Neunhalb”.
(Photo: Adrian Infernus)
We are now in a room in which the time levels strangely overlap: the floor-to-ceiling shop window is reminiscent of the sausage displays in the butcher’s shop that used to be here. In 1999, years after the owner’s death, the city acquired the vacant monument, including the former slaughterhouse, whose history dates back to the 19th century. She did this with the vague idea of creating something like a cultural quarter in the Gassenviertel, with the house number 9 ½ as a connection between the Historical Museum, which is also located here, and the Art Museum.
Around this time, a group of young visual artists with the auspicious name “Forum Phoinix” were looking for exhibition spaces. “If it’s good for you, you can use it rent-free,” offered the city’s culture officer. This is how the old butcher’s house became a “fixed contact point for the Bayreuth underground,” says Matthias Mayer.
Garbage cans, one toilet, no central heating
The “Forum Phoinix”, as the off-culture place was soon called, was more reminiscent of Berlin-Kreuzberg than Upper Franconia. “The city had rented the entrance area as a storage place for garbage cans, so at that time you had to go past a bin trellis in the backyard and through a door into a completely dilapidated house,” says Mayer. Today, since it’s empty again, floors have been torn open, electricity and water have been shut off, it’s easy to imagine this time of improvisation, of it being so cool between the 1970s wallpaper.
It doesn’t matter that there was only one toilet, no central heating, just this old tiled stove, which has been cold for a long time. At that time, Mayer remembers, the house was not allowed to be used as a restaurant, which is why the idea of membership applications came up: Member for a day or month, then there was a beer. “But that was also the charm of the building,” enthuses Mayer during this short tour.
The former butcher’s house at Kämmereigasse 9 ½ . The so-called Gassenviertel, in which it stands, is a redevelopment area. The city wants to bring some things into shape here, the future art and culture center “Neunhalb” is part of the project.
(Photo: private)
In 2013, the “Kültürklüb” association entered the Forum Phoinix, with the “Sübkültür” series every Tuesday. The program became broader, in addition to art there were now also concerts, readings, theater, slam, cinema. A few hundred events, and that to this day. Currently, however, it is no longer at Kämmereigasse 9 ½, because the dilapidated building has been empty again since 2021. The matter had become too delicate and dangerous for the city. What to do with the crumbling monument? The question came up again. Luxury renovation? apartments, offices? Kick out the creatives?
No, the municipality invited the Phoinix people and the Kültürklüb to participate in the plans for a new art and culture house here in the Gassenviertel. That was already at the end of 2016, the “AG Neunhalb” was founded and presented a comprehensive usage and room concept in 2017: The old butcher’s house should offer space for event rooms, studios, artists’ apartments, a café, for a cinema with around 30 seats in the former slaughterhouse . The city council was convinced, in 2018 there was a unanimous decision. The planning phase began with an engineering office, architects, fire protection reports, monument protection, and pollutant analyses. Well, and then the pandemic came, and you can already guess what Matthias Mayer is about to say: “The project has been in the drawer ever since.”
The alternative quarters are also a place with a past
The tap at the counter of the interim venue on Gerberplatz: Much here is reminiscent of the house’s past as a jazz bar “Podium” and most recently as a club “Koco”, which did not survive the pandemic.
(Photo: Adrian Infernus)
It is also thanks to the pandemic that Bayreuth’s off-scene did not become homeless when it finally had to leave Kämmereigasse 9 1/2. Change of scenery: From the old butcher’s house, you follow Mayer to another place with tradition in Bayreuth, to the former jazz bar “Podium” on Gerberplatz. The club, which emerged from the AG, has now repotted itself temporarily and simply taken the name “Nine and a Half” with it. “If you like, we are the beneficiaries of the pandemic,” says Matthias Mayer, who chairs the association. His board colleague Markus Spona has joined.
In a room that feels like a living room, full of motley furniture and a huge Jesus ham on the wall, the two tell how it all came together. How the disco operator, who was in here before, closed due to the corona and the nine and a half was able to move into the building, which is also municipal, rent including additional costs around 1200 euros. Everything here is reminiscent of the casual club past: the entrance, the bar with the petrol-colored counter, where an Africola costs 1.50 euros and a Bayreuther Helles 2 euros, the low-ceilinged room, in which up to 130 concert-goers fit when the double doors are open. During the lockdown, they worked here in two shifts and renovated on their own. An IT freak among the almost 80 nine-and-a-half members programmed the building technology, which can now be controlled from the iPad, says Matthias Mayer proudly. Each of the volunteers not only give a lot of their lifetime, but also share their know-how. Mayer, for example, is a concert promoter, Markus Spona a media producer.
What if the Green Hill knocks?
Up to 130 concertgoers can be seated in the “Nine and a half” on Gerberplatz, here a performance by the Nuremberg band “Ferge X Fisherman”.
(Photo: Adrian Infernus)
in the nine and a half Since the summer of 2021, rehearsals have been taking place on Gerberplatz for what will later become the “big” cultural center in Kämmereigasse 9 1/2: film series, cabaret, exhibitions, theatre, song recitals, readings, comedy, the “Süb Slam”, Bavaria’s smallest Poetry slam, concerts from avant-garde pop to post punk or the reading series “Africa Multiple”. And every first Monday the house is open here, the new “cultural niche” is always inaugurated, a kind of mini apse for art solos, from multimedia to graffiti to a vulva exhibition, all of that already existed.
Speaking of niche. How does the underground position itself in a high culture/cultural heritage city like Bayreuth? A quick thought: Mayer and Spona see their nine and a half as an alternative to commercial culture. They want to fill a gap, as easily as possible. Did you know that there isn’t a single live music club in downtown Bayreuth, or an art-house cinema? The potential in the city is great, many things organically coexist here.
The “chocolate factory” that does something similar in the field of youth work, the “glass house” outside on the university campus, lots of clubs. The nine and a half, which is open to all cultural institutions, wants to build bridges here, currently on Gerberplatz and at some point on Kämmereigasse again. And if those from the Green Hill knock on the door? Matthias Mayer probably expected the question: Well, you wouldn’t close your mind, but Wagner, that would really only work subversively in the nine and a half.