The still shows a theater schedule for ‘Westberliner Bühnen – Staatliche Bühnen’, uniting the three state-run theaters of West Berlin: the Städtische Oper, the Schiller Theatre (Bismarckstraße), and the Schloßpark-Theater. Visible in the schedule are productions such as ‘Othello’, ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen’, ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘La Bohème’, ‘War and Peace’, ‘Faust’, and ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’. A person points a finger at the playbill, underscoring the everyday, bourgeois character of the scene. The diverse offering of classical opera and drama was, in Berlin of 1955, a deliberate cultural-political signal: West Berlin presented itself as a vibrant cultural metropolis and “showcase of the West,” whose subsidized theatrical life claimed world-class standing despite partition and postwar circumstances.