In May 1906, the Hungarian theatre director Eugen Robert [de] (aka Jenö Kovázs) planned the construction of a Schauspielhaus in Berlin with the intention of staging popular and modern acting there.

He remembered having seen a bedroom's design at an exhibition in Wertheim the same year, by Oskar Kaufmann,[1] who afterwards gained experience in theatre building with the Berlin architect Bernhard Sehring.

[2][3] Kaufmann found the property in the southern Friedrichstadt,[4] which the registered Building owners' association [de] Theater in der Königgrätzer Straße acquired in October 1906 for 460,000 marks.

In addition, the Ministry of Public Works initially refused permission due to unsettled legal relations of the adjacent private road on which the theatre was to be built.

[1]: 79  In addition to Kaufmann, three other collaborators were involved in the design of the theatre, architects Albert Weber and San Micheli Wolkenstein, and the private lecturer and structural engineer Bruno Schulz.

[5] Robert, the founder and first director of the theatre, had to give up the management at the beginning of 1909 due to financial problems; and was criticised for numerous miscasts, unfavourable choices of plays and the lack of independent direction.

After a short period of self-administration, the two directors Carl Meinhard [de] and Rudolf Bernauer followed, and the theatre was renamed Theater in der Königgrätzer Straße on 30 September 1911.

[6] The Hebbel-Theatre had its heyday in the 1920s,[7][5] when Paul Wegener, Tilla Durieux, Elisabeth Bergner and Fritzi Massary appeared[5] in plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind[6] and later in works by William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Victor Barnowsky [de] took over the management in 1925, and engaged stars such as Hans Albers,[7] Fritz Kortner, Paul Hörbiger and Curt Bois.

[5][7] During the Nazi era, the theatre was gleichgeschaltet in 1934,[7] under the general directorship of Eugen Klöpfer from the Volksbühne, who completely renewed the equipment and reduced the hall to 672 seats.

[1]: 85  The house was largely spared destruction in the Second World War,[2] apart from a bomb that hit it in the 1943/44 season,[7] damaging the foyer and the roof of the stage.

[1]: 87 [2] He had the oak entrance doors replaced with plain wooden portals, covered the roof of the front of the building with tiles and made many changes in the design of the interior.

[4]: 225  This form of building a theatre with tiers strictly separates the auditorium from the stage and at the same time offers the possibility to integrate numerous seats.

[2] The structure of the theatre serves optimal use of space and a clear disposition, divided into a front building with anterooms (entrances, cloakrooms, staircases and foyers), the audience and stage house and the administrative wing.

Both facades are covered by a bossage almost up to the gable, with a sculptural effect by the block bond of alternately wide and narrow stone courses.

The facades of the three rear buildings appear withdrawn due to the uniform vertical arrangement of the windows and the simple plastering without decorative elements.

The two-storey main foyer, the theatre's representative room, is built in an oval-elliptical shape and panelled with reddish-brown mahogany and black pear wood.

The 800-seat auditorium is almost entirely covered with reddish to golden-brown stained panels of birch wood and was originally additionally decorated with valuable silk fabrics.

[12]: 124  This cladding creates the uniform impression of the room, which is deliberately not broken up by the installation of rear boxes behind the first tier and thus represents Kaufmann's decisive innovation in comparison with other theatre constructions of the time.

With the almost square format of 12 m height as well as width of the opening, the play on stage appears as a framed picture, thus completely spatially separating the dramatic action from the audience hall.