[9] As a result, the state of Berlin, the building official for the Maxim Gorki Theater and signed a ground lease agreement for 25 years, which provides for annual rent of each €315,000 euros.

The originally planned opening of the theater with Maxim Gorky's Night Asylum (also known as The Lower Depths) was stopped by the State Art Commission.

[11] Instead, the building opened on 30 October 1952, with the German premiere of the Soviet piece Für die auf See (For those at sea) by Boris Lawrence.

Then at the end of the 1950s (also under the impression of the uprisings in the GDR, in Poland and in Hungary) there were performances of such pieces as Alfred Matusche's Naked Grass and Heiner Müller's Die Korrektur (The Correction) and Der Lohndrücker (The Scab) both in 1958.

The GDR premiere of Volker Braun's Die Übergangsgesellschaft (The Transitional Society}, directed by Thomas Langhoff, caused a sensation in 1988.