In addition to the meadow light shows, Milhausen’s daughter and her husband (Erni and Wolfgang Sturm) also ran the bathroom cinema in Hauingen. This house no longer exists today. The inn with a butcher’s and cinema in Unterdorfstrasse had to give way to an apartment building.
The Köpfer photo studio has been located where films once flickered across the screen for 40 years. Owner Erwin Köpfer has received a few things in such a way that memories of the cinematic past of the Wiesental community emerge when visiting the photo studio.
The entrance to the photo studio is between the pharmacy on the corner, the Rummel drug store when the cinema is open, and the “Ochsen” inn. The glass door opens to the former foyer of the cinema. From where the entrance was paid earlier, the originally preserved staircase leads upstairs, past the original, golden lights in Art Nouveau style.
The former cinema has been a photo studio for 40 years. It was quite a job converting the former cinema ten years after it was closed, says Erwin Köpfer.
The meadow lights, remembers Wolfgang Deschler, were an attraction in what was then still a very small community. Clara Hermine Milhausen from Moers made sure of that and opened a cinema in the “Ochsen” family owned by the Pflüger family. She had previously operated cinemas in North Rhine-Westphalia.
On Ascension Day 70 years ago, she opened the new 250-seat cinema in the dance hall of the “Ochsen” inn. The hosts, the Pflüger family, made the cinema possible, remembers Wolfgang Deschler. As he came from a family with four children, he himself rarely went to the cinema. “Not as a child because we didn’t have the money for it and because there were hardly any films for children or young people back then,” says Deschler. Later he went to the cinema and met Heinz Wüst, who was almost the same age and worked as a projectionist for Clara Hermine Milhausen for many years.
Madlee Schultheiß has memories similar to Wolfgang Deschler. “Back then, we were only able to go to the cinema more often thanks to a well-off aunt,” says the woman from stone. Hollywood classics, Edgar Wallace crime novels, homeland films, Winnetou films and educational films were shown. Deschler knows that the influx of the latter was particularly high.
“And the various housewife and schoolgirl reports were checked very carefully at the cinema entrance,” continues Deschler.
Madlee Schultheiß still remembers “Oliver Twist” and the Sissi films with the young Romy Schneider and that as a young woman she liked to go to the cinema with her future husband.
And there was another special feature in stones. For the many Italian guest workers who found work in Steinen, especially in the textile industry, films in Italian were shown in extra screenings over the years.
As more and more households owned a television, this also meant the decline of many small cinemas. Even the Kino in Steinen could no longer hold up. Clara Hermine Milhausen closed her cinema in May 1971. The cinema tenant died the following year.
Half a century after the Steinen cinema was closed, film buffs can draw hope. The Schweikart film operations, which already operate a number of large cinemas, including in Baden-Baden and Lörrach, want to build an adventure and event venue with a cinema complex with seven cinemas, restaurants and a climbing hall in Höllstein between Bundesstrasse 317 and Gewerbestrasse. This would give Steinen a cinema again after a good 50 years.
On the screen in 1971, “Baldwin der Sonntagsfahrer” strained the laughing muscles, western fans cheered along with the “Settlement in Gun Hill” and the “Love Stroy” moved cinema-goers to tears by the thousands.
Musically, Danyel Gérard let his “Butterfly” fly 50 years ago, Middle Of The Road chirped “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” and Roy Black & Anita said “It’s nice to be in the world”.
The eyes of the world were turned to Egypt, where the Aswan Dam was inaugurated, and in Germany motorists had to get used to a new traffic sign: the new octagonal stop sign. The Deutsche Bundesbahn introduced intercity trains (IC) for high-speed traffic, mangoes and kiwis were presented to European consumers for the first time at a trade fair, and in 1971 the last curtain fell in stones in the only cinema, the Wiesen-Lichtspiele.
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