Page "Cinema of Germany" Paragraph 9

In the late 1950s, the growth in cinema attendance of the preceding decade first stagnated and then went into freefall throughout the 1960s.

By 1969 West German cinema attendance at 172. 2 million visits per year was less than a quarter of its 1956 post-war peak.

As a consequence of this, numerous German production and distribution companies went out of business in the 1950s and 1960s and cinemas across the Federal Republic closed their doors ; the number of screens in West Germany almost halved between the beginning and the end of the decade.