One evening in January 1878, a special train ran between the Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Utrecht. The journey lasted an hour and the train stopped at every station in between. The local Utrecht newspaper had predicted that many people would take this train to attend a play at the German theatre in Amsterdam, and indeed 272 people did. It is not certain whether all of them went to the German theatre. There was also a circus in Amsterdam that same night. A fortnight later, another special train was announced in the Utrecht newspaper. This time the German theatre in Amsterdam premiered the play Freund Fritz, a comedy in three acts.

The German theatre in Amsterdam was a very active organisation. On March 29, 1839, the opera Othello was performed. It was the 51st performance at the theatre that season. There had been two productions every week, each time of a difference play or piece of music. Despite this enormous activity, the German theatre in Amsterdam had not been doing well financially. There was too little interest in the performances, and there were quarrels amongst the organisers. In 1839, the director feared that his theatre, the only one in its kind in the Netherlands, would be forced to close. The Theatre Français did much better, despite the fact that the French immigrant community was only a fraction of the size of the German one. The French theatre, however, also attracted the Dutch elite, who admired French culture and enjoyed an evening of French entertainment. This elite did not appreciate German culture in a similar fashion. The German theatre however, managed to survive throughout the 19th century. The construction of a railway network contributed to its survival, because it enabled people from further away to travel to Amsterdam for an evening performance.

Utrecht did not have its own German theatre. The percentage of German immigrants in Amsterdam was not much larger than Utrecht's (2% in Amsterdam versus 1.4 in Utrecht), but the actual population of immigrants in Amsterdam was larger. In 1859, 5,286 Germans were living in Amsterdam. Apparently this number was not enough to maintain a theatre, but luckily it was supplemented by Germans from elsewhere as transportation improved.