This article explores the contested relationship between modern circus and bourgeois theatre in Berlin around 1900, analysing how cultural hierarchies between “art” and “entertainment” were historically produced. Drawing on legal texts, administrative records, and contemporary press discourse, it shows that the marginalisation of the circus was not based on aesthetic inferiority but resulted from institutional regulation, professional lobbying, moral reform movements, and fiscal policy. Although the circus functioned as a technologically innovative and dramaturgically complex form of urban performance, theatre legislation increasingly codified genre distinctions through the category of “artistic interest,” placing the circus at a structural disadvantage. The article argues that the decline of the circus should be understood as a consequence of cultural power relations and self-canonising strategies within bourgeois theatre, rather than as an aesthetic or historical inevitability.