Deep cut: Berlin braces for major culture cuts
On the proposed cuts to the Berlin cultural budget and the potential impact on the city's theatre scene.
Apologies for this coming out a day late. I’ve just got back from Berlin. After being on the go for so long, my battery was kind of flat, so it was super-nice to recharge while drinking whisky sours in tiny Kreuzberg dives I would never have found on my own accord, as well as getting the opportunity to peek into the Deutsches Theater’s impressive rehearsal complex. I was also acutely aware, however, that Berlin cultural scene was in turmoil as a result of sweeping cuts to the budget that have recently been announced, and it - understandably - ended up being the dominant topic of conversation.
I’m aware of the irony of talking about money in a piece about funding cuts, but it’s also a pretty precarious time to be an arts writer, so if you enjoy reading this newsletter or find it informative, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber - or share it with others who might like it. Café Europa is free to read and I’m keen to keep it that way. Your support really helps.
On Friday 29th November, around 2500 people gathered outside Berlin City Hall before walking to Brandenburg Gate. The demonstration, which was styled as a funeral march with many participants wearing black, was organised in response to the plans to drastically cut Berlin’s cultural budget by over 130 million euros. Scheduled for implementation in January 2025, these cuts will have a significant impact on cultural organisations large and small. While these have been widely reported in the press – this Guardian piece details the potential impact on some of the city’s most famous spaces - spending the past week in the city really made the calamitous nature of these cuts plain; the anxiety and upset was palpable.
The cuts are being made because Germany's economy is in crisis. It is not only culture that is affected. The cuts are part of a wider programme of austerity measures across all sectors totalling over €3 billion. Education and transport are also facing significant snips, including the loss of the much-lauded €29 ticket for Berlin’s public transport system. The city tax for tourists is also likely to go up as a consequence. The official list of cuts was not revealed until it was leaked in the Berlin Morgenpost on 19th November – here’s the full list.
Living in the UK and witnessing Tory austerity measures eat away at the cultural landscape for over a decade, the German system of cultural subsidy was one I always viewed with a mixture of envy and admiration. Here was a country that understood the wider societal good of spending on culture! But now even Berlin’s big houses are worried about their future. In the Guardian article, Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of the Schaubühne, explained how the cuts could lead the theatre to close its Studio, the space in which it stages smaller more experimental work. He even suggested the theatre could end up facing insolvency. Celina Nicolay, artistic director of operations at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, meanwhile, explained how the cuts they were facinng “not only massively threatens the current ability of the house to perform, but also narrows the space that is absolutely necessary for future artistic planning." This week it was announced that the proposed interim directorship of the Volksbühne by the duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller will no longer happen, in part at least a consequence of the climate of financial uncertainty.
In a statement provided by Shermin Langhoff, artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theatre, she stated that given the Gorki receives around 19 million euros from the state, the majority of which is accounted for by personnel costs and operating costs, if the funding were cut by 10%, and thus 1.9 million euros, “we would already be in the minus of 1.9 million euros before artistic performance operating costs, without any possibility of countermeasures due to the fixed expenses. This would reduce all of the Gorki's reserves to zero as early as 2025. The Gorki would no longer be able to continue to exist as an ensemble and repertory theatre.“
While a lot of focus has been on the impact on the city’s major cultural institutions that is just the tip of things. The proposed cuts have been sweeping and are particularly brutal in certain sectors. As a result, as Esther Slevogt, editor in chief of online criticism portal Nachtkritik explains that the cuts could potentially “destroy an entire cultural infrastructure. Berlin consists of a very hybrid network of institutional and non-institutional art. Even for the large state theatres, which have to think several years ahead in their planning, this sudden cut could be threatening. The private-sector structures that politicians have suddenly found so desirable cannot be implemented this quickly and, in times of recession, sponsors won't be beating down the doors of the theatres just like that.”
As ever with cuts of this nature, freelance artists are likely to be hit harder. As Slevogt explains, “freelance artists are already living in extremely precarious circumstances and are scrambling from project to project.” That said, the situation in Berlin has historically been more comfortable than other countries, making the city a hotspot for international artists. “That might be over now,” says Slevogt. “You could call that a dramatic loss, as Berlin doesn't have much else that gives the city international appeal. There is no significant industry or anything else here that brings in money. Culture as a “creative industry” has always been a factor with countervalue.”
In many of the conversations I had there was a suggestion that the cuts had an ideological edge. Of the organisations facing a total cut in funding instead of 12%, many work with migrants and other marginalised groups. Berlin Mondiale, a network of artists and cultural practitioners working in the field of migration, asylum and exile, is one of many organisations that has been severely impacted. "When I sat in front of the Senate's list of cuts on Tuesday the 19th of November, I could hardly believe my eyes: our project was cancelled - as of January 1, 2025,” said Sabine Kroner, managing director of the Berlin Mondiale.
They had been anticipating some cuts but nothing of this scale. In just over 40 days they faced a complete loss of funding - with little warning. The sudden way in which these cuts are being implemented is a huge issue, giving organisations little time to prepare. Many of the people they work with are refugees, Kroner explains, while many of their employees come from abroad. For some, their visa depends directly on the project. “It’s really difficult for me to explain this to these people,” she says.
Despite what the Coalition says, she explains, the cuts will also have an impact on the city’s outskirts. “One million will be lost for the youth culture initiative, which not only supports our work, but also the decentralized youth culture work such as that of the Volkssbühne in Neukölln, the Literaturhaus in Reinickendorf, Sasha Waltz & Guests in Spandau or the Theater an der Parkaue in Marzahn."
“In the cultural sector, we are the only project that is so well networked in the outskirts of Berlin,” explains Kroner. “These cuts challenge everything we have built for ten years and destroy the trust of the people we work with.”
This fear that the Senate’s cuts are unduly targeting projects that specialise in inclusion and diversity was articulated by Anna Mülter, of Festival Theaterformen and Kate Brehme from Berlinklusion in a letter of protest entitled ‘The Senate is abolishing inclusion and diversity in culture!’
The letter – the full text of which is here – outlines how disabled artists will also be disproportionately affected by the cuts. “Germany has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, we are far behind in its implementation and have only just begun to dismantle barriers throughout the arts. The cuts that have been decided upon are throwing us back to zero. Participation is not a gift that you can afford in good times. It is a duty to give all people access to culture, as artists and as audiences.”
This sentiment is echoed by director Lydia Ziemke, who is part of the Kollektive Künstlerische Leitung at Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg (tak), a space which is often rented out by independent artists. “The impact on cultural and artistic work with disabled people, POCs, children and other vulnerable and diverse groups is vastly disproportionate to the rest of the cuts in culture.”
Given the artists who rent the Kreuzberg space are reliant on funding, she envisions losing around two thirds of their artists as a result. In addition to this, she says, “we will lose about 50% of opportunities to apply for structural or project-based funding in Berlin and the federal republic. We will have to rely much more on European and international funding as well as foundations/associations.”
Slevogt also envisions a wider societal impact from the cuts. The loss of these independent cultural projects that specialize in inclusion, diversity and integration, she says, “is also destroying a powerful public instrument of integration. For a city like Berlin in particular, this is a catastrophe - and the radicalization to be feared here in the individual bubbles will then be a threat to the right.”
The proposed cuts also pose an existential threat to the free scene. Katharina Stoll, theatre director and member of the feminist collective Glossy Pain explains that “having a conservative cultural minister with a lack of understanding for arts and culture, has already made work as a theatre maker in the free scene pretty difficult this year. We were facing a reduction of funding and limitations of artistic freedom.”
What the city is facing now, she continues, could lead “to the end of some very important spaces in the free scene. Some theatres won’t survive, and I am sure that we will also lose some artists who will just not be able to afford to do theatre anymore. Theatre will become once more a privilege, only available for a certain elite.”
“The free scene has always been a space of artistic experiments, new radical voices, new visions of theatre, that has also had a big influence on the state theatres,” she explains. She worries that is becoming harder for artists to experiment. “What we need in a global political situation like today is the courage to initiate radical change, to experiment and to envision another world. I fear that these voices will have a difficult time now and that funding will only be for very established groups or success-guarantors, because theatres can’t afford to take any risk anymore.”
These cuts also come at the time when the AfD is in the ascendance and intent on starting culture wars. They are always talking about German culture, though their idea of German culture is, of course very narrow and exclusionary. It goes without saying that they are not in favour of projects which supports migrants and refugees. (They’ve recently even mounted an attack against the legacy of Bauhaus). The loss of projects supporting migrants and the marginalised at such a politically precarious time for Germany, with elections on the horizon, feels particularly depressing/worrying/fucked-up.
Berlin artists are not taking this lying down. Protests and actions are being organised across the city under the hashtag #BerlinistKultur - they arranged last Friday’s funeral march and a day of action back in October, before the full extent of the cuts was known, in which spaces were symbolically shut down. This prompted me to think about how UK artists responded to austerity measures of the 2010s. The most significant intervention was the creation of Theatre Uncut, a group of artists who created political new writing and debate which made its texts available for free for anyone to perform. This excellent essay also usefully details the impact that austerity had on culture in the UK over that period, particularly in regards to the perception of cultural value and even the language used to talk about the arts.
“Working in theatre has never meant making big money,” Stoll told me. “We do what we do because we feel the need to tell stories, to move people, to look at the world from a different angle, to share a political standpoint and to inspire people. Especially in the free scene we work under conditions that are pretty precarious anyway. A lot of the work is unpaid and only a few people can actually live from their work. But we do this because we believe in the power of theatre, because it is the language that we speak and that unifies us.”
During my stay in Berlin, I went to see the Nan Goldin retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie, a fascinating exhibition but a bittersweet experience because I went on 1st December, which as the first Sunday of the month, was a Museumssonntag, an initiative offering free entry to museums across the city. The 1st was, however, the last Sunday the scheme was running – one of the first causalities of the cuts - and while the queue was really fucking enormous, it was worth it in more ways than one. It felt important to visit a museum on this day and partake of this offer while it still existed. Schemes like these are so important. They open eyes and minds – they are an invitation, and this is so important, they are a non-transactional way of engaging with the arts - and the removal of the scheme felt like a symbolic kick in the teeth.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
Following the dismissal of the director of Slovakia’s National Theatre Matej Drlička and the violent protests by Bulgarian nationalists during the premiere of John Malkovich’s production of Arms and the Man at the Ivan Vazov National Theatre in Bulgaria, almost 250 artists and 178 cultural institutions from across the EU have signed an open letter to the parliament expressing concern about the growing threat to freedom of artistic expression posed by the far right. You can read the letter in full here.
Dirty Hands – German director Jan Bosse directs a new translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Die schmutzigen Hände at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, the theatre where the play received its German language premiere in 1948. It has its premiere on the 5th December.
Liliom - Stefanie Reinsperger, star of a visceral one-woman take of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love at the Berliner Ensemble stars in German film and theatre Philipp Stölz’s production of the play by Ferenc Molnár, written at the tail-end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and set in a carnival. It premieres at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 6th December.
Thank you for reading! You can contact me about anything newsletter-related on natasha.tripney@gmail.com.
This is really fascinating, as usual, but boy it made me sad. (Glad you got to see the Nan Goldin though)
Holy fuck. It’s really frightening how quickly these measures can be implemented. I fear for the arts in our country after January 2025. Trump hasn’t an artistic bone in his body and a lot of grievances against those in the arts that shined a light on his horrifying tendencies. I’ll read more of the links, but for now HOLY FUCK!