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Plans to slash Berlin’s culture budget by tens of millions of Euros have led to a huge backlash, with leading venues saying they have been forced to cut performances and others warning they will be pushed into bankruptcy.
About 450 institutes that are reliant at least in part on state subsidies, from theatres and opera houses to nightclubs and galleries, have formed an alliance in an attempt to force a rethink over the €130m (£108.6m) cuts. At around 12 to 13% of the current annual budget, they have been described even by those proposing them as “brutal”.
For those fighting them, they spell disaster for a city famed the world over for its thriving artistic life. “The cuts will permanently destroy Berlin’s cultural infrastructure,” predicts the alliance Berlin Is Culture (#BerlinIstKultur).
In its appeal to Berlin’s Christian Democrat-led (CDU) government, it says “drastic programme cuts, layoffs and closures” are inevitable. At stake are not just jobs but “diversity, excellence, resilience and social cohesion,” it warns.
On Friday, protesters against the cuts will gather close to the city hall at 3pm, from where participants will march to the Brandenburg Gate.
Thomas Ostermeier, the artistic director at the Schaubühne, a leading German stage with a reputation far beyond Berlin owing to its progressive programming, said the cuts would “open up a new chapter in the city’s history” in which culture “play[ed] an ever less prominent role”.
The €2.5m savings to be made by the Schaubühne, he said, would lead to the closure of the theatre’s smaller experimental stage, the Studio, which has championed British playwrights such as Sarah Kane and David Harrower. It could also, he predicted, lead to the entire Schaubühne – which was founded in 1962 – facing “insolvency by the end of next year”.
Ostermeier urged Berlin’s government to recognise how crucial culture is for the city’s economy. “If you destroy that, you are destroying even more than the culture. You are also destroying tourism, and the attractiveness for certain commercial companies to settle in this city is also reduced,” he told Die Zeit.
Oliver Reese, the director of the Berliner Ensemble in east Berlin, the spiritual home of playwright heavyweights Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, said that “horror scenarios” lay ahead. “We are in the process of cancelling five to six productions for 2025-26 and 2026-27,” he said. “In the end, there will simply be less new art.”
Philipp Harpain, the artistic director of Grips, a children’s and youth theatre, said the €300,000 savings his house would be forced to make amounted to “more than the entire artistic budget for 2025”, adding he had been warned that more cuts would come in 2026.
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The sudden nature of the cuts has also been a shock; they will come into force in less than five weeks’ and give theatres little time to prepare.
Juli Zeh, a bestselling author, said “applying the cutting sheers” to culture was “politically incredibly dumb” especially at a time when the far right – which has repeatedly called for art funding to be dependent on content and be more German-centric – was on the rise.
She addressed a recent protest concert at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, which also heard words of support from the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, the former general music director of the Staatsoper, and from the Berlin Philharmoniker, who were beamed in via a video link from New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Ulrich Matthes, an award-winning actor who played the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in the 2004 film Downfall, said Germany’s tradition of heavily subsidised theatre sustained by broad consensus, to ensure as wide a public access to the arts as possible, was the envy of the world. It was also crucial to underpinning democracy, he said.
“It is an incredible democratic achievement that the state, the cities, the country, subsidise [German theatre],” he told Die Zeit. “All these places where people come together and feel and think together are important, especially at a time when the [far-right populist] AfD [Alternative for Germany party] is constantly nibbling at culture with the aim of assimilating it at some point.”
Joe Chialo, Berlin’s senator for culture, has called the cuts “drastic and brutal” and said he will fight to reduce their impact. But veteran observers of Germany’s cultural scene have warned they may yet be a harbinger of what is to come across the country. Chialo is widely tipped to become the next minister of state for culture under Friedrich Merz if, as predicted, the CDU wins February’s federal election.
