Berlin's art institutions worry about 'brutal' cuts

Artistic institutions and groups in the German capital of Berlin are banding together to protest against what they call "brutal" cuts to the city's culture budget, amid fears some of them could be pushed to bankruptcy.

City authorities have slashed the cultural funding budget for next year by around 12 percent, a move that Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner, from the center-right Christian Democrats, or CDU, called "painful".

"We now have to see, and I hope the theaters will do the same, also in discussions with our cultural institutions, how we can manage to work even more economically here," he said.

Joe Chialo, Berlin's culture chief, who has been tipped as a future culture minister if the CDU wins the federal election in February, admitted the cuts were "drastic and brutal", and pledged to try to lessen them.

Among the more high-profile events affected is the world-renowned Berlin International Film Festival, which will see its public funding halved, and redevelopment work on the Komische Oper Berlin opera house has been delayed indefinitely, after 10 million euros ($10.5 million) that had been set aside for it was canceled.

"A plan that has been prepared and developed for years in dialogue between the city, the planners, and the Komische Oper Berlin is being discarded overnight," said a statement from the opera house.

Germany has a tradition of significant subsidies for the arts, to make them as widely accessible as possible, and actor Ulrich Matthes, who starred in the 2004 Academy Award-nominated film Downfall, about the final days of the Nazi regime, said this fulfilled a vital civic function that was the envy of other countries.

"It is an incredible democratic achievement that the state, the cities, the country, subsidize (theater)," he said. "All these places where people come together and feel and think together are important, especially at a time when the (populist far-right) Alternative for Germany party is constantly nibbling at culture with the aim of assimilating it at some point."

Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director at the Schaubuhne theater, said the cuts would "open up a new chapter in the city's history" in which culture "play (ed) an ever less prominent role", and also failed to recognize the arts sector's contribution to attracting visitors and investment to the city.

"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 the Die Zeit newspaper.

Another proposed cost-cutting measure is the abolition of the 29-euro monthly ticket for the city's public transport network, which only came into operation this summer but that has already secured 200,000 users.

julian@mail.chinadailyuk.com