Berlin cries Kulturkrise as cuts hit arts scene

A performance of Verdi’s Macbeth last month at the Deutsche Oper briefly turned into a political protest, as a member of the choir suddenly addressed the audience with an urgent plea.

Thaisen Rusch railed against the Berlin government’s decision to slash next year’s arts budget by €130mn. “If these cost savings really go through, they will inflict massive, long-term damage on Berlin’s culture,” he said, asking audience members to sign a petition against the spending squeeze.

Rusch’s intervention was part of a broader outcry across the German capital against the austerity drive, part of a €3bn package of cuts designed to heal the capital’s battered public finances.

Directors, choreographers, artists and opera singers say they could hobble Berlin’s arts scene, widely seen as one of the city’s main attractions and a huge draw for tourists.

“To paraphrase the REM song, it’s the end of the city as we know it,” said Sabine Kroner, head of Berlin Mondiale, an artists’ network that just had its funding withdrawn.

The cuts are part of a nationwide trend. From 2019, cities across Germany saw their budgets balloon as they scrambled to deal with the economic effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Now comes the reckoning. Mayors are having to tighten their belts — or face financial ruin.

“After 2019 spending in Berlin virtually exploded,” Kai Wegner, mayor of the capital, said in a speech to its parliament on Thursday. “The problem is . . . that previous governments [here] no longer took any countermeasures. They just spent too much.”

He added that despite the savings, next year’s budget envisaged “record” spending of €40bn, compared with €30bn in 2019 and €26bn in 2016.  

Wegner’s priorities — law and order and welfare — will be spared cuts. But everything else is up for grabs. Transport and higher education, for example, have also been hit hard. The Berlin-Abo, a popular scheme offering unlimited travel on public transport for just €29 a month, has been abolished just a few months after it was introduced.

But it is the arts spending cuts that have made the most waves. Berlin has one of the most vibrant cultural landscapes of any city in Europe, with three prestigious opera houses, and, in the Schaubühne, one of the continent’s most celebrated theatres.

It also has a justly famous underground arts scene, with a huge ecosystem of independent painters, dancers and musicians drawn to the city by its — relatively — low rents, subsidised studios and nonconformist vibe.

Mark Pringle, a British jazz pianist who moved to Berlin in 2015, had been due to perform next year in the “Projections” Festival, a collaboration between musicians and visual artists at the Berlin Konzerthaus. But the event has now been cancelled. “Institutions will only play it safe from now on, which means less diversity of expression,” he said.

Pringle also worries he’ll lose his rehearsal room, after the city’s subsidised workspace programme had its funding slashed. “This is all so short-sighted,” he said. “They don’t seem to realise that without its healthy freelancer scene, Berlin is nothing.”

A joint statement released by all the main Berlin theatres after the final 2025 budget was passed on Thursday summed up the mood of despair. The cuts will “choke off” Berlin’s cultural life, threatening jobs and “stopping tourists visiting the city”.

“Every cut not only weakens the creatives working on stage and behind the scenes, but also takes away a piece of Berlin’s soul,” they said.

Yet in many ways the big theatres — like the Deutsches Theater, the Schaubühne and the Berliner Ensemble, once home to Bertolt Brecht — can breathe a sigh of relief.

After a huge public backlash the city’s big institutions will now shoulder a smaller share of the cuts than originally proposed. The main casualties appear to be independent groups, freelancers and fringe theatres.

“We are constantly getting emails from artists who are experiencing a kind of existential fear,” said Janina Benduski of the Berliner Kulturkonferenz, an alliance of different arts groups. “They no longer know if they can continue with the work they’ve been doing over the past 10-15 years.”

Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture minister, has urged the city’s creatives to consider private sponsorship and find ways of turning a profit without public subsidy. “My request to all those in authority is to think about how to become economically more efficient,” he told the Berliner Zeitung.

Supporting culture to the max at taxpayers’ expense, as happened during the pandemic, was no longer sustainable. “We are facing a watershed moment and need a new mindset,” he said.

But the spending squeeze has inevitably fed into a long-running debate about Berlin’s identity and its future direction. A former mayor once described the place as “poor but sexy”. Its fans fear it is now neither. 

“We’re not so poor any more because we have one of the biggest budgets we’ve ever had,” says Marcel Weber, head of the Berlin Club Commission, which represents the city’s clubs and event organisers. “And we’re not sexy either because everyone goes round these days with a stick up their arse. So all we have left is the “but”.”

Sabine Kroner said Berlin is in danger of losing the status it acquired in the European imagination since the fall of the wall in 1989. “In a whole lot of different areas we’ve lost the qualities that really made the city what it is over the past 35 years,” she said, pointing to the shocking lack of affordable housing, the exploding rents, the cost of living crisis.

Mark Pringle agrees. “The main attraction of Berlin is the cultural scene,” he said. “Without culture it’s a pretty boring city.”