The Berlin government has sliced the city’s arts and culture budget by €130 million (about $135 million), sparking concerns that institutions may be forced to close and imperiling the German capital’s status as an arts hub. The cuts, which represent 12 percent of the sector’s budget, are part of the city’s 2025 spending plan and have been robustly defended by Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, a member of the right-wing Christian Democratic Union. According to the Art Newspaper (TAN), Wegner blamed the cuts on the “green dreams” of the prior, left-wing administration, citing a need for a “change of mentality” and pointing to the city’s “record” €40 billion budget.
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Bandied about for weeks, the cuts almost certainly place jobs and programs in jeopardy, and the arts community has been vocal about these and other possible negative outcomes, including a tamping-down of experimental or less commercial programming. Emma Enderby, director of the nonprofit KW Institute for Contemporary Art, told TAN that “culture and clubs bring people to Berlin. They don’t come here for the food, they come here for the history and the culture.” Enderby noted that organizations have still not received information regarding the full budget and that it may not be communicated until mid-January.
Nevertheless, with such notice, institutions are already making difficult choices. “We are letting certain positions go and closing certain programmatic initiatives, such as one of our mediation programs,” Enderby told TAN. Calling the cuts “short-sighted,” she explained that “in Berlin, culture costs around 2 percent of the overall economy, yet they’re cutting us between around 10 percent and in some cases 50 percent.”
“It’s a very bad decision—pennywise and pound foolish in every sense,” Paul Spies, a co-president of the Berlin Museums Association and former director of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, told the publication. “And it’s been done so bluntly and without input from the cultural department. It doesn’t seem that the Senate has listened to the specialists about what is possible and what is not possible.”
Along with musuems, artists are expected to be affected by the cuts. “Many initiatives like studio spaces and residences that support them are also being removed or cut,” said Enderby, “which will completely change the attractiveness of coming to Berlin, an increasingly expensive city to live in.”
