A performance of Verdi's Macbeth at the Deutsche Oper was interrupted by a choir member protesting cuts to Berlin's arts budget. The €130 million reduction is part of a €3 billion austerity package aimed at addressing the city's financial woes. Artists and cultural institutions fear the cuts will severely damage Berlin's vibrant arts scene. The situation reflects a nationwide trend in Germany, where cities are grappling with the financial fallout of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
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of the city as we know it,” said Sabine Kroner, head of Berlin Mondiale, an artists’ network that just had its funding withdrawn.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 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 har
BERLIN ARTS FUNDING AUSTERITY CULTURE GERMANY
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