The Berlin Senate has unveiled a controversial multi-billion-euro savings plan for 2025 that would slash the city’s arts and culture budget by 13%. The proposed cut of over €130 million (~$136.3 million) has sent shockwaves through hundreds of the city’s cultural institutions and centers, many of which are heavily if not completely reliant on state funding to operate.
Berlin’s arts and culture budget reportedly only accounts for just over 2% of the city’s overall annual spending. Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture senator, called the budget slash “very drastic and brutal” and claimed that he will fight to renegotiate the projected figure in order to ease the burden on affected spaces and organizations.
The proposed budget cuts were publicized on Tuesday, November 19, yielding myriad complaints from theaters, museums, and other art-aligned venues and festivals about recalibrating their finances for the new year with such little notice. Dozens of Berlin’s cultural spaces mobilized their members and communities in marches and protests.
With over 90 institutions, exhibition halls, and memorials as members, the Berlin Museums Association (BMA) expressed immediate concerns regarding museums’ abilities to facilitate their programming and exhibitions as planned, coupled with job insecurity and its implications in the conservation, preservation, and education sectors.
“Museums and memorials are important anchors for social cohesion and a functioning democracy,” the BMA said in a statement, noting that schools rely on the city’s varying institutions for supplementary education on accessibility, sustainability, and sociopolitical history.
“This is indispensable, especially in times when right-wing extremism and historical revisionism are on the rise and challenging democracy,” the organization continued. “The negative consequences will be clearly noticeable in both the short and long term.”
The Berlin International Film Festival, better known as Berlinale, has been stripped of €2 million (~$2.1 million) in financial support from the Senate for its 2025 iteration this coming February. However, a spokesperson for the festival told ScreenDaily that despite the tight financial situation, Berlinale has secured balanced funding through the end of March 2025.
Other organizations and institutions have come forward with the projected impacts of the cuts as well. The Berlin Studio Program, which allocates subsidized or rent-stabilized individual workspaces and studio flats to local artists across the city, reported that its budget has not only been halved from €24 million to €12 million (~$25.2 to $12.6 million), but that the company managing some 2,500 rental contracts for the workspace program, Kultur Räume Berlin, is slated for complete dissolution in 2025.
Berlin Mondiale, an artistic network rooted in creative and cultural advocacy for migrant, asylum-seeking, and exiled minority populations along the outskirts of the city, announced that the Senate has pulled all funding for the organization for 2025. Additionally, the Foundation for Continuing Cultural Education and Cultural Consulting and its subsidiary, Diversity Arts Culture, issued a direct statement indicating their probable dissolution without state-allocated funding in light of the Senate’s decision.
“The media report that we are to be wound up therefore came as a complete surprise and unexpected,” said Florian Stiehler, board member of the Foundation, in a press statement concerning the funding cuts. “Almost 100 highly qualified employees are to lose their jobs — and Berlin will lose important infrastructure, expertise and experience in the key issues for the future viability of the cultural sector: participation, cultural education and diversity.”
Free Museum Sundays, a critical cultural resource for accessibility with over 80 participating institutions, was also gutted after funding was pulled for the collaborating organizer Kulturprojekte Berlin. The administrators from the free admission initiative for the first Sunday of each month announced that Sunday, December 1, was the last date to celebrate the program in light of the budget cuts.
Several of Berlin’s iconic and historic performing arts theaters, including the Deutsches Theater, Schaubühne, the Komische Oper opera house, and Berlin’s Opera Foundation are buckling from unforeseen problems such as looming bankruptcy and suspended renovations.
Mobilizing under the movement #BerlinIstKultur (Berlin is Culture), thousands of visual and performing artists, writers, creative workers, and allies have taken to the streets to protest the Senate’s decision on several occasions over the last two months, including a day of cultural shutdown in mid-October and a “funeral march for the arts” on Friday, November 29.
“We firmly reject these cuts and demand that they be reversed in the parliamentary deliberations,” organizers from the movement expressed in a statement, underscoring that the annual cultural budget is disproportionately impacted for how little it takes from the city’s overall budget.
“The cuts will permanently destroy the cultural infrastructure and will lead to drastic program cuts, layoffs and closures. Diversity, excellence, resilience and social cohesion are at stake,” they continued.
BerlinIstKultur is also promoting a petition to save the city’s arts and culture budget with over 110,000 signatories imploring the Senate to revise its decision and protect Berlin’s creative identity and cultural economy.
