Always only the best for Berlin: The Berlin Festival is celebrating its 75th birthday

Always only the best for Berlin, that’s what this story says. The special. The festival didn’t want to do anything less than that. She were West Berlin. And the west of the city saw itself as a cultural showcase, from punk to philharmonic, between avant-garde and the concept of “culture for all” that was common in the 1970s.

What a difference they haven’t made! The festival was involved in the opening of the Chamber Music Hall at the Cultural Forum and in the creation of the exhibition “Topography of Terror”. They later also took over the Gropius Bau, with groundbreaking exhibition projects such as “Jewish Worlds of Life” and “Prussia – Attempt at a Balance Sheet”.

Those were the really great times. The offices were in the Bikini Haus, at the entrance Harald Juhnke grinned in the display case, advertising a Chinese restaurant. Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations for 1987 were prepared here; there were summer festivals back then, free and outdoors.

This autumn the Berlin Festival celebrates its 75th birthday. You were a child of the Cold War who developed into a major diplomatic player. Matthias Pees, artistic director since 2022, recalls the historical background of the festival operation: “The flags of freedom have always flown over the competition between systems fought with art and cultural programs. Freedom from capitalist exploitation on the one hand, freedom from communist oppression on the other.”

What makes this Berlin institution so special is that it is at home in a major city. The Salzburg Festival, founded in 1920, the mother of European festivals, resides in a fairly small town where there isn’t much else going on. In Berlin, the festivals are part of a diverse and branched system.

East and West in competition

From the beginning it was an East-West story; the competition between the two parts of the city was often carried out in the field of culture. The Berlin Festival, originally a counterpart to the Eastern World Festival of Youth and Students, turned out to be a continuation of politics by other means. In the first few years, the Berlin Film Festival in particular was competitive, and it stayed that way for a long time. The Berlinale has political DNA. And it is a public festival, right from the start.

Even in quick retrospect it becomes clear what the festival is or can be for Berlin. Ulrich Eckhardt directed the institution from 1973 to 2000. During this time there were extraordinary guest performances from Eastern Europe, unforgettable performances by the Théatre du Soleil, organized by Francesca Spinazzi and Torsten Maß. Gereon Sievernich’s “Horizons” festival preceded the House of World Cultures, and today one has to say that an openness and audience-friendliness have also been lost, especially at the HKW.

For a long time the festival was a roof without its own house, that came later. The Theatertreffen as well as the Jazz Festival and the Music Festival still sit under this roof today. Despite all the criticism, these festivals have proven surprisingly resilient. New series have been added again and again, such as the Performing Arts Season, which opens in October with Marina Abramovic and her “Balkan Erotic Epic”, after her successful exhibition in the Gropius Bau.

The fledgling series “Reflexes and Reflections,” curated by Saba-Nur Cheema and Meron Mendel, looks at “The Great Disorder” in the world this weekend. Interlocutors include the historian Adam Tooze, the philosopher Corine Pelluchon and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Bridges into the city

Since 2002, the festival has operated entirely under federal sponsorship. At that time they also moved into their home. Eckhardt’s successor Joachim Sartorius took over the newly named Berliner Festspiele house, so the listed theater of the Freie Volksbühne was saved. The “European season” fell under Sartorius’s directorship until 2011 – still the most appropriate motto for guest performances, especially from Eastern Europe. The festival has built bridges, which, however, always have to be renewed if the “great disorder” is taken seriously.

The festival presented itself as Western games and as test games that explored possibilities for exchange, an “international meeting place for the arts,” as Matthias Pees puts it. And that’s basically how they remained. His predecessor Thomas Oberender took the idea of ​​building bridges a little too literally when he wanted to build a Stalinist village for study purposes behind original pieces of the Berlin Wall with the DAU project Unter den Linden. The project failed, as did Oberender’s initiative to revive the ICC, which the 2021 festival was able to temporarily open to the public with a broad program. The giant building still awaits a solution.

The Berlin Festival is closely linked to the city. For his birthday, the Japanese artist Akira Takayama transformed the S-Bahn ring into a stage for visions of the future of yesteryear. You can join in at the Gesundbrunnen, Sonnenallee and Hohenzollerndamm train stations until September 20th and answer the question: “What if Berlin”.

Big international names adorned the Gropius Bau – Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson. It is all the more astonishing that they are now presenting Gabriele Stötzer, the first artist from the GDR. The exhibition “Be there and not be silent” runs until December and shows the work of a woman who made herself “an object of art” in defiance of the Stasi. Gabriele Stötzer was imprisoned in the GDR for “defamation of the state”. She refused to be broken and founded the mobile and imaginative group of artists in Erfurt.

A Christoph Schlingensief exhibition opens in the Gropius Bau in October: “It’s no longer my problem, do your shit yourself.” The title is reminiscent of the time when the director, visual artist, performer and entertainer, who died in 2010, shook up the art and political scene. That should give you courage, just like the example of Gabriele Stötzer. These examples show that the obvious can be the special. Festivals don’t always have to be far away.