BERLIN Ten years after reunification, culture in Berlin is a tale of two cities, three opera houses, seven orchestras, 50 theaters, 170 museums and 300 galleries.
But as next Tuesday's 10th anniversary of German unity approaches the pressures of merging the artistic inheritance of East and West while scaling back runaway funding have provoked a row that could be a scene from a Richard Wagner opera. The decade since German unification has been difficult for Berlin's cultural institutions, particularly the world of music. After years during which opera houses and orchestras on both sides of the Berlin Wall enjoyed privileged status and generous funding as showpieces for the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism, the arts in Berlin are getting their first taste of cultural realpolitik.
Most European cities have become used to cuts in public spending on the arts and have generally adapted accordingly. But Berlin is only now having to deal with the prospect of functioning on a tighter budget and still producing the output that made it the city of choice for cultural icons such as the conductor Herbert von Karajan, who ruled West Berlin's Philharmonic Orchestra with an iron baton and brought it a worldwide profile. The illustrious Rgentinian-born musician and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who heads the Staatsoper (state opera) in the old East Berlin and has done much to boost Berlin's international reputation since his arrival in 1992, says he wants $5 million more funding or he will quit Europe's aspirant cultural capital.
Berlin's city authorities, still reeling from the discovery of a funding deficit of more than 70 million marks ($35 million) in the arts budget, has pleaded that the cupboard is bare and instead proposed swingeing cuts. It has suggested its own form of unification by merging the city's two main operas into one.
Barenboim blames unification for many of the woes facing the city's orchestras, including the Staatsoper and the Berlin Philharmonic, where Britain's Simon Rattle takes over as artistic director from Italian conductor Claudio Abbado in 2002. "Both are suffering from the effects of unification.
West Berlin used to be an island of the West in a communist ocean. Back then money flowed into the city for political reasons.
Now the subsidies are gone, the taxes are higher, the wages are smaller," Barenboim said recently. The 58-year-old Barenboim was brought to Berlin in 1992 in the heady early days of post-reunification optimism, with politicians insisting that the newly installed capital and future seat of a united German government should have a cultural program to match. But much of that enthusiasm has waned since reunification and Germany's federal system means that Berlin is still required to compete for central funding alongside other large German cities such as Stuttgart, Munich or Dresden, which also have world class orchestras and opera houses.
"Berlin politicians have to set priorities. If you want to keep Germany's elite orchestras at the highest standards in the world, you have to be careful that the top people don't quit to become professors in Hanover or Freiburg. That's what's happening now and that's a disgrace," Barenboim said. Although rattle, currently at the city of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the English midlands, has so far kept out of the broader funding debate in Berlin, he is also keen that the Philharmonic should also be generously funded and competition for a share in the 100 million marks culture budget from the federal government's coffers is sure to intensify.
Berlin's culture wars may only be beginning.
Rich Cultural Fabric Barenboim, Abbado, Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta ... the list of musicians working in Berlin reads like a top 10 of international music and Berlin has long been a musical capital to compete with New York, Paris and London. The job of Christoph Stoelzl, a former newspaper editor recently appointed Berlin's senator (state government minister) with responsibility for culture, is keeping them in Berlin. Stoelzl's predecessor Christa Thoben was brought in from the State Construction Ministry to sort out the deficit in the culture budget but left frustrated after her pleas for more funding were turned down.
Stoelzl insists the only way forward is through consolidation.
"There will be no closures," he promised in a recent interview with Die Welt, newspaper. "Restructuring involves three factors: Cutting personnel, introducing structural flexibility and thirdly much closer cooperation between the three houses," Stoelzl said. Many were excited at the prospect of a doubling of Berlin's cultural offerings post-unification 10 years ago, but quickly the logistics problems of having two cities merge into one became apparent.
Greater quantity has not meant better quality. The west of the city has the Deutsche Oper (German opera), whose glory days were during the era of the wall, when it staged many groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed productions. Barenboim's Staatsoper, lies on the Unter den Linden Boulevard in the former East. A short way down the street is the Komische Oper (comic opera), which has the smallest subsidy of the three opera houses but which has earned a reputation for staging the most adventurous, mostly lighter, productions.
Under Stoelzl's proposals, the Staatsoper and the Deutsche Oper would be merged and Barenboim would be offered the reins of the merged unit. The neoclassical Staatsoper would stage ballet and baroque pieces, while 19th-century and more contemporary works would be staged in the modern, white concrete block of the Deutsche Oper. Barenboim is cautious about whether the merger could work.
(Reuter)