When culture is cut, everyone suffers – not just the creative industry

The media and creative industries in Berlin employ 265,000 people and have an annual turnover of €44 billion, but at the end of 2024 – a year in politics that came crashing to a close with outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz losing a vote of confidence that resulted in an early federal election and a chilling rise in votes for the far right party AfD – Berlin’s local government confirmed a sucker-punch €130 million in cuts to arts and culture funding in the city.

The German capital has famously thrived on its reputation for facilitating creativity; its “excellent funding landscape” is even one of the first things mentioned in the results when Googling what made the city creative. In 2006, Berlin was awarded with the UNESCO certification City of Design, and became part of the Creative Cities Network, a worldwide organisation built on understanding creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. And just four years ago, in 2021, the German government approved a record €2.1 billion for federal culture funding — a €155 million increase from 2020.

So why are the city’s many creative communities being subjected to this brutal and unapologetic u-turn on funding priorities now?

The widely-criticised cuts appear to be a disproportionate attempt to rectify Berlin’s €3 billion budget shortfall, stunting arts and culture funding with a hefty 12 per cent reduction, despite the sector only accounting for 2.5 per cent of total public spending. Acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders has warned Euronews Culture that removing funding from cultural institutions never pays off. He says: “They start cutting cultural funding and that, in the long run, is the hardest price they're paying. Because I think that in the long run, they would profit from culture remaining vivid and alive.”

Reinforcing the sentiment of Wenders’ statement, director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art Emma Enderby told The Art Newspaper, “Culture and clubs bring people to Berlin. They don’t come here for the food, they come here for the history and the culture.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a newly unified Berlin emerged with a creatively endowed landscape, thanks to its sudden wealth of unoccupied property and the incentives of a government desperate to cultivate an optimistic new identity. Significant administrative efforts were made to establish the networking opportunities needed for creatives to take advantage of the city’s growing reputation as a design and art hub, and trade fairs and arts festivals soon became international platforms, encouraging emerging talent to rub shoulders with established designers, while simultaneously facilitating encounters between entrepreneurs, investors and the media.

As Berlin-based Italian designer Giulia Hartz explains, these fairs are some of the first to admit to feeling the pinch of these sizeable funding cuts. “I try to take part in Berlin’s illustration and design festivals often. They partly rely on government funding, and what I’ve heard from some insiders is that this year’s festivals are still going to happen, but they will be downsized significantly.”

In typically German fashion, the cuts were announced, protested, confirmed anyway and put into effect in a matter of a few short weeks, with little clarity or communication around the distribution of what funding is left. Three months into 2025, the realities are unavoidable, with shrinking programmes, fewer jobs and a visibly reduced offering of exhibitions from within the art and design scenes. One of the first and most visible losses was the immediate discontinuation of Museum Sundays – an initiative offering free entry to Berlin’s museums on the first Sunday of every month. Between July 2021 and December 2024, Museumssonntag enabled 2.2 million visits to 81 institutions. It is well documented that exposure to culture through museum and gallery settings is pivotal to the cultivation of creative practices, and it cannot be overstated how severe the impact of this loss of exposure to the arts will be to the future of creative industries in Berlin.

Observing the erosion of the previously abundant community spirit that has shaped Berlin’s arts landscape, 3D artist and Digi-gxl member Harriet Davey explains that a decrease in both funding and jobs means that people are forced to stretch themselves beyond boundaries that allows for the sustenance of collective organising and thinking within the design industry, stating, “People just don’t have the time or the energy anymore.”

While the government is doing its best to devalue art and design by defending its cuts, with Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner calling for “a change of mentality, including in culture”, multidisciplinary designer and PR specialist Judith Weber, who works with social and cultural organisations, feels that the public is more aware than ever of how the creative sector impacts them on a day-to-day basis, thanks to the activism the initial announcement of the funding cuts inspired. They explain: “The protests were really long. A lot of people went. I think that people really noticed the importance. Plus, it isn’t just some avant-garde, elite programmes being cut. It’s a wide range of cuts that might affect the whole population.”

They do, however, fear the legacy of this type of austerity in the arts, adding, “The question is what projects are going to be left in the end – who’s going to get the money? A lot of diversity funds have been cut, which gives quite a bleak outlook, and a lot of queer organisations have been severely affected. If you allow these important projects to disappear, and in the next election we have an even higher rise in conservative power, who’s going to be left to fight it?”

The threat of censorship – a well-known weapon of fascism – is another feeling that has emerged as a result of the funding cuts. With little to go around, and the centre-right CDU government coming into power later this month, it seems unlikely that critical voices will be supported above those willing to pander to party lines. And with February’s announcement of the withdrawal of an additional €15 million in culture funding in 2026, resistance through design and culture is set to be stifled by bureaucratic economics.

Closer Look

Milly shares some people and projects standing strong in the fight for culture and awareness.

• Activist platform #BerlinIstKultur plays a pivotal role in organising, communicating and documenting protests against the Berlin government’s cuts in the cultural sector. Check out @berlinistkultur on Instagram for details of the effects of the cuts on individual institutions and individuals in arts and culture.

• Sung Tieu’s exhibition 1992, 2025 is currently on show at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The artist’s research-driven practice examines the tensions between individual lived experiences and mechanisms of systemic regulation, with a critical lens on Germany’s divided history. In her latest body of work, Tieu deepens her ongoing critical engagement with the 1980 recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which led to the migration of approximately 60,000 Vietnamese contract workers to the GDR.

• 90mil is a temporary urban regeneration project in Berlin. For the last year the multidisciplinary space has facilitated creation and community – offering studios, exhibition, performance and rehearsal space, ceramics, a wood and metal workshop, radio and a community kitchen and garden — working with a donation-based programme that is committed to public access. The vision for 90mil is to “create a new space in Berlin that exists between genres and artforms, that is informed by interdisciplinary, international and intersectional approaches to building community and culture”.

• Berlin Design Week returns to the German capital 15-18 May 2025, encompassing visual communication, product design, textile and surface design, interaction design, circular design, new materials and manufacturing processes, urban planning and architecture. Submissions are open now, until 16th March, for creatives and organisations wishing to take part in this year’s event.