The Arts:The German state's commitment to arts funding is envied by practitioners in other countries - though the level of subsidy has an increasing number of critics, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
It's a chilly Thursday night in Berlin and a crowd is arriving at the Staatsoper for a performance of Maria Stuardaby Donizetti. At the box office, a queue of people is waiting to buy tickets costing from €16 to €63, less than half the "real" price. Students who show their ID get the best unsold seats for €10.
"It's a really fair price, not much more than for the cinema," says student Malte Sommer. "Often the problem in Berlin is not that there isn't enough culture but that there's too much."
In the cloakroom, fur coats hang beside anoraks; in the auditorium, opera-goers of all ages are taking their seats. No matter where you are in Germany, you can be sure you're never far from culture: last year 35 million people visited more than 100,000 theatre productions and 7,000 concerts. All of this is made possible by German public arts funding of €8 billion annually.
The money goes a long way (see panels), enabling a diversity of culture and freedom that artists in other countries can only dream of. "Support for culture is the greatest contribution Germany makes to the world," said Daniel Barenboim, the star conductor of Berlin's Staatsoper, in an interview last week.
Cultural support allows theatres and galleries to make long-term plans, gives artists financial security and makes the arts affordable to all. But while Germany sees support for culture as one of its central responsibilities, the arts in Germany are not centrally organised. Instead they are largely the responsibility of the country's 16 Länder - federal states such as Bavaria and Saxony - as well as city-states such as Hamburg and Berlin.
More than 80 per cent of arts funding comes from the Länder and municipal authorities. For anyone used to a centralised arts council, the German system takes some getting used to.
"It's a natural consequence of our history before a united Germany, where dukes and princes had their own theatres and museums," says Britta Kaiser- Schuster, spokeswoman for the Cultural Foundation of the Länder. Unlike France, where nearly all cultural activity is centred on Paris, the decentralised federal system offers a huge geographic cultural spread.
There's the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Munich Staatsoper, the William Forsythe dance company in Frankfurt, the Kunsthalle gallery in Düsseldorf.
The effect of cultural subsidies is most evident in publicly funded theatres, where an annual €2 billion pays for permanent drama, opera and dance ensembles of contract performers working in repertoire.
"France is a film country, Germany is one of the largest theatre countries in the world, something we really have to bring more to the outside world," says Rolf Bolwin, head of the German Theatre Association, which represents all state theatres and orchestras. "That we can afford this level of artistic freedom through public financing enables artistic development not possible in other countries. Considering the way private commerce has pushed its way into all other levels of society, I find it good that in the aesthetic sphere we in Germany still have freiraum[freedom]."
But retaining this artistic freiraumis a constant battle. Budget freezes and cuts have seen 6,000 theatre jobs go in the last decade. Dozens of theatres have been closed and companies merged or dissolved.
THE SUBSIDISED WORLDof German theatre has its bizarre side too. In state theatres, less than 10 per cent of people on the theatre payroll are performers; the rest are musicians, technicians and administrative staff.
The technicians and orchestras have iron-clad union contracts filled with clauses guaranteeing overtime for technicians who work after 9pm or one-off payments for musicians if they have to wear formal dress. A theatre's administrative staff are often public servants with permanent contracts on a public-service pay scale.
Those with the least job security and lowest earnings are the singers, actors and dancers.
"Earnings are a problem and and artistic personnel pay is, as a rule, set more freely, with a certain room to manoeuvre," admits Rolf Bolwin. In other words, when a theatre's budget is cut, it is often the artists who feel the pinch first.
"But on the other hand, in an ensemble, performers often have contracts over three, four or five years, which is not the case in other countries," Bolwin says.
There is no shortage of critics of the German system for supporting the arts, who argue that the culture of plenty lends itself to artistic flaccidity and financial waste. The federal system works well by spreading the arts around the country, but it has also created a mammoth bureaucracy of cultural institutions to manage the money. Each of Germany's 16 federal states has its own arts council, and the federal government has one too.
No one seems to have an overview of how many people are employed to administer culture and whether they are worth the money. Ask for headline funding figures and the only people who can help are the number-crunchers in the statistics office.
In state-funded theatres and museums, cushioned from the daily battle to cover costs and justify their existence, it is perhaps only natural that cultural snobbery and intellectual smugness are rife. German theatre professionals who work in houses where box office takings only cover around 15 per cent of costs can afford the luxury of mocking the English- speaking theatre world.
Yet commonly heard clichés - for example, that commercial pressures have killed off all artistic merit in English- language drama - contrast with the regular appearance on German stages of the work of David Mamet and Harold Pinter, Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane. Modern German playwrights, on the other hand, are rarely seen in Dublin, London or New York outside of theatre festivals, if at all.
Cultural critics in Germany argue that a subsidies mentality can be just as toxic for creativity as commercialism.
For nearly two decades, the German-speaking theatre world has been gripped by Regietheater, the concept that a play's text is just one ingredient to be mashed up with other texts, music and improvisation to serve a director's reinterpretation of a play. What began as an attempt to breathe new life into staid plays and conservative theatre has, critics say, now become a self-serving cliché itself.
Today it is rare to find a German public theatre that doesn't subscribe to Regietheater, offering plays filled with nudity, bodily fluids and endless screaming, all at taxpayers' expense.
" Regietheateris a luxury phenomenon, a product of plenty that allows directors to put their private neuroses on the stage," says German author and playwright Rolf Schneider. "Book publishers do quite well without cultural subsidies, and if the commercial interest was introduced a little more to the theatre world, it wouldn't hurt a bit."
CRITICS OF THEsubsidised arts world believe that the most vibrant cultural activity is happening in the free scene, in privately funded venues such as the Radialsystem, a new dance and exhibition space in Berlin, or the Hotel Halle-Neustadt in Halle, where an 18-storey Ballymun-style tower block has been transformed into a cultural centre with 91 individual spaces, all on a shoestring budget.
At the same time, the chill wind of commercialism has begun to blow through the German arts world, particularly in state galleries. Many curators faced with budget cuts have signed deals with large German banks and energy companies, only to face an increasing demand from sponsors for the kind of blockbuster shows seen in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, which has drawn huge crowds in recent years for its shows of "greatest hits" from New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum.
Sponsor pressure is a shock to German institutions used to dealing with politicians, who might put occasional pressure on budgets but never on cultural output.
"Germans have a problem with commercial sponsors because we think that culture is a public matter," says Britta Kaiser-Schuster. "Putting pressure on cultural establishments to earn more money is fine as long as the balance of content is kept between blockbusters and the rest."
Germany's long history of excellence in the arts goes hand in hand with its long history of cultural funding. The chicken-and-egg riddle of public funding for "elitist" arts is redundant in the land of €16 opera tickets for all.
But in this land of plenty, Germany's cultural elite need greater pressures to avoid the trap of publicly funded vanity projects and concentrate instead on their primary obligation: to the taxpayers who fund their work.
