Berlin’s Former Cultural Senator Lederer Criticizes Senate’s Cultural Policy
For the first time, Berlin’s former Cultural Senator Klaus Lederer (Left) has publicly criticized the black-red Senate and its successor Joe Chialo (CDU) for their cultural policy. The CDU-SPD coalition is showing a “brutal demolition mentality” in culture, Lederer told the “Tagesspiegel” (Saturday edition).
Referring to the budget cuts, Lederer said, “I lack any fantasy on how the sums currently under debate in culture are to be achieved without leaving a broad swath of destruction behind.” However, he also acknowledged that there can be cuts in culture. “Many things can indeed be done with less money” he said.
According to Lederer, who was the Cultural Senator from 2015 to 2023, the coalition’s cultural policy is one-sided. “The question of what the Senate is aiming at with its cultural policy is becoming increasingly pressing. So far, I can only recognize one direction: dismantling” he said. “They know that what they are doing is bad, even if they are not really interested in culture. Now they are trying to drown out the criticism with the triggering of art-hostile sentiments and resentments. A bit of Trumpism is already ringing through.”
Lederer, a Left Party politician, accused the CDU of being “not far from the cultural understanding of the AfD” and of catering to resentment towards the supposedly unnecessary in the cultural sector. “It’s a way of dealing with the resentment towards the supposedly unnecessary in the cultural sector” he said.
Regarding Senator Chialo’s proposal for cultural institutions to work more with sponsors, Lederer said, “I consider these phrases as a way of evading responsibility, as the Senator does not have much to offer in this regard.”
The former Cultural Senator warned that, on this path, art would become a privilege for people who “receive money from their parents at the end of the month or are wealthy.” The politician demanded alternative steps: “In the face of years of increasingly obscene public poverty, while private wealth is growing bizarrely, I, as a Leftist, find it as the state should secure the funding of culture through a good tax policy, rather than begging at the door of the private sector.”
At the same time, Lederer reminded of the economic importance of culture for Berlin: “The cultural value chains in the culture are still essential in the city’s economy. Of the 13 million people who visited Berlin in 2024, 61 percent came for the culture. That this argument no longer counts can only be explained by a deep-seated aversion in the coalition towards broader culture and an understanding of the arts as a useless cost item in the budget. This is cutting off the branch on which one is financially sitting.