Berlin’s Theatre Landscape after 1989: Cultural Policy Strategies and Multi-Level Transformations

Abstract

After 1989, cultural policy makers in Berlin faced the challenge of reorganizing the city’s dual cultural structure in the context of multi-level transformations. This article analyzes their strategies, using the example of the funding and reprofiling of the city’s theatre landscape. The integration of East German theatres into the federal German theatre landscape did not happen solely by adapting them to western structures. Instead, all of Berlin’s theatres were reviewed to determine whether they could still assume an important function for the reinvention of the city as the capital of unified Germany and as a cultural metropolis of international importance. At the same time, the funding of the capital city’s cultural infrastructure had to be renegotiated between the federal and state governments, shifting toward permanent and direct federal funding for the cultural sector. Moreover, cultural policy concepts underwent profound changes throughout the 1990s, as culture was gradually discovered as one of the city’s central economic resources.