Capital of Culture Year 2025 – Chemnitz artists: “No reason for inferiority complexes”

Gabi Reinhardt still has time before departure. On September 3rd, an Ikarus bus will set in motion for the first time at the Chemnitz bus station with its futuristic, floating concrete roof, “at a glittering stop,” says the director. She is preparing a theater production that is part of Chemnitz’s program as European Capital of Culture and in which women report about their work, especially the “unseen work” in the household, with children, in relationships. The performance takes place during the bus journey and at five stations in the city. Amateur actresses will play, dance, sing or move puppets. Title of the piece: “The bus has left”.

The bus left for Chemnitz this Saturday. The Capital of Culture year was officially opened on January 18th with an extensive cultural program and a ceremony in the presence of the Federal President. For twelve months, the quarter-million city in southwest Saxony will be, so to speak, the cultural central stop of Europe, together with the Slovenian Nova Gorica and the neighboring Italian Gorizia. Chemnitz was awarded the national selection process in 2020 as the fourth German title holder since the Capital of Culture was “invented” 40 years ago. A jury gave her preference over Magdeburg, Nuremberg, Hanover and Hildesheim. The decision already caused astonishment, as it was aimed at a city that was ridiculed in comedy shows as the epitome of dreary provinciality, where no ICE stopped and which has been heavily burdened by right-wing riots since 2018. Cultural city? But not here!

Gabi Reinhardt already knew better back then. In a short film on her homepage, the theater maker interviewed herself with a wink during the Corona period, with questions like: »Child or career? Fixed or free? Berlin or Chemnitz?” Sometimes the answers come hesitantly, with the latter there is no thought: Chemnitz! After studying theater education in Berlin, she immediately returned to the city that was still called Karl-Marx-Stadt when she was born there in the 1980s.

A powerful argument for being a freelance artist is that there is space and cheap rent. A studio like hers, “with a view of the city center and even storage,” would be unaffordable in many other cities. In addition, the theater maker in Chemnitz is part of a lively cultural biotope. The city not only has an internationally renowned art collection, the Smac archeology museum, an opera and a cultural department store, but also a lot of subculture: theater groups, exhibition projects, clubs and festivals like the “Kosmos”. Last but not least, artists find a “grateful audience,” says Reinhardt. When she staged the “Balcony Ballet” with its residents in a high-rise building in the city center in 2013, 2,000 spectators came. “You can make a difference here,” she says, adding that Chemnitz “doesn’t have to have an inferiority complex compared to Dresden or Leipzig.”

This is known in the Chemnitz scene, but word of it has hardly gotten around among art lovers beyond the city limits. When the program for the festival year was presented to the national and international press at the end of October, many of the cultural journalists who had traveled there admitted that they were in the city for the first time. The Saxon Culture Minister Barbara Klepsch (CDU) claimed during the presentation that Saxony was the most popular German federal state for cultural tourism. However, she admitted that the guests have so far preferred Dresden, Leipzig or Görlitz. In Chemnitz you are not used to crowds of visitors. When Gabi Reinhardt expresses the expectation that “tourists will soon come here,” she laughs in disbelief.

The fact that they are coming can of course be taken for granted. The organizers expect two million visitors; Experiences from comparable cultural capitals make this seem realistic. Reinhardt is already reporting the first ticket inquiries for her production, which will not be on the program until autumn. She also hears that the Capital of Culture is being chosen as a location for conferences or work meetings. “This is a completely new experience for us,” she says.

In Chemnitz people are looking forward to the onslaught. Sabine Kühnrich says: “I’m looking forward to many encounters and impulses from outside.” The singer and her band Quijote have been a fixture in Chemnitz’s cultural scene for decades. The day after the opening of the Capital of Culture, she performed a program for the 100th birthday of the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, which will also be celebrated in 2025. She also hopes that the guests will bring “a lot of happiness.” That would be good for the city. Their self-esteem is largely based on their long industrial tradition, but has been weakened since they had to cope with dramatic structural change and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs after 1990. When she rides the tram, she often feels a bit “gloomy,” says Kühnrich. If we could correct this a little during the Capital of Culture year, “living in Chemnitz would be easier.”

Life would also be easier in the city if the extreme right-wing scene didn’t take up so much space – at least for progressive artists like Reinhardt and Kühnrich. In her productions, the theater woman often allows people who are considered “marginalized” and who are particularly threatened by right-wing extremists to have their say: migrants, queer people, people of color. The singer is one of the leading figures behind the Chemnitz Peace Day, which is celebrated every year at the beginning of March on the anniversary of the war’s destruction of Chemnitz, a date over whose interpretation there are heated arguments with the extreme right.

It has always been strong and well connected in the city; It is no coincidence that the Nazi terrorist trio of the NSU was able to live underground here at the end of the 1990s. A documentation center reminiscent of the “NSU complex” is an important program point in the Capital of Culture. However, the scene showed previously unimaginable strength in 2018, during what is often shamefully referred to as “the events” in Chemnitz: the riots and hunts against migrants and alternatives triggered by the murder of a city festival visitor, as well as the demonstrative solidarity between hooligans, the AfD and Pegida Large demonstrations. Reinhardt, who later staged a staged reading along the demonstration route, is still shocked when she speaks of an “unheard of space” by the right.

This threatens again in the Capital of Culture year. The right-wing extremist splinter party Free Saxony, whose leader Martin Kohlmann sits on the Chemnitz city council, has announced provocations, says Ulf Bohmann, sociologist from the Chemnitz University of Technology; They want to “make 2025 the new 2018.” Their goal is to “disrupt the cultural festival spectacularly at least once” and thereby influence the tenor of the reporting. The first march last Saturday was initially smaller than feared. In contrast, a lot of people took part in protests against it and attempted blockades.

“Chemnitz doesn’t have to have an inferiority complex.”

Gabi Reinhardt Director

Chemnitz civil society is willing to continue to oppose this in the future. Bohmann, Kühnrich and other colleagues organized a “democracy base” as part of the official program. It’s about connecting civil society and preparing it for possible provocations from the extreme right, says Bohmann: “We want to avoid everyone falling into a state of shock like in 2018.”

At the same time, he emphasizes that it is a “small project” – and the only one in the official program of the Capital of Culture that addresses the topics of democracy and the threat to it from right-wing extremists. He is actually convinced that Chemnitz was chosen as a cultural capital in the expectation that answers would be sought there on how to deal with the rise of right-wing extremism. “‘2018’ was a decisive argument,” he says. When asked whether the city is doing justice to this, the scientist smiles meaningfully: “Can I say: ‘No comment’?” Gabi Reinhardt sees it similarly: that the Capital of Culture year is not being used more to look for “answers for 2018”, “I find it disastrous,” she says.

Despite such deficits, artists like Reinhardt and Kühnrich are looking forward to the capital year – and are looking forward to what comes after. A budget is currently being debated in the city council that includes significant cuts to culture. A fifth of the funds could be lost; The result would be an enormous “loss of substance,” warns a protest alliance. Funding for culture is also at risk of being cut in the state and federal government. Gabi Reinhardt admits that she is seriously considering “whether I will still be able to do my job from 2026 onwards.” And Bohmann fears that the clear-cutting of Chemnitz’s cultural scene after the euphoria of the capital year could lead to a hard landing and great disappointment among the city’s population: “Then it might be said: We had a once-in-a-century opportunity – and didn’t use it.”