Berliner Festspiele

The Berliner Festspiele organize various festivals and art exhibitions, concerts, dance and theater performances, readings, lectures, debates and much more throughout the year. In addition to other venues in Berlin, they primarily use their own two buildings: the Gropius Bau and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

With its diverse offerings in all artistic fields, the Berliner Festspiele see themselves as a large platform. For artists, their idiosyncratic works and diverse working methods and approaches. For visitors, listeners and spectators from all parts, corners and angles of the city and the country, with their often very different preferences and expectations. And for the joint exploration of timeless and contemporary questions that are on all of our minds in one way or another and that challenge us as individuals and as a society in this country and around the world more than ever.

It is often precisely through art that new spaces of fantasy and imagination are created, which also show us other possibilities for reality, unexpected connections and ways to better endure or even overcome conflicts and opposites. Participating in these artistic processes and making them one's own, putting one's own views to the test and trying out new positions and perspectives is the permanent invitation that the Berliner Festspiele extend to their audiences.

This year, with its diverse programs, projects, festivals and exhibitions, the Berliner Festspiele are increasingly turning to the question of what special and unique role art can play in processes of social change and disruption, understanding and reconciliation. Especially in times of increasing polarization and reflexive exclusion of other convictions and experiences, the committed, reflective and pluralistic exchange of different points of view and perspectives is of particular importance, according to the artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele, Matthias Pees. "Our most effective means of achieving this is the encounter in and with art. Through them, themes and positions manifest themselves in our program."

The Berliner Festspiele have been a cultural institution of the Federal Republic of Germany since 2002. Together with its two "sisters", the Berlinale and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, it forms the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH.