The Latest at Goethe

800 guests from politics and the arts, African dances and a thrilling football match: the Goethe-Institut held court in Berlin. State minister Pieper brought a surprise along to the festivities and filmmaker Schlöndorff brought a very special declaration of love.

Africa and football – it’s a ubiquitous combination right now. The two themes were also taken up for the Goethe-Institut’s Parliamentarian Summer Festival. In his address, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Goethe-Institut, emphasized the increasing engagement of the Goethe-Institut in Africa, which received further funding with the Foreign Office’s Aktion Afrika in 2008. The corresponding special funds made it possible to “strengthen and further expand the network, to promote inner-African dialogue yet further and to establish the important Culture and Development project in the region of sub-Saharan Africa.”

Many of the numerous guests had their eyes on Africa – the Netherlands-Uruguay match was transmitted from Cape Town to a screen here at the venue Hamburger Bahnhof.

A number of politicians showed up – from Claudia Roth to Norbert Lammert – and celebrities from the arts such as Uwe Timm, Susanne Linke, Andreas Dresen and Joachim Król also responded to the Goethe-Institut’s invitation to its fifth Berlin Summer Festival. The official theme was, of course, Africa.

According to Lehmann, the opening of two new institutes in Luanda and Dar Es Salaam have made it possible to become re-established in the sub-Saharan region of Africa, giving the Goethe-Institut a presence in 24 countries. The president of the Goethe-Institut continued to say that “the unique cultural and artistic potential and the diverse links for social and artistic dialogue” have been quite decisive for the work of the Goethe-Institut in Africa. 2009 was the most successful year in the existence of the Goethe-Institut, “and this high quality of work ought to be maintained,” Lehmann continued. This can only be possible, however, if the budget cuts aimed for by the Foreign Office are kept at a minimum.

Cornelia Pieper also got the message. The state minister is responsible for foreign cultural policy and thanked Lehmann for the trustful cooperation and announced “a surprise” to the great applause of the audience. After the parliament’s summer break at the latest, a part of the previously frozen budget of 3.5 million euro will be released.

Volker Schlöndorff thought it was not enough. Considering the 10 million less that the Goethe-Institut would be receiving this year, 6.5 million would still be lacking. Schlöndorff made it quite clear how very much the Goethe-Institut means to him. Without the Goethe-Institut, the filmmaker claimed, there would be no film directors like Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta and he himself. “The Goethe-Institut opens the world for filmmakers.” And as if that weren’t enough praise, he finished, “I’d let myself be drawn and quartered for Goethe.”

The artistic highlight of the evening consisted of performances by the theatre director Monika Gintersdorfer and the fine artist Knut Klassen, who have been travelling together now for five years as a directors’ collective and develop theatre, video and exhibition projects in Germany and the Ivory Coast with a team from both countries. In Berlin the performers now danced a piece from their series Logobi in the guests’ midst. Logobi is street dance from Ivory Coast. European and Ivorian choreographers meet in the five part series and show both the differences and the parallels between traditional African and contemporary European dance.

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