Germany will take on the European Council Presidency from 1 July to 31 December. We ask, what constitutes Europe? In the future how do we want to live in Europe? What issues do we want to advance across Europe? With our Europe-wide projects presented to you here, we work in an artistic, discursive, and quite critical way to strengthen a common European public sphere, to promote European digital civil society, and to promote ecological cultural change in Europe.

How do we innovate and make progress? Our answer: often by mistake. We’re celebrating mistakes and their innovative power in this magazine: a collection of both big and little mistakes in art, language, technology, and society.

“The other Beethoven(s)” is a Goethe-Institut project that pays tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven's 250th birthday and takes his interest in non-European perspectives to the next level. Building on the composer’s cosmopolitan outlook, artists and musicians from Asia, the Arab world, Southeast Europe and Germany are translating his work into a new, contemporary idiom.

Artists, scientists and activists think about the big questions of our epoch. What do hyper-realistic robot copies and fake news reveal about the future?

How do we assert ourselves in the digital society? Which tools do we have to master, which skills do we have to learn? ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe and the Goethe-Institut provide answers.

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 – and in doing so revolutionised architecture, design and the way we think about it. What influence does this art school have today? And what should everyone know about the Bauhaus? 

In global conversations between Budapest, Cairo, Brasilia, Nairobi, Moscow, Salzburg and Zurich we debate common narratives of populists in different countries.

What are the vital issues that women and feminists in Germany today consider to be of burning importance, what are they concerned about?