Carnival of the Cultures

The moving group "Calaca eV" at the Carnival of Cultures

The Carnival of Cultures is an intercultural festival in Berlin , which has been celebrated every year since 1996 around the Whitsun weekend in the Kreuzberg district .

The event consists of a four-day street festival from Friday to Whit Monday and a street parade on Whit Sunday.

The performances of the participating groups in the parade and the artists of the music and theater events of the street festival show and affirm the value of the cultural diversity and togetherness of the city.

The number of visitors for both parts of the event has leveled off at around one million since the early 2000s. This makes the move one of the largest street removals in Germany. The number of active participants in the parade and the street festival is around 5500 annually.

The Carnival of Cultures 2020, scheduled for May 29 to June 1, has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany .

Goal of the event

Once a year, the event celebrates the cultural, artistic and social diversity of Berlin for four days in Berlin. The Carnival of Cultures is an analogue dialogue and the real encounter between people, whose diversity can exist on all and multiple levels - socialization, gender, origin, nationality, culture, religion. The real encounter supports the possibility of an integrative understanding of culture, which aims to make the diversity of lifestyles and aesthetic ideas tangible and accessible to public discussion using the means of art as an enrichment of urban culture. It enables intercultural dialogue and transcultural innovation. The Carnival of Cultures provides socio-political impulses for peaceful and mutually interested coexistence.

For the actors, participation offers the opportunity to maintain their own identity, to present it to the outside world and to pass it on within the community. Participation enables empowerment and anti-discrimination work. The festival and the parade are a political statement for the importance and value of diversity and social commitment. The positive image of a diverse society is used by the media and the city to market their image.

In contrast to many other carnivals around the world, the Carnival of Cultures does not emphasize any particular carnival tradition, but rather reflects the diversity of all actors living in Berlin.

Both the groups taking part in the parade and the artists and musicians at the street festival are almost exclusively Berliners, with the parade groups often inviting groups from other federal states or other European countries to take part. This focus on Berlin groups was the result of a conceptual realignment with the aim of raising the profile of the event. Because its great cultural heterogeneity is a special feature of the Berlin event worldwide. It is strongly emphasized by the fact that all these cultural references can be found in one city. Another reason to focus on Berlin actors was the establishment of a title in the Berlin state budget - state funds for the empowerment of Berlin's diversity.

The beginnings

Participants of the "Bengalisches Kultur Forum" parade group at the Carnival of Cultures street parade.

In October 1993 the Workshop of Cultures opened in Berlin-Neukölln . With the support of the Berlin Senate's Commissioner for Foreigners , the operators offered a meeting place for around 500,000 Berlin residents from over 180 nations. The regular meetings and artistic projects soon led to the idea of a public event lasting several days.

There were already concepts for a carnival in Berlin earlier that were also implemented, based on existing carnival traditions, but in the opinion of the initiators of the Carnival of Cultures ignored the special features of Berlin. The first Carnival of Cultures took place on May 15 and 16, 1996 on Ascension Day . The event should join newer European traditions such as the Notting Hill Carnival in London and the Rotterdam Zomercarnaval.

The program

Members of the "Thai Smile" moving group during their 2012 street parade

The first Carnival of Cultures in 1996 took place without a street festival. 2,200 people took part in the parade and 50,000 spectators came. In the following year, the move was supplemented by the street festival to present areas of cultural diversity that cannot be represented in a move. Over the years, the carnival grew into a four-day street festival with numerous musical and choreographic performances, 350 gastronomy, handicrafts and information stands.

The number of visitors rose continuously from 50,000 in 1996. In 1997 there were already over 300,000. At Pentecost 2000 the million mark was exceeded. In 2003 over 1.5 million visitors could be counted. Between 2005 and 2019, the number of visitors stabilized at just under one million visitors.

Since 1997 the children's carnival has been taking place on Saturday, the parade of which ends at Görlitzer Park and turns into a children 's festival there. The organizers of the children's carnival are the "Kreuzberger Musikalische Aktion eV" (KMA eV), which are organizationally independent of the Carnival of Cultures.

Both parts of the event - street festival and street parade - are locally close to each other, so that on Pentecost Sunday there is the opportunity to visit both the street festival and the parade. Admission is free.

The street parade

The street parade on Pentecost Sunday forms the heart of the event. A large number of different actors take part in it - cultural associations, school classes, music groups and dance enthusiasts, artist collectives and others. All groups choose their own topic that is important to them, with which they deal intensively and, often in months of preparatory work, implement it artistically. On Pentecost Sunday, the street turns into a stage when the work of the past few weeks is performed on the almost 3.5 km long parade route.

The participating groups are free to take part in a competition, although only a few groups decide against it. Groups that register to take part in the award will present a rehearsed performance of 90 seconds to a jury at the Südstern. The jury is composed anew every year. It awards prizes worth 1,000 euros in seven categories: "Overall formation", "Topic and implementation", "Dance and / or music", "Costumes, figures, props", "Car construction", "Children and young people" and "Sustainability" .

The street festival

The street festival has complemented the street parade since 1997. It took place for the first time in 1997 on three days of the Whitsun weekend at Anhalter Bahnhof.

In 1998 it moved to the area still used today at Blücherplatz and was extended to four days. Initially, it was only held on Zossener Strasse and the green area of Blücherplatz. From 1999 to 2004 the event days and the area used were the same as today, until the Waterlooufer was added to the area in 2005.

With its cultural, informative and, above all, culinary offers, the street festival offers the opportunity to participate in the diversity of Berlin's culture. It promotes a peaceful and mutually interested coexistence among Berliners.

Approx. 350 lovingly designed stands shape the image of the street festival.

A total of around 100 bands appear on three stages (up to 2017: four) each year. The event offers both newcomers and established musicians a stage. The focus of the musical performances is on "world music".

The program of the stages “Black Atlantica”, “East2West” and “Latinauta” is supplemented by several places known as “Music Corner”, where music or dancing is done unplugged.

There are also two off-stage program areas with “Turf in Action” and “Shanti Town”. The "lawn in action" offers something for children and families. Interactive theater performances, hands-on circus and various workshops. In terms of its orientation and design, “Shanti Town” is particularly strongly influenced by the idea of sustainable action. NGOs and companies that are socially committed provide information and the retailers' gastronomic and commercial offerings also reflect this basic attitude.

House of the Carnival

In the Caribbean carnival tradition, the term mascamp refers to a costume workshop.

Since Piranha Arts took over the sponsorship of the Carnival of Cultures, the organization office and the Mascamp have been located under one roof in the Berlin district of Marzahn, in the so-called House of Carnival. Some of the areas are made available by the Berliner Gewerbesiedlungs-Gesellschaft mbH (GSG Berlin) free of charge.

The house of the carnival is used all year round as a workshop, warehouse and also has two rooms for dance and music rehearsals. The areas are available to those involved in the carnival free of charge. In addition, conferences, workshops and assemblies take place in the House of Carnival, which enables encounters and exchanges between the actors, Berliners and interested parties from all over the world.

sustainability

The production of the event is as sustainable as possible; the preparation and implementation should have as little impact as possible on the environment and natural resources, social sustainability and the economic basis.

The organizers are in contact with environmental associations such as the Green League or Deutsche Umwelthilfe in order to take part in evaluations and to support them by participating in interviews, workshops and surveys in developing recommendations for action for events.

Since the beginning of the Carnival of Cultures z. B. the waiver of disposable tableware. Dealers are obliged to use reusable or palm leaf crockery. Eco-free are being used, the use of local public transport is being advertised, and bicycle parking spaces are being set up.

In particular, the “Shanti Town” area at the street festival enables companies and initiatives with a focus on sustainability to present themselves. In "Shanti Town", visitors will find specific information and products from certified organic coffee to bicycle power generators.

100% recycled paper is used for print products.

The abandonment of internal combustion engines in vehicles on the move has been particularly promoted since 2018. The first successes have already been achieved, even if the complete switch to pushed and pulled platforms is likely to take several years.

One topic that needs to be improved in the future is how to deal with rubbish and contamination from visitors who have been drunk. There has been a one-way ban for the participating traders at the Carnival of Cultures since its premiere. Shops in the vicinity of the event are not subject to domiciliary rights and sell glass and disposable tableware that is entered by the visitors into the event, as the event site is not fenced off for conceptual reasons.

Media perception

The Carnival of Cultures is represented in the media not only nationwide, but also globally and shows Berlin as a young, happy and cosmopolitan metropolis. Nevertheless, the pictures often show stereotypes that do not correspond to the concept of the event and do not depict the actual heterogeneity.

The media partners of the event have so far been the public broadcasters Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg and the citizens' television network Alex .

safety

In the years since 2014, the media perception of the event has been heavily influenced by the topic of security at major events . Since the accident at the Love Parade in Duisburg 2010 at the latest , the attention of organizers, authorities and the public has been focused on the question of how events with large crowds can be safely organized. So-called security concepts for large events emerged from this need . The Carnival of Cultures presented its first in 2011.

With the appearance of assassinations at major events around the world, a new focus was added that needed to be considered in these concepts. In 2019, the main measures of the security concept of the Carnival of Cultures were committed to the so-called crowd management . This included cameras (to monitor the filling of the areas), barriers (for the otherwise unfenced event) to prevent overcrowding and so-called escape and rescue areas (if partial areas have to be cleared).

Economy

Participants in the 2008 street parade

The event is partly financed by public funds, partly by own income and sponsors. Since 2015, the latter have been conceptually exclusively companies providing public services as the “Berlin Carnival Partner”. In 2019 these were the Gewerbesiedlungs-Gesellschaft , Berliner Wasserbetriebe , Berliner Sparkasse and Johanniter .

Before the event was anchored in the budget of the State of Berlin in 2010, it received partial financing from various funding instruments and funds such as the Capital City Culture Fund , the Berlin Lotto Foundation and the Millennium Fund .

According to a study by the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) from 2011, the additional gross domestic product generated by the Carnival of Cultures for the period of five years amounts to 53.2 million euros. "Every euro invested [in the Carnival of Cultures ] brings five times the income," says the study. In addition to gastronomy and the hotel industry, the event also benefits retailers, other cultural institutions and service providers. In addition, the Carnival of Cultures creates or maintains 220 jobs in Berlin. The image of the capital also benefits from the street move. In the media, the Carnival of Cultures is not only represented nationwide, but globally and shows Berlin as a young, happy and cosmopolitan metropolis and thus contributes significantly to the Berlin hype.

politics

The Carnival of Cultures was founded out of the Werkstatt der Kulturen, which in turn went back to an initiative at the beginning of the 1980s by the Berlin Senate's Foreign Affairs Commissioner, Barbara John, and the Governing Mayor, Richard von Weizsäcker .

Since the Workshop of Cultures was an institution funded by the Senate Department for Social Affairs and Integration (with various departmental adaptations over the years), the Carnival of Cultures also belonged to this department. This changed with the State Budget Act 2018/19, which provided for a change to the Senate Department for Culture and Europe .

Support for an event that is important for the country expresses itself. a. in the definition of funding from state funds in the budget.

For many years the governing mayor, Klaus Wowereit and Michael Müller (both SPD) were patrons of the event.

organizer

From 1996 to 2014 the Carnival of Cultures was organized by the Workshop of Cultures . In 2015 the event was in the hands of the state-owned Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH . This was the result of a dispute between the Werkstatt der Kulturen and the Berlin Senate.

The change from Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH took place the following year. The event has been held by Piranha Arts AG since 2016.

This renewed change, as well as many other changes, were the result of intensive, partly publicly funded, dialogue processes between the active actors with the Senate administrations involved and with each other. So there are z. B. since 2015 a group fund to support the participating relocation groups and since 2016 an advisory board.

The conceptual development of the event was made more difficult in the years of structural changes. In addition, there has been an official focus on the safety of the event since 2015. Since 2019, the actors and organizers have been able to intensify their content-related work and take up the topic of "sustainable organization" again.

Other cities

In other German cities there are comparable, partially cooperated events. Since 1997 z. B. takes place the Bielefeld Carnival of Cultures , the u. a. sponsored by the Shademakers Carnival Club and the Welthaus . The two- to three-hour parade usually ends in Ravensberger Park with a music and performance program lasting several hours.

For several years now, Frankfurt am Main has been organizing the Parade of Cultures with an increasing number of participants. The organizer there is, among others, the Frankfurter Jugendring with cooperation partners such as the municipal “Office for Multicultural Affairs” and the municipal representation of foreigners. Culturio took place for the first time in Saarbrücken in 2006 . In 2007, a Carnival of Cultures took place in Cologne for the first time. However, this was also critically discussed there at an event organized by the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne) - including the question of whether such a “Carnival of Cultures” does not convey more tolerance than it actually exists.

In Hamburg , there were between 2003 and 2009 a Carnival of Cultures , where the removal took place during the "Festival of Cultures Hamburg". The 4th Carnival of Cultures took place on September 16, 2006 with 34 formations and groups for the first time through downtown Hamburg, sometimes over the Jungfernstieg. In 2007, Fatih Akın took over the patronage of the event. The organizers canceled the move for the first time in 2008; in 2009 it took place as a demonstration. At the end of 2009 the organizing association “Kulturwelten” was dissolved due to lack of funds.

An initiative for an intercultural carnival was started in Kiel in 2019 , also for participants from all over Northern Germany and neighboring Denmark

literature

Kerstin Frei: Those who mask themselves will be integrated. The Carnival of Cultures in Berlin . Schiler, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89930-008-4 .
Michi Knecht, Levent Soysal (ed.): Plausible variety. How the Carnival of Cultures thinks, learns and creates culture. 2nd Edition. Panama-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-938714-01-0 .