Budgetary blues

The city of Wuppertal is world famous for its cultural scene. Pina Bausch, an internationally renowned avantgarde dancer and choreographer, based her dance company here. Tens of thousands of people from all over Germany - and the world - flock to Wuppertal's theaters every year. But recently the city has been attracting attention for an altogether different reason - it is buckling under a load of debt and budget cuts.

Johannes Slawig, the city's finance director, described a bleak picture: a city that is 1.8 billion euros ($2.3 billion) in debt - an amount higher than the actual city budget. By the end of this year, they will owe 2 billion euros in loans. And that adds up to 600,000 euros in cuts for the next year.

Slawig said that on top of drastic cuts already made, there are still hundreds of thousands to shave off the budget for the upcoming year. And the highly-subsidized cultural scene has been put on the chopping block.

A famous theater's final scene?

A recent visit to Wuppertal found stage hands hard at work, busy building a set for a performance of "The Greek Passion" at the city's opera house. Their passions may not be as strident as the Greeks' these days, but their financial worries are similarly severe.

The city theater has moved its offices to the opera house as it faces the possibility that it will be kicked out of its home. The city has proposed closing the 44-year-old theater building to save the cost of renovating. The building would then be sold or repurposed. Either way, the theater ensembles and the Pina Bausch Dance Theater would have to find somewhere else to perform.

The theater's managing director, Enno Schaarwaechter, said cuts that hurt the arts end up being counterproductive.

"In the end, supporting cultural programs supports the development of the city, it strengthens the city," Schaarwaechter said. "A city without culture is unthinkable, and in any case, it does nothing to help the economic viability or demographic development of the city."

The proposed theater closure has drawn protests from tens of thousands of people in Germany and internationally, including film director Wim Wenders. Many fear that the shutdown of Wuppertal's theater would set a precedent for a mass cull of cultural venues in cash-strapped towns across Germany.

Trying to stay afloat

Wuppertal has already started making some money-saving changes. Slawig said that about half of 1,000 job vacancies in the municipal government expected to open in the next five years will not be filled. That includes several openings for pool supervisors at the city's swimming facilities. The resulting staff shortage means shorter hours for some pools this summer, and complete closure for five others.

Brigitte Schaefer, a mother of four who was recently swimming laps at the city's central pool complex, the Schwimmoper, lamented the shutdown of the other pools. But she said her family was even more frustrated by the city budget's impact on their own.

"We mostly feel the budget cuts with things like increased fees for street cleaning," Schaefer said while taking a break from her swim. "In the last five years, the fees for the street, and trash pickup, and so on just keep getting higher. For our family, we've seen expenses double in five years."

Grassroots protest

Locals aren't taking the cuts lying down. Last year, "Wuppertal Wehrt Sich," or Wuppertal Stands Up, was formed to protest them. It now has over 2,000 members. Spokeswoman Iris Colsman said the city is losing some of the very things that make it attractive.

"Cultural life has something to do with identity and being able to be proud, to have something that's different from the cultural life in another city," Colsman said.

But Wuppertal Wehrt Sich doesn't blame the city government for the bleak situation. Colsman said that Wuppertal has been forced into a corner by the state and federal tax structures. Cities get very little out of each euro in taxes collected. Most goes to the federal and state governments.

But the upper levels of government require the cities to pay for certain programs, such as housing subsidies. The global financial crisis only exacerbated an already bad situation.

"The taxes we get from [the federal government in] Berlin are not enough for all the things they ask the city to do," said Colsman.

Slawig agreed.

"If the federal and state governments put their money where their mouths are, then we've got a chance," Slawig said. "But we need the support of the media and the public, because it's only through public and political pressure that things will change. We have to jump in and put up a fight for it."

This wouldn't be the first time Wuppertal has fought to survive a crisis. In the last century it clawed its way back from both industrial decline and wartime destruction. But it is not yet clear if Wuppertal's drama will play out happily, or as a cautionary tale, when the city council votes on the budget cuts July 12.

Author: Stephanie Siek
Editor: Nancy Isenson