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Poster in front of the Dresden Semper Opera House: "Significant financial losses"
Photo: Robert Michael / picture alliance / dpa
In 2020, the culture and creative sector in Germany suffered sales losses of 22.4 billion euros due to the corona pandemic. The cultural industry (minus 19 percent) suffered three times more losses than the creative industry (minus 6 percent), as a current report by the Bundestag's scientific service shows. According to the Federal Ministry of Economics, the creative industries include the advertising market and the software / games industry.
Similar to the previous year, there are again significant differences within the cultural and creative industries, according to the study. For this year, the experts calculated a minus of up to 69 percent for the performing arts compared to the pre-crisis year 2019. In the music industry (minus 59 percent) and in the art market (minus 61) the values are similarly dramatic. According to the report, the sub-markets of the film industry, performing arts and the art market have "fallen back to the sales level of 17 years ago."
The chairman of the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Dietmar Bartsch, criticized the federal government's crisis management in view of the numbers. "After 16 months, culture is a blind spot in the fight against pandemics," he told the editorial network Germany (RND). »In the federal government's list of priorities, cultural life and the event industry did not appear. Despite the aid, many are in a pile of broken glass. «In the future, better social security for cultural workers will be needed to make the industry crisis-proof, said Bartsch.
For the German Cultural Council, the central statement of the report is that it certifies that the cultural and creative industries and the people working in these areas have suffered significant financial losses due to the restrictions due to the measures to combat the pandemic, which were caused by the very diverse funding - and aid programs at federal and state level could only be partially compensated «.
According to Olaf Zimmermann, Managing Director of the Cultural Council, the federal and state governments are "called upon to support the cultural sector significantly more in overcoming the crisis."
According to the report, a total of 260,000 companies and over 1.8 million people are employed in the cultural and creative sectors.
The scene will "need longer than other industries to get out of the crisis," it said in the analysis.
feb / dpa / AFP