Sarah Mondegrin’s delightful walking tour of Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant's Steglitz reimagines their life together in Berlin 1923-24, in the green leafy neighborhood where they lived. Literary walkers will be provided with more information about Kafka`s several stays in Berlin like the famous hotel “Askanischer Hof”.Information and Booking: Sarah Mondegrin Tel +49 30 791 72 66 <a href="info@mondegrin.de">info@mondegrin.de</a> <a href="http://www.kafkawalksberlin.wordpress.com" target="_blank" title="www.kafkawalksberlin.wordpress.com">www.kafkawalksberlin.wordpress.com</a>

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Gropius Bau 2017

Schwartzsche Villa

Imagine Kafka

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Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place for encounters with art and each other. As an internationally renowned exhibition centre, it offers space for major exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists.

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The Practice – What Moves Artists&nbsp;is a new book series by Gropius Bau, that invites artists to showcase a practice that they pursue, that has influenced them or that has been with them for a long time. In the first volume of the series,&nbsp;On Making Less, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija compiles various ideas and approaches to this topic.

The Practice – What Moves Artists

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To kick off our new event series Sp&auml;tschicht, we’re teaming up with Pop-Kultur Festival we invite you to a free live programme with DJ sets by Planningtorock and Meg10, a concert by Wa22ermann, performances by Jimmy Robert’s class, Queer Ping Pong and a screening with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art.

Sp&auml;tschicht x Pop-Kultur Festival

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YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

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Only until 19 January 2025 – we’ll be back for you in March! 🐛

BAUBAU

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In a nationwide competition, 60 ensembles applied for this year’s Theatertreffen der Jugend. The eight award winners selected by the jury have now been selected. In spring, their productions will be shown at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Theatertreffen der Jugend

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Performing Exiles is an international and interdisciplinary festival produced by the Berliner Festspiele, that seeks to make diasporic lives in the city of Berlin visible and explore the contemporary meaning of exile. A preview of the programme has already been published. &nbsp;

Performing Exiles

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Tanz im August, presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, is a festival of contemporary dance in Berlin. With three productions, it will once again be a guest at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele this year. The pre-sale of some programme highlights has already started.

Tanz im August

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Eight selected concert highlights of Musikfest Berlin 2025 have already been published and are on sale. These include guest performances by the world’s best symphony orchestras and choirs from the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy, which are rarely heard in Berlin.

Musikfest Berlin

More Berliner Festspiele

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The international literature festival berlin, or ilb for short, is considered one of the most important literary festivals in the world. The programme for the 25th&nbsp;ilb will take place from 11 to 20&nbsp;September 2025. The Young Programme will run from 15 to 24&nbsp;September 2025. The main venue is the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, with additional locations for the Young Programme including Theater an der Parkaue and the Gelbe Villa.

25th international literature festival berlin

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A&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

Playing, laughing, making noise, letting off steam, doing nothing – all in an exhibition venue! With BAUBAU, the artist Kerstin Br&auml;tsch designed an&nbsp;admission-free play space for kids, where more is allowed than forbidden. On the Gropius Bau’s ground floor, colourful wallpapers, structures, objects and open-ended material called “loose parts” configure flexible spaces that are shaped by children’s activities.

BAUBAU

Spielen in der Stadt

A Short History from 1900 to the Present

What has been the role of play in public space, both historically and in the present? Complementing BAUBAU, our free play space for kids, Gabriela Burkhalter’s&nbsp;Playing in the City&nbsp;presentation traces the history of playgrounds since their emergence in 1900 to today. The free presentation is open to all and can be seen in two rooms next to the play space’s entrance.

Playing in the City

Now at Gropius Bau

BAUBAUA&nbsp;Play Space for Kids

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For more than three decades, Rirkrit Tiravanija has been expanding the possibilities of what can happen in an exhibition space. As part of his practice, the artist creates situations that offer space to eat and drink, play and rest. They encourage chance encounters, relationships and their failure – in other words: life.&nbsp;The exhibition&nbsp;DAS GL&Uuml;CK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG&nbsp;(Happiness is not always fun)&nbsp;presents more than 80 of the artist’s works created between 1987 and 2024.

Rirkrit Tiravanija:&nbsp;DAS GL&Uuml;CK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG

Now at the Gropius Bau

With Queer Ping Pong, Jimmy Robert’s Class, Team Ping Pong, Planningtorock, Meg10 and Wa22ermann

Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place to encounter art and each other. The internationally renowned institution stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists. Its diverse events focus on exchange and discussion, bringing together local and global perspectives.&nbsp;

About the Gropius Bau

We are looking forward to welcoming you back in mid-March with the reopening of our play space, <a href="${link:{uuid:{df42e57d-a14a-4b44-a5e4-9d3e7dcab5a6},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/baubau}}}">BAUBAU</a> (on 22 March), and two exhibitions, <a href="${link:{uuid:{55d64239-53fe-4b12-8567-a63191c6cae4},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2025/ausstellungen/vaginal-davis}}}">Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt</a> (from 21 March) and <a href="${link:{uuid:{9618c701-bd05-432e-b688-5943e1f7fc57},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/programm/2025/ausstellungen/yoko-ono}}}">YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND</a> (from 11 April). For details on opening hours and tickets, please visit our <a href="${link:{uuid:{62c3018b-bb40-46ce-8019-646ec5cd2e4a},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/gropius-bau/besuch/informationen}}}">Information &amp; Tickets</a> page. We look forward to seeing you soon!

See you in March!

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Becoming more accessible – with the help of Artificial Intelligence: the new AI-based app Gropius Bau Prisma allows you to translate exhibition texts into 36 languages, play them as audio, ask questions about the works on display and activate subtitles in various languages during events.

Gropius Bau Prisma

Key Visual Neu

Marking twenty years since artist, writer and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her home, Gropius Bau presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work in Germany. In her expansive oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counter-culture and resistance meets desire.&nbsp;Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt&nbsp;features installations, paintings, video and film works, zines, writing, music and performances, offering an overview of Davis’ practice and artistic collaborations.

Vaginal DavisFabelhaftes Produkt

Since the 1950s, Yoko Ono has been ahead of her time, leaving her mark on visual arts, music and activism. To honour her groundbreaking work, Gropius Bau presents the comprehensive solo exhibition&nbsp;YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND. Spanning the first floor and the atrium of Gropius Bau, the show brings together over 200 works from seven decades, revealing her radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

YOKO ONOMUSIC OF THE MIND

Current Exhibitions

Marking twenty years since artist, writer and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her home, Gropius Bau presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work in Germany. In her expansive oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counter-culture and resistance meets desire.&nbsp;Fabelhaftes Produkt&nbsp;offers&nbsp;an overview of Davis’ practice and artistic collaborations.

Playing, laughing, making noise, letting off steam, doing nothing – all in an exhibition venue! With BAUBAU, the artist Kerstin Br&auml;tsch designed an&nbsp;admission-free play space for kids, where more is allowed than forbidden. On Gropius Bau’s ground floor, colourful wallpapers, structures, objects and open-ended material called “loose parts” configure flexible spaces that are shaped by children’s activities.

Currently at Gropius Bau

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Located in the centre of Berlin, the Gropius Bau is a lively place to encounter art and each other. The internationally renowned institution stages large-scale exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists.

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&ldquo;The anguish this book gives off is at moments almost unbearable; for how can one help but say to oneself: this hounded creature is I?&rdquo; Andr&eacute; Gide

More than 100 years after it was written, the entire manuscript of Franz Kafka&rsquo;s famous novel &ldquo;The Trial&rdquo; is going on show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. It will be displayed page by page in the order given to it by Kafka&rsquo;s friend, executor and editor, Max Brod. The Berlin presentation was based on the 2013/2014 exhibition &ldquo;The Entire Trial&rdquo; at the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach; the manuscript is part of the collections of the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

He began writing the novel in August 1914, with the First World War already being fought, and it was largely completed by January 1915. Today, &ldquo;The Trial&rdquo; is regarded as one of Franz Kafka&rsquo;s major works. The surviving 171 sheets of the manuscript contradict the notion that a novel must develop linearly and be narrated from beginning to end. During the approximately six months that he spent working on &ldquo;The Trial&rdquo;, Kafka, who earned his living as a lawyer at the &ldquo;Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt&rdquo; (workers&rsquo; compensation insurance institution) wrote chapters and chapter sections for the novel in ten different quarto notebooks, for the most part made up of 40 sheets each. The work, edited by Max Brod after Kafka&rsquo;s death in 1924, was first published in 1925 by the Berlin publishing house &ldquo;Die Schmiede&rdquo;.

The exhibition was complemented by screenings of Orson Welles&rsquo; 1962 film adaptation and photographs from Klaus Wagenbach&rsquo;s collection. The photograph selection was curated by Klaus Wagenbach and Hans-Gerd Koch. Translations of &ldquo;The Trial&rdquo; in more than 60 different languages were also on display.

The precious manuscript was purchased at a London auction in 1988 for approximately 3.5&nbsp;million marks in a collective effort by the German Federal Government, the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, and the State of Baden-W&uuml;rttemberg, and at the time was the most expensive manuscript ever to be bought at auction.

Kafka often worked on several chapters at the same time in various notebooks, alongside diary entries and drafts of other texts. Just one day after starting work on his novel, he wrote in his diary: &ldquo;No sleep at all. In the afternoon I laid on the sofa listlessly without sleep for three hours; same again at night. This must not stop me.&rdquo;

Kafka took apart his ten manuscript notebooks, added coversheets (fashioned from folded or halved pages from his typescript of &ldquo;The Stoker&rdquo;, a chapter published in 1913 from his likewise unfinished America novel The Man Who Disappeared), and arranged them into 16&nbsp;volumes.

In January 1915, Kafka abandoned his work on &ldquo;The Trial&rdquo;. In September 1915, he published a few pages of it in the Jewish weekly paper &ldquo;Selbstwehr&rdquo;. In 1920 he handed over the entire manuscript to his friend Max Brod. However, as early as 1921/22 he asked Brod to burn his work &ldquo;unread and without remnant&rdquo;.

Brod did not carry out this wish and in 1925, one year after Kafka&rsquo;s death, he published a selection from the &ldquo;Trial&rdquo; manuscript; further editions followed in 1935 and 1946. His view was that the section &ldquo;Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.&rdquo; and the nine volumes with just a coversheet had been completed; he put them in order, corrected presumed errors in the manuscript, standardised the spelling and added punctuation. The other six volumes that formed part of the Stoker typescript, consisting of a total of 19 sheets, remained as unpublished fragments.

When Brod left Prague in mid-March 1939, just a few hours before the Wehrmacht invaded, he took the &ldquo;Trial&rdquo; manuscript with him. He travelled to Palestine and after the war he gave the manuscript to his secretary and partner Esther Hoffe. In 1988, she decided to sell it. Thanks to an unparalleled fundraising campaign, it was possible to acquire the manuscript for the German Literature Archive Marbach.

Stresemannstra&szlig;e 111, in the immediate vicinity of the Gropiusbau (Stresemannstra&szlig;e 110, then K&ouml;niggr&auml;tzer Stra&szlig;e), was once the site of the Hotel Askanischer Hof. It was at the Askanischer Hof, on 12 July 1914, that the legendary conversation took place between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer, her sister Erna and friend Grete Bloch, after which the engagement between Kafka and Felice Bauer was broken off. Kafka wrote later in a journal entry that the meeting felt to him like a &ldquo;law court in a hotel&rdquo;. Thus the idea for his novel began to take shape.

Franz Kafka. Der ganze Prozess

Franz Kafka. The entire Trial

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The Berliner Festspiele organise a range of festivals and art exhibitions, concerts, dance and theatre performances, readings, lectures, debates and much more throughout the year. These events are presented at a range of locations across Berlin but are concentrated primarily at their own two venues: the Gropius Bau and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

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Today’s Events

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The international and interdisciplinary festival produced by the Berliner Festspiele

Performing Exiles

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37th&nbsp;International Festival Berlin

Tanz im August

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The international literature festival berlin, or ilb for short, is considered one of the most important literary festivals in the world.

25th international literature festival berlin

Leichte Sprache

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You can listen to some of our events this year digitally in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library after the live concerts.&nbsp;In addition, On Demand offers from past years are available.

Musikfest Berlin in the Media Library

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The international Jazzfest Research Lab&nbsp;welcomes academics and students to take a critical look at the festival’s archive, its programmes, creators, musicians and – last but not least – its myths. In two seminars during the summer semester of 2024, students from the Berlin University of the Arts and the University of Hildesheim have explored the festival’s history from various perspectives. In this film, the participants give a first look at how they dealt with their research subject.

Introducing: Jazzfest Research Lab

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To mark its 60th anniversary, Jazzfest Berlin is celebrating the cultural diversity of the neighbouring district of Moabit in collaboration with around 35 official partners and initiatives and with over 350 participants of all ages.&nbsp;In June 2024, interviews were conducted with 20 partners who presented their perspectives, wishes and ideas for the Jazzfest Community Lab Moabit. You can get a first impression with this film.

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Curated by&nbsp;Meron Mendel and Saba-Nur Cheema&nbsp;

From 13 to 16 June 2024, the interdisciplinary themed days “Reflexes &amp; Reflections” on the Israel-Palestine conflict and its consequences for society in Germany took place at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. You can now find video and audio recordings of the discourse events in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library!

Reflexes &amp; Reflections. 7 October, the war in Gaza and the debate in Germany

In the Media Library

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The 10 Remarkable Productions 2024

On 26 January, the Theatertreffen’s jury of critics announced their selection of 10 remarkable productions for the 2024 Theatertreffen at a press conference. Our congratulations go to the nominated production teams and all participants! The programme will be published on 5 April.

Theatertreffen 2024

“Radical Playgrounds”, an art parcours at the Gropius Bau, is spending eleven weeks exploring the differences between the concepts of play as competition and free play. Visitors are invited to walk and climb on the various installations and sculptures, to activate them and to shape the project collectively.

Summer School 2025

As part of Performing Exiles there will be a Summer School from 16 to 28&nbsp;June 2025. This will offer workshops, seminars and mentoring. The participants will see the performances and guest productions in the festival programme and visit artistic initiatives and cultural institutions in Berlin that operate across a wide range of disciplines and contexts. A public presentation of the participants’ current work and research at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele will complete the programme.

Open Call

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