Architecture
The Hamburg architect’s office Gerkan, Marg & Partners and the Frankfurt architects and city planners Albert Speer & Partners are stars in China and the Arab World. The young Graft team from Berlin has made a name for itself in the United States. Germany’s well-trained architects are very much in demand abroad. Germany’s Federal Chamber of Architects has 121,000 members. Most, nearly 87%, work in structural engineering. Many have become specialized – especially in sustainable building. This field has great potential because 40% of energy is consumed in residential and industrial buildings. The Stuttgart-based architect Stefan Behnisch is a pioneer in sustainable building. His ideas are also in demand in the United States, where his breakthrough came in 2003 with the Genzyme Center in Cambridge, MA.
Fine Arts
The boom has a name: YGA. The three letters stand for Young German Artists. Young German painters and photographers in particular enjoy global success under this label. The Leipzig-based painter Neo Rauch is its most prominent representative. His large-format works show surreal, ossified scenes from everyday life, usually in pale, chalky colours. If it wasn’t before, photography is certainly accepted now as an autonomous art form in Germany thanks to the success of three students of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff are in international demand today. Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz and Rosemarie Trockel are among the world’s top ten most famous artists. The art market in Germany employs over 100,000 people – in studios, galleries, museums and trade fairs.
Book Publishing
Germany is a country of books. With approximately 95,000 new and reissued books published every year, and more than 2,000 publishers, it is one of the world’s leading book nations. In 2007 the German book market generated sales worth approximately 9.6 billion euros – roughly 10% of the total turnover in the cultural economy.
German literature is also in demand as a creative export commodity: more than 9,000 licences were issued abroad in 2007, more than twice as many as in 1995. Every autumn, moreover, publishers, authors, booksellers and book agents from all over the world get together for the International Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s biggest. The Leipzig Book Fair, held every spring, is also now firmly established.
Computer Games
Every computer gamer’s eyes light up when they hear the name Crysis. Nowhere else will you see such detailed landscape graphics, with every blade of grass moving individually. This digital work of art was programmed by the Frankfurt-based entertainment development company Crytek. Their work is regarded as state-of-the-art worldwide. Thanks to games like Crysis, and the Settlers and Anno series, which also come from Germany, the games market is growing very quickly. Some 30% of all Germans play video games; they spent 1.4 billion euros on them in 2007: more money than on cinema tickets or DVDs. No wonder that training in this field is also becoming more and more professional. The Games Academy in Berlin, which was founded in 2000, receives many more applications for places than it can fill.
Performing Arts
About 35 million people go to almost 110,000 theatre performances – not including opera and ballet – every year in Germany. Mathematically, that’s almost half the population. It demonstrates the undiminished vitality of the German theatre. Every season, 5,800 productions of about 2,500 works are performed. The borderlines between theatre, dance and musical theatre are becoming increasingly blurred, with new forms being developed all the time. Deutsches Theater Berlin was voted Theatre of the Year in 2008. The Play of the Year – The Last Fire – was written by Dea Loher and premiered at the Thalia Theatre, Hamburg. There are 360 world and German premieres every year. The theatre in Germany directly employs approximately 40,000 people.
Design
Almost everyone who is interested in design knows the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design. However, a new generation of designers with a playful, innovative approach have long-since been making a name for themselves alongside the modern classics: people like Konstantin Grcic and the team of Studio Vertijet. German design is largely dominated by corporate brands: Audi, BMW, Daimler, Wilkhahn, Vitra, Lamy, Erco and Interlübke. In fashion, Michael Michalsky, Gabriele Strehle and Wolfgang Joop are among the big names. The German Apparel Industry Foundation promotes up-and-coming designers – for example with the European Fashion Award.
Film Industry
Camera flashlights, crowds of fans, a red carpet full of stars: the 59th Berlin Film Festival in February 2009 was a celebration of international cinema – and proof of the steadily growing success of German movies. Just under 100 of the 390 contributions to the Berlinale were made with German participation. The market share of German-made films in German cinemas rose to 26.6% in 2008 – the best result since 1990. The quality of domestic productions has also been a factor attracting bigger audiences. The cinema operators sold 129.4 million tickets in 2008, four million more than in the previous year. The number of international enquiries coming into German film studios is also growing. In early 2009, Roman Polanski and Quentin Tarantino were shooting at the Babelsberg Studios just outside Berlin. The Berliners are most directly affected by the German movie boom, by the way; the traffic in the capital was held up 4,100 times by location shooting in 2008!
Music
Halls and stadiums are quickly sold out wherever the two German bands Tokio Hotel and Rammstein are on the bill. The young rock and heavy-metal musicians are among Germany’s hottest exports. The German music industry now earns almost twice as much from concerts featuring such top stars as it does from CD sales. Turnover from live music totalled about 2.9 billion euros in 2007, compared to CD sales of 1.65 billion euros. The music industry has changed more than most creative sectors in Germany in recent years. Digitization is the buzzword driving market development. Accordingly, the download market soared in 2008: from 25.2 million digitally copied songs to 35.2 million.
Press Publishing
Some 3,600 specialist journals, 2,300 popular magazines with a circulation of more than 120 million, and roughly 350 daily newspapers with a circulation of 25 million copies – these impressive figures illustrate the diversity and economic strength of the German press landscape. Economically significant media firms in the German press market include Gruner + Jahr in Hamburg, the Holtzbrinck publishing group in Stuttgart, the WAZ media group in Essen, and Axel-Springer-Verlag in Berlin, Europe’s biggest newspaper company.
With its 40% share of the daily newspaper market, Axel Springer is not only the market leader in newspaper advertising. It also publishes Bild-Zeitung, Germany’s biggest-circulation newspaper with more than three million copies a day. Bild is Germany’s only nationwide tabloid daily.
Broadcasting
Radio and television are two important pillars of the German media landscape – and a major factor in the creative economy. The dual system of public (ARD/ZDF) and private channels (RTL, Pro7/Sat1) stands for programme diversity. In the radio field, for example, there are some 75 public stations competing with 385 commercial stations.
Their number has grown markedly since the mid-1990s. Today the almost 600 private TV and radio stations in Germany – mostly medium-sized companies – generate an annual turnover of about 8 billion euros and employ 23,000 people. German broadcasting’s overall contribution to gross domestic product was a respectable 5.4 billion euros in 2006.
Advertising/Communications
The advertising sector in Germany has developed positively in recent years as a significant economic sector with growing investment. The key data: almost 600,000 employees, a high proportion of young staff, predominantly medium-sized firms. The industry is characterized by a low unemployment rate, relatively stable jobs and high demand for qualified staff. A sum of 30 billion euros was spent on advertising in Germany in 2007. The retail trade is among the industries that make the most intensive use of advertising. Germany has the 5th strongest advertising sector after the USA, China, Japan and the UK.
