The international Festival Mitte Europa
A unique festival brings together the former border regions of Saxony, Bohemia and Bavaria.
Culture transcends borders. This motto has been followed since 1992 by prominent artists and renowned ensembles at the German-Czech Festival Mitte Europa, a summer of culture that draws its special charm from unusual venues in the border region between Germany and the Czech Republic. Audiences experience classical music, jazz and folk, but also literary programmes, exhibitions, artistic master classes and symposia in old buildings and barns, Gothic churches and mediaeval monasteries. Most of the programme (about 60 events) is the result of German-Czech cultural exchange, but there are also top artists from all over Europe.
A bridge of reconciliation
The roots of the festival go back to 1990. The initiators – German concert and opera singer Thomas Thomaschke and his wife, Prague-based art historian Ivana Thomaschke-Vondráková, PhD – had emigrated from the GDR in 1976. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall they developed a plan to actively encourage encounters for the people living in the border regions between the hitherto divided Germany and the then Czechoslovakia. So, in the summer of 1990, the first international master class for singers, entitled Border Encounters, was held in the Saxon-Vogtland village of Misslareuth in the immediate vicinity of the exclusion zone on the frontier to Bavaria. Where once the Iron Curtain divided Europe, the festival hosts and their guests built a bridge of reconciliation, piece by piece. Today the cultural event is jointly backed by 65 Saxon, Czech and Bavarian local authorities. The festival area extends for 400 kilometres along the German-Czech border, from Upper Palatinate, Upper Franconia, to Western Bohemia via Vogtland, the Erz Mountains, and up into the Dresden area and North Bohemia.
The German concert pianist Manfred Schmidt has been artistic director of the Mitte Europa Festival since 2015. The festival will kick off this year with the Leipzig Bach Orchestra in the freshly renovated Národní dům (People’s House), a grand art-nouveau building in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. Artists in residence are the Czech cellist Jiří Bárta and, for Germany, the organist of the Dresden Church of Our Lady, Matthias Grünert.
Festival Mitte Europa from 14 June – 2 August 2015.
