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Big names in line-up for summer of music, dance and art to celebrate the Goethe-Institut's 50 years in London
Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the popular British perception of German culture involved either a stout opera singer in a horned helmet warbling Wagner, or Nena on Top of the Pops singing about 99 Red Balloons.
Much has changed in the intervening two decades, not least Berlin's coronation as a "poor but sexy" international capital of cool. Now the range of Germany's cultural influence, and the extent to which it has been embraced in the UK, will be revealed with a number of high-profile projects in London this summer.
In June, the late choreographer Pina Bausch's revered dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal is coming to Sadler's Wells and the Barbican. The next month, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall will be filled with an installation by Tino Sehgal, a Berlin-based artist whose works involve performers interacting with viewers, which Tate Modern's director, Chris Dercon, describes as "almost like a mental and bodily exercise".
From May, the Barbican will show Bauhaus: Art as Life, the biggest UK exhibition of the German modernist design school's work for 40 years. Later in the year the Serpentine gallery will exhibit the work of German artists Thomas Schütte and Hans-Peter Feldmann.
All five projects have been supported by the Goethe-Institut, founded to promote German culture, to celebrate its London branch's 50th anniversary and the reopening of its headquarters.
Yet they are far from the only Teutonic heavyweights hitting the UK. In the last few days alone, Saturday saw composer Heiner Goebbels play the Southbank Centre in London , while on Friday Nottingham's Capital FM arena reverberated to the sounds – and pyrotechnics – of Rammstein, the heavy metal band. Even Paul Weller, once a quintessential Britrocker, is getting in on the act: his forthcoming album Sonik Kicks is partly inspired by 70s Krautrock band Neu!
The rest of the world's growing preoccupation with German art was demonstrated in the title of an exhibition in New York last year curated by Anke Kempkes and the British critic Michael Bracewell: Germany is Your America.
For Sabine Hentzsch, director of the Goethe-Institut London, such an influx of German culture is the culmination of a process that began with unification, when clubbers and fans of electronic music from the east and west came together to give Berlin its pounding techno soundtrack. The other factor, she says, is Berlin's cheapness and thriving subculture, which has made it the adopted home of artists from around the world, including Britain's Douglas Gordon and Tacita Dean.
German artists have also settled in the UK, for instance Wolfgang Tillmans, who studied in Bournemouth and went on to win the Turner prize. In 2006 he told Butt magazine: "I liked the smell of English homes and bathrooms, the mix of a damp carpet and apricot scented potpourri … Marmite, the repressed but omnipresent sexuality, weak milky tea on a rainy afternoon by the sea, the spongy bread – basically all the things people don't like, and what one would see as signs of how pathetic and backwards England was, or is, I liked."
Dr Anja Baumhoff, lecturer in history of art and design at Loughborough University, who worked on the Barbican's Bauhaus show and has lived in the UK for eight years, believes the 2006 World Cup helped popularise German culture beyond artistic and intellectual circles.
Now, she says, "the fact that Germany is playing such a big political and economic role means that people are interested in what we're doing. It's not just a globalised world, it's a mobile world, and people are moving from the UK to travel back and forth from Berlin – it's not a big deal."
However, the artists themselves are less interested in representing Germany than exploring the ambiguities of being at the meeting point of several cultures. "If you travel a lot you feel a certain proximity to every culture but also a kind of distance," says Sehgal, who was born in London to a German mother and Indian father.
He points to his 2005 installation in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There, three guards jumped out of their chairs and hopped around chanting in English: "This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!"
"In the German pavilion a heavy, relatively dark piece is expected. I decided to do something quite light, in English, with a touch of humour," Sehgal said. Not that this means his Turbine Hall installation will be German in tone: "We've been thinking a lot about English culture, but not in a direct way influencing the piece. I experience London as a crossroads. The Turbine Hall belongs to this increasingly global moment more than the Centre Pompidou, which opened 30 years ago – that's my feeling."
"London has been celebrating German art since Anthony D'Offay," says Dercon, referring to the gallerist who in the 80s represented some of the country's most significant artists, from Joseph Beuys to Gerhard Richter. "We are very well informed about what's going on in Germany and that's why the Geothe-Institut is saying let's go deeper and let's see where it's heading."
However, there are some aspects of German culture that still have little traction in the UK. Hentzsch says it is still difficult to find German contemporary authors in English translations in the UK. Baumhoff says that "the Brits don't like modernism – just look at Prince Charles".
Finally, there's pop music. "The Germans have embraced British culture for the last 50 years – big time," Sehgal says. "German pop music is on a much lower level of reception in Germany. There's no German Adele."