Awakening is the motto for Chemnitz2025

If there is something in Chemnitz’ blood, it is departures: to the leading industrial city in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, to the leading mechanical engineering company in Central Eastern Europe during the Cold War and to the up-and-coming medium-sized business location since the turn of the millennium.

Whatever led to radical changes in history – the people of Chemnitz have made a breakthrough with a doer mentality and inventive spirit. At the same time, they have always maintained an active cultural life in the city. In 1909, for example, the citizens gave themselves an art collection and an opera house, built the open-air stage in the Küchwald in thousands of voluntary working hours between 1955 and 1963, and to this day afford cultural institutions like hardly any other city of this size. Not to mention the rich association work in a wide range of artistic genres, in sports, in the allotment garden movement, in the work of tradition or international exchange, which has always been very important.

Notwithstanding this, the ruptures in the city’s history have also made notches that continue to have an impact. Three different city centres within 70 years, two city names, different social systems – Chemnitz is still searching for identity and self-image. The application for the European Capital of Culture 2025 will also make a decisive contribution in this direction.

It will tell a story of Chemnitz that gives concrete faces, fates and new beginnings to the great historical impacts in Europe. And it will show that Chemnitz has always benefited from European influences: from industrialists who came with know-how from Manchester or Alsace. From merchants who brought cotton from Macedonia. From workers who came from the surrounding regions for wages and bread. They all made Chemnitz rich and found a place in the city that gave them a new home, existence, energy, the space for their dreams. Thus, the city in which the cradle of German patent law lies is still the city of inventors and tinkerers, of creative ideas, new approaches, innovative ability – and in 2025 it will show this to the whole of Europe.

It will face the challenges facing all of Europe with courage and openness. Issues such as immigration and emigration, social justice and the new fault lines between nation states or between generations call for reflection on Europe’s values – and to fight in Chemnitz for a coexistence of people, countries and cultures. To stand up for the European peace project.

Culture has always been and still is the key to involving the city and its people in an open dialogue and creating encounters.

For this process Chemnitz has defined three fields of action:

Give new rooms.

“Give space!” is the motto of the urban cultural strategy 2030. The city opens up new spaces for thinking and acting – and opens up for a cultural region along the Chemnitz model. Chemnitz offers the space where dreams can come true.

re-connect work.

Digitisation is changing the world of work. Co-creation and transformation determine everyday life. New networks and working models are emerging.

tracks for a common future.

The courage to face the past becomes the impulse for a European future. Only those who know their own history can continue to write it.

In the coming months, it is now important to enliven these three programmatic pillars with creative new departure scenarios and concrete projects in an intensive exchange with the people of Chemnitz.

that is why the demanding title:

breakups. Opening Minds. Creating Spaces.