German arts colleague Rainer Glaap has been feeding me interesting articles over the last couple weeks. I was going to follow up on some content he sent earlier, but he hit me up with an interesting study today that I am moving to the front of the line.  The recently released Culture Relevance Monitor shows a number of parallels between general cultural attitudes in Germany and the U.S.  (Note that the PDF document labeled as the German version is actually the English version and vice versa)

I use the term general cultural attitudes because many of us in the US would be envious to read of an large overall expression of support:

People in Germany (91 per cent) believe it is important to preserve cultural offerings in theatres for coming generations. A large majority (76 per cent) is also of the opinion that these should continue to be financed from the public purse. The offerings are part of Germany’s cultural identity (82 per cent) and education (91 per cent)

However, German cultural offerings seem to be faced with the same generational challenges as those in the US. Despite saying they enjoyed their experiences attending these activities when they were children, a significant segment of the population doesn’t feel these offerings resonate with them:

Both in the population as a whole and in the generation of young adults aged between 18 and 29, two-thirds are not at all interested or are not very interested in theatre performances, classical music concerts, or opera, ballet or dance performances. Four out of five respondents stated that they did not make use of traditional cultural offerings like these over the last twelve months.

37 per cent of respondents had never attended a classical music concert or an opera, ballet or dance performance (for theatre performances: 10 per cent). Many 18- to 29-year-olds feel that cultural offerings do not cater to them (43 per cent); they feel out of place there (39 per cent).

A summary of recommendations on another site also sounds similar to conversations on the same topic in the US.

• get to know and address their target groups better: There is demand for cultural offerings such as those that are specially directed at children and teenagers (85 per cent), that make people laugh (83 per cent) and that are easy for everyone to understand (81 per cent). The performances should also stimulate social and political discussion (61 per cent) and be new and topical (63 per cent).
• be more open and network: Theatre venues should see themselves as a gathering place (80 per cent) and offer amateur theatre groups/orchestras or similar ensembles opportunities to perform (74 per cent). Social and habitual barriers to access must be removed.
• carry out marketing in social and modern ways: The pricing structure should be socially fair (89 per cent), and 18- to 29-year-olds in particular need easier access to programme information (42 per cent), for example via social media platforms.

The survey also asked what would have to change to make them attend more frequently:

40 percent of respondents indicated that theatre venues would have to have more cultural offerings that interested them …. 29 percent would have to have more leisure time, and for 28 percent of respondents, the tickets would need to be cheaper or free … 20 percent would need someone to accompany them for such visits, 14 percent would like it to be easier and cheaper to travel to theatre venues. 11 percent say that their health would have to improve, and 11 percent say that the quality of the cultural offerings would have to be better.

[…]

A quarter (28%) of respondents say they would need easier access to information about interesting offerings before they would attend theatre venues more often. 13 percent would like to see more diverse and varied offerings in terms of the topics, 6 percent want more options for childcare during the events.

I found it interesting that childcare came up so frequently among the 2505 respondents. This put me in mind of the last pre-Covid CultureTrack survey I wrote about in 2017 which reported on barriers to participation for those who frequently attended and those who didn’t.

For frequent attendees, the top barriers were inconvenience, no one to attend with, and rather do other leisure activities, in that order. For infrequent/never attendees, not for someone like me, didn’t think of it, and inconvenient were the top barriers, in that order.