Film and Literary Events

Germany runs one of the busiest cultural calendars in Europe, and two of its highlights are film festivals and literary festivals. This chapter is a practical guide to both: which events are worth planning your year around, what actually happens at them, and – the question that matters most if your German is still a work in progress – how much you can enjoy without speaking the language. Film festivals turn out to be remarkably welcoming to foreigners, since so many of the films are in English or shown in their original language with subtitles. Literary events are more German by nature, but even there you will find international programmes, English-language readings and a lively expat book scene in the big cities.

Two flagships anchor everything else. The Berlinale is Germany’s, and arguably the world’s, most accessible major film festival, and the Frankfurter Buchmesse is the largest book fair on the planet. Around them sits a dense network of smaller festivals, prizes and readings that run from January to December. For the broader picture of Germany’s festival year – the beer, music and seasonal celebrations – see our guide to major German festivals, and for concerts and general arts events our guide to music and arts festivals. This chapter stays with the screen and the page.

The Berlinale: Germany’s flagship film festival

The Berlin International Film Festival, known to everyone as the Berlinale, is the one German film event you should know by name. Together with Cannes and Venice it forms the so-called “Big Three” of world cinema, the trio of festivals that carry the most prestige in the industry. It takes place every February in Berlin, filling the cinemas around Potsdamer Platz and across the city for around ten days of premieres, competitions and public screenings. Its top prize is the Goldener Bär (Golden Bear), awarded to the best film in the main competition, with Silberne Bären (Silver Bears) for directing, acting and other achievements. Winning a Golden Bear puts a film in the same conversation as a Cannes Palme d’Or or a Venice Golden Lion.

What makes the Berlinale special for a resident, rather than a film professional, is that it is the largest public film festival in the world. Where Cannes is largely closed to anyone without an industry badge, the Berlinale sells hundreds of thousands of tickets to ordinary members of the public every year, roughly half a million admissions in a good year. This is not a festival you watch from behind a barrier. You can sit in the same screenings the press and juries attend, often with the director and cast present for a question-and-answer session afterwards. The red carpet at the Berlinale Palast draws the stars, but the tickets in your hand get you into real films.

The programme is organised into sections, and knowing a few of them helps you choose. The Wettbewerb (Competition) holds the high-profile premieres that compete for the Bears. Panorama focuses on independent and boundary-pushing cinema, often with a strong social or political edge. The Forum is the experimental, essayistic wing for more adventurous viewers. Generation programmes films for and about young people, and Berlinale Talents is a development lab that brings emerging filmmakers together with established names. You do not need to understand this structure to buy a ticket, but it tells you what kind of evening you are booking.

Getting tickets takes a little planning, because demand is high. The Berlinale runs an online presale that opens a few days before each screening, alongside physical box offices in the city; central tickets for popular titles can sell out within minutes of going live, so it pays to have an account ready, know which films you want, and log in the moment sales open. Less starry titles in Panorama and the Forum are far easier to get, and often just as rewarding. Crucially for non-German speakers, the Berlinale is built for an international audience: most non-English films are shown in the original language with English subtitles (marked OmeU, Original mit englischen Untertiteln), and English-language films screen in their original version. You can spend the whole festival watching films you fully understand without a word of German. That single fact makes the Berlinale the most foreigner-friendly cultural event in the country.

Film festivals beyond the Berlinale

The Berlinale may be the giant, but Germany hosts strong film festivals all year and in many cities, so wherever you live you are probably within reach of one. The Filmfest München (Munich Film Festival) is the largest summer film festival in the country and generally counts as the second most important after the Berlinale. It runs in late June or early July and has a more relaxed, warm-weather feel, with a focus on new German, European and international films, many of them premieres. If you are in the south, it is the obvious counterpart to Berlin’s winter showcase.

For documentary lovers, DOK Leipzig is a landmark. Full name the Internationale Leipziger Festival für Dokumentar- und Animationsfilm, it is one of the oldest documentary festivals in the world and the leading one in Germany, held each autumn, and it was the first festival to pair documentary with animated film. Its top prizes are the Goldene and Silberne Tauben (Golden and Silver Doves). Documentaries travel well across languages, since so many carry subtitles, which makes DOK Leipzig another good option for non-German speakers. The Internationale Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg, founded in 1952 and spread across the two neighbouring cities, has a long reputation for discovering new directors before they become famous. In the north, the Nordische Filmtage Lübeck has since 1956 been one of the most important showcases for Nordic and Baltic cinema outside Scandinavia itself, a genuine specialist destination if that region’s films interest you. Genre fans have the Fantasy Filmfest, a touring event that brings science fiction, horror and thriller films to several German cities, usually in late summer.

Summer also brings a much more casual pleasure: Open-Air-Kino, open-air cinema. From roughly June to September, courtyards, parks, riverbanks and city squares across Germany turn into pop-up screens showing recent releases and classics under the stars, sometimes with English-language nights. It is one of the nicest low-cost ways to spend a warm evening, and you will find the local listings and other year-round cinema options in our guide to cultural activities in Germany.

Behind the festivals sits a substantial national film industry, and its top honour is the Deutscher Filmpreis, awarded since 1951 by the Deutsche Filmakademie at a Berlin gala. The trophy is nicknamed the “Lola”, after the character Marlene Dietrich played in the 1930 classic Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel); it is the highest-endowed film award in the country and the German equivalent of an Oscar or a BAFTA. You do not attend it as a member of the public, but it is the context for a lot of what you will see at the festivals, since German films premiere at the Berlinale and Munich hoping to be in the running.

One practical note applies to almost all German cinema-going: the subtitle question. German cinemas routinely dub foreign films into German, so a normal multiplex showing of a Hollywood release will usually be the dubbed German version. To hear the original, look for the labels OV (Originalversion, the original soundtrack with no subtitles), OmU (Original mit Untertiteln, original with German subtitles) or OmeU (Original mit englischen Untertiteln, original with English subtitles). The big cities have dedicated cinemas that specialise in these versions, which is how many foreigners keep watching films in English while living in Germany. Festivals are the exception that proves the rule, since they show films in their original language by default, but for everyday cinema the OV and OmU labels are what you search for. The big cities keep dedicated OmU and OV cinemas running all year, so original-language screenings are never far away.

The book fairs: Frankfurt and Leipzig

Germany’s literary year is built around two great book fairs, one in autumn and one in spring, and they have quite different personalities. The Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair) each October is the largest book fair in the world, measured by the number of publishers who exhibit. It is where the international publishing industry meets to buy and sell translation rights, so it is a trade event first – which is why it also belongs in our guide to trade fairs and Messen, where the business side is covered. For a reader, the point to know is that the fair splits its week: the first days are reserved for trade visitors and press, and the final weekend opens to the general public, when anyone can buy a ticket, wander the halls, meet authors and browse a genuinely global spread of books.

Two traditions make Frankfurt worth the trip even if publishing is not your world. Each year the fair names an Ehrengast, a Guest of Honour country, which brings an extended programme of that nation’s literature, authors and culture; it is a ready-made introduction to a country’s writing. And every year the fair hosts the ceremony for the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, awarded since 1950 in Frankfurt’s historic Paulskirche to a figure who has advanced peace through their work in literature, science or the arts. The prize is one of the most respected cultural honours in the country and its acceptance speeches are national news.

The Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig Book Fair) each March is the other pole, and for a resident it is often the more enjoyable of the two. Leipzig is the second-largest book fair in Germany, but where Frankfurt is about the trade, Leipzig is unapologetically about readers. It is open to the public throughout, and it is famous for its awards to new German-language books, above all the Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse, given in the categories of fiction, non-fiction and translation. Wrapped around the fair is Leipzig liest (“Leipzig Reads”), reckoned to be the largest reading festival in Europe, which scatters thousands of readings and events across the whole city for several days – in bookshops, cafés, churches, museums and bars, not just at the fairground. The atmosphere is helped along by a large crowd of visitors in costume for the neighbouring Manga-Comic-Con, which shares the venue. If you want to feel what a reading-mad culture looks like, Leipzig in March is the place.

Literary festivals, readings and book prizes

Beyond the two big fairs, Germany has a rich circuit of literary festivals, and two stand out for their scale and their openness to international visitors. The internationales literaturfestival berlin (ilb, the International Literature Festival Berlin) gathers more than a hundred authors from around the world each September for readings, premieres and panel discussions, and it is one of the most significant literature festivals anywhere. Because its line-up is so international, a good number of its events involve English-language or other non-German writers, which makes it more approachable than most for a foreigner. The other heavyweight is lit.COLOGNE in Cologne, held every March since 2001 and often called Europe’s biggest literature festival: up to two hundred events and close to a hundred thousand visitors over roughly two weeks, staged in unusual venues and mixing famous novelists with musicians, politicians and other public figures. It is as much a cultural happening as a book event.

Underneath the festivals lies an everyday institution worth understanding: the Lesung, the author reading. Reading culture in Germany runs deep, and a Lesung – where a writer reads aloud from a new book and then takes questions – is a normal weeknight event in almost any town, hosted by bookshops, libraries and literary houses. Many are free or cost only a few euros. These are overwhelmingly in German, so they are best once your language has come along, but they are one of the most authentic windows into local cultural life, and our guide to cultural activities in Germany covers the libraries and reading venues that host them year-round. Poetry has its own scene too, from formal Lyrik evenings to the livelier poetry slams that pack bars in the bigger cities.

The prize that shapes the German literary year is the Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize), awarded each October by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (the German Publishers and Booksellers Association) to the best German-language novel of the year, with the ceremony held in Frankfurt just before the book fair opens. A place on its shortlist can transform a book’s sales, so it is the closest German equivalent to the Booker Prize, and following it is a good way to discover contemporary German fiction, much of which eventually appears in English translation.

If your German is not yet up to a full novel, the big cities have a real English-language literary life of their own. Berlin in particular has English reading series, expat writing groups and a cluster of English-language bookshops that host author events; Munich, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt have their versions too. These tend to be smaller and more grassroots than the German festivals, but they are welcoming, easy to find through the shops themselves or through the city’s expat networks, and a good way to meet people. Our guide to expat groups and clubs points to the communities where these events are usually announced.

Enjoying these events without fluent German

The honest summary is simple: film festivals are highly accessible to a non-German speaker, and literary events are more of a mixed picture. On the film side, the language barrier mostly disappears, because festivals show films in their original language with subtitles as a matter of course. The Berlinale is the clearest example, with most of its programme in the original version and English subtitles on non-English films, but the same logic applies at DOK Leipzig, in Munich and at the genre and short-film festivals. You can build an entire festival around films you understand completely. Away from festivals, the OV, OmU and OmeU labels are your tool for finding original-language screenings in ordinary cinemas, and the dedicated art-house cinemas in the big cities keep a steady supply of them.

On the literary side, the picture is more honest if you set expectations correctly. The great fairs and festivals are primarily German-language events, so a typical Lesung will be in German and aimed at a German-reading audience. But the international festivals deliberately break that pattern: the ilb in Berlin runs many events with international authors, often in English or with interpretation, and lit.COLOGNE and the book fairs regularly host non-German writers. Add the independent English-language reading series and bookshop events in the major cities, and there is plenty to enjoy even before your German is fluent. The practical rule is that you can dive straight into film festivals now, and grow into the German literary scene as your language improves.

On cost and logistics, none of this needs to be expensive. Individual festival film tickets are broadly in line with a normal cinema ticket, cheaper than you might fear for a world-class event, and the public day at a book fair is an inexpensive ticket for a full day out. Open-air cinema and most readings are cheaper still, and many library and bookshop events are free. The festivals cluster in the big cities – Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Cologne, Hamburg – all easy to reach by train, so a festival can double as a weekend trip, and each of these cities has its own English-language film and book scene, plus expat communities that organise their own screenings and reading nights.

Planning your festival year

The easiest way to make use of all this is to map it onto the calendar and pick a few events to aim for. February is the Berlinale in Berlin; March brings the Leipziger Buchmesse with Leipzig liest, and lit.COLOGNE in Cologne; early summer is the Filmfest München and the start of the open-air cinema season; September is the internationales literaturfestival berlin; October stacks up the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the Deutscher Buchpreis and the Friedenspreis, followed by DOK Leipzig; and November brings the Nordische Filmtage in Lübeck. Even one or two of these a year will change how connected you feel to the culture around you.

Concretely: if the Berlinale appeals, create an account on the festival site well in advance and be ready the moment the presale opens, since the popular titles go fast and the calmer Panorama and Forum screenings are easier to reach. For the book fairs, buy a public-day ticket rather than a trade pass unless you work in publishing. Sign up for the newsletters of the festivals near you and of your city’s English-language bookshops so the dates and English-language events land in your inbox. And in the meantime, keep your everyday film-going in the original language by searching for OV and OmU screenings. Start with one festival this year, and let it lead you to the rest – Germany gives you a full calendar of them to grow into.