By Gunnar Schupelius
In other times, this renovation of the opera might have been possible, but not when police and fire stations are falling into disrepair because there is no money, says Gunnar Schupelius.
Decided and announced: The Komische Oper will not only be renovated, it will be given a huge building, a roof terrace, new offices, rehearsal rooms, a shop and a cafe. Estimated costs: 478 million euros.
The Taxpayers’ Association, which presented the current 51st Black Book on Wednesday, entitled: “Public Waste 2023/24”, is now defending itself against this. There, Berlin and the Komische Oper are at the top of the wasteful list.
“The planned costs for the opera renovation have multiplied in recent years,” writes the taxpayers’ association. Until 2019, “total costs of 80 million euros” were mentioned, but “in June 2023 the audit” there was a sudden increase to 477.9 million euros.
The President of the Taxpayers’ Association, Reiner Holznagel, describes this cost explosion as “careless use of taxpayer money”. That’s still politely put.
The reconstruction of the Komische Oper building dates back to 1967, so it urgently needs to be renovated. But the renovation turned into a huge renovation, a large-scale expansion.
The architects really went wild; there was no price cap. The winning design was chosen without paying any attention to the money, based on the motto: If we like it, we will build it.
And of course it won’t stay at the mentioned sum. As we know, the price for the renovation of the State Opera (2010-2017) has almost doubled from 240 to 440 million euros. Accordingly, the Komische Oper would cost 900 million euros.
In other times one might have been allowed to make such a decision, but now such recklessness is forbidden. There is now an acute budget emergency. It’s so big that there isn’t even enough money to renovate the police and fire stations. Many of them look worse than the Komische Oper.
The so-called renovation backlog at police stations is estimated at 2.1 billion euros, and at the fire department it is 384 million euros. This is how much money is required to repair the buildings.
With the sum that is now being made available for the Komische Oper, all fire stations in Berlin or at least a quarter of all police stations could be renovated.
So that there is no misunderstanding: I do not consider the Komische Oper to be superfluous, on the contrary, it is a jewel of the cultural landscape and a crowd puller. But it will be that way even without the monstrous conversion.
It’s like Stuttgart 21 or BER: the projects are getting out of control.
The financial plan for the Komische Oper is completely absurd, a luxury we cannot afford. There is still time to slim down the plans.
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