By Gunnar Schupelius
The Senate turns off the lights on buildings and landmarks to save electricity. That’s ridiculous and seems provincial, says Gunnar Schupelius.
The Festival of Lights begins on Friday (until October 15, 2023, daily from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.). “Berlin buildings and landmarks will be illuminated,” promises the capital’s advertising Visit Berlin, “colored patterns, images or video projections (…) create a magnificent cityscape.”
Many Berliners and many tourists are looking forward to this. But when the festival ends a week from now on Sunday, it will be even darker in this city.
The Berlin Senate has decided not to switch the lighting on particularly important and well-known buildings back on in the evenings and at night. The environmental administration announced this on Monday.
The lights on 150 buildings and landmarks are to remain switched off until at least the end of September 2024. In this way you can save 150,000 to 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, it is said, and costs around 40,000 euros.
A year ago, the red-green-red Senate decided to switch off the lighting. This happened under the impression of a feared natural gas supply crisis due to the Russian war against Ukraine.
This year the situation has eased significantly; there are no longer any fears of a gas shortage, but the lights still remain off. Now the price of electricity has to be used as an argument. Is that a convincing argument? No certainly not.
The Festival of Lights inspires many people every autumn Photo: picture alliance / Geisler-Fotopress
At first glance, 40,000 euros per year is a lot of money, but not for a city with 3.9 million inhabitants. Berlin is spending the incredible sum of 39 billion euros this year, so 40,000 for outdoor lighting is of course not an issue if you think it’s important.
However, the Senate obviously does not consider it important and that is precisely a misjudgment. It’s easy to explain why: the city, its streets, squares and buildings are like an extended apartment for the people who live in it. And just as you illuminate a beautiful picture on the wall in your apartment to make it effective, you illuminate famous and valuable facades and monuments, for example the Victory Column or the State Opera.
If you switch off this lighting, the city falls back into insignificance when it gets dark – and the darkness now sets in earlier and earlier; today the sun sets at 6:33 p.m.
We are now spending more and more hours without daylight leading up to Christmas. And during these hours we have nothing left except the dim light of the lanterns. Everything that makes the city worth seeing can no longer be seen: the Berlin Cathedral and the Memorial Church, not even Charlottenburg Palace and not even the ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof.
It’s a question of aesthetics: If what’s beautiful and worth seeing isn’t illuminated, the city becomes unsightly, desolate and empty. In short: it is ridiculous to darken 120 buildings and landmarks for another year in order to save 40,000 euros. That’s provincial.
Is Gunnar Schupelius right? Call: 030/2591 73153, or email: [email protected]
Read all of Gunnar Schupelius’s columns here