Those on the edge tend to be overlooked, and that's mostly a mistake.
Passau with its three rivers is no longer on the edge of the Iron Curtain, but in the center of a triangle where Bavaria, Austria and the Czech Republic meet.
It was a resourceful American officer and diplomat who came up with the idea in 1952 to prescribe a festival for this border region that implemented the idea of a united Europe at the closed gate to the Eastern Bloc.
Hannes Hintermeier
Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.
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A mission for international understanding with a long reverberation: The Festival European Weeks Passau, abbreviated European Weeks and known only as “EW” among connoisseurs, will take place for the sixty-ninth time in these weeks. It is played - that was a novelty in the immediate post-war period, and to this day it is a rarity nationwide - at venues that are spread over five Bavarian districts - Passau, Freyung-Grafenau, Deggendorf, Straubing, Regen and Altötting. In Austria, the districts of Schärding and Grieskirchen participate, in the Czech Republic the districts of West and South Bohemia.
A few years after it was founded, it was noticed in Passau that the festival was tearing holes in the city's budget that could not be filled.
And so a sponsoring association was founded to act as the organizer.
To this day it is mainly fed by urban society.
Its history is rich in upheavals; in the last decade there were two directors who had to vacate their posts: Peter Baumgardt in 2016 and Thomas E. Bauer two years later.
The interim game director Carsten Gerhard, who was brought on board in 2019, had known Passau since 2012 because he had helped design the program under Baumgardt as dramaturge.
Last year he was offered the post until 2023, without an advertisement, and now he is officially called Intendant.
Head of the sponsoring association draws a conclusion
The departures of Baumgardt and Bauer certainly did not go optimally, admits the lawyer Rosemarie Weber, who is a member of many committees and who has headed the sponsoring association for eight years. A generation conflict, fueled by all those involved out of concern for “their” festival, which resulted in an unsuccessful restart at the time. Today she is full of praise for the man whom she asked two years ago as an "anchor" whether he could take over the artistic direction. Born in 1976, the musicologist and Germanist Carsten Gerhard studied in Berlin, wrote music reviews, was press spokesman for the Deutsches Theater in Munich, and switched to the Munich Philharmonic before he started his own business in the field of cultural marketing.
The sporty man in his mid-forties appears concentrated and relaxed at the same time in the FAZ conversation, a gift that helps the native Swabian to succeed in an unobtrusive way among the self-confident Lower Bavarians. His credo: “A festival funded with public money has the task of opening doors. Subsidized culture must also offer something for people who are not adepts of high culture. "