The Köln Crisis | A Psychological Intervention for a Cultural System in Breakdown

This essay is written by CAE Member Heather O’Donnell, Psychologist, Musician & Founding Director of TGR The Green Room in Germany.

Author’s Note on Language and Analogy

Before I begin, I want to be explicit about the use of psychological language in this text. The clinical analogy that follows is not intended to stigmatise people living with mental illness, nor to trivialise the realities of psychiatric diagnoses. Psychological concepts are used here metaphorically, as an interpretive framework for understanding systemic behaviour under chronic stress.

Mental illness is not a moral failure, nor is it a punchline. If anything, this analogy is meant to highlight how urgently systems – like individuals – require care, responsibility, and stabilisation when patterns of harm emerge.

From Crisis Response to Systemic Breakdown

Five years ago, I opened TGR The Green Room – a small, stubborn center for artists in crisis.

At first, the crises were circumstantial: cancelled seasons, lost income, and the sudden evaporation of cultural relevance during COVID. By 2022, they were geopolitical: Ukrainian artists arriving disoriented and traumatized.

By 2025, the crises are no longer only external. They are also local, structural, and increasingly exacerbated by the city itself.

Artists coming to The Green Room now speak less about exhaustion from overwork and more about something harder to name: perhaps an erosion of trust, a feeling of being hoodwinked. They describe a growing sense that Cologne’s relationship to its artists has become unstable, inconsistent, and quietly hostile.

Cologne increasingly behaves like a system in psychological disintegration—caught in cycles of self-harm, broken attachment, identity diffusion, and impulsive decision-making that damages the very structures it once depended on.

If Cologne presented itself as a patient in my clinical practice, I would be considering a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, marked by:

• unstable self-image: proclaiming itself a “Kulturstadt” (City of Culture) while dismantling the conditions culture requires

• unstable relationships: weakening or abandoning long-term partnerships through inconsistency, silence, or abrupt withdrawals

• self-harm: slashing budgets, freezing funds, starving the ecosystems that give the city its pulse 

• impulsivity: endless renovations, scandals that drain attention, restructurings without strategy, and financial decisions stripped of foresight

The ‘diagnosis’  is provocative, but the situation demands a vocabulary adequate to the damage being done.

Cologne Is Not an Exception

What is unfolding in Cologne is not unique. It is an intensified version of a pattern now visible across Germany and, increasingly, across Europe.

In 2025, Germany’s federal government proposed halving the Federal Cultural Fund (Bundeskulturfonds) and eliminating funding for key national and international networks supporting the independent performing arts. This occurred not necessarily due to cultural austerity, but alongside an increase in the overall federal culture budget –  a trend that continued into 2026, when the culture and media budget reached a record level.

This is the contradiction shaping the current crisis: culture is being funded at the level of representation, heritage, and institutional visibility, while the independent structures that generate innovation, international exchange, and artistic renewal are being dismantled. What appears, from the outside, as stability or even investment masks a deep erosion of the ecosystem that keeps cultural life adaptive and alive.

The same logic is visible at the municipal level. Cities maintain flagship institutions while withdrawing from the less visible but more vulnerable infrastructures of the Freie Szene. Independent artists and networks are treated as flexible buffers – expected to absorb instability, delay, and loss without complaint. Cologne is not an outlier in this respect. It is a case study in how cultural systems fracture when structural support is replaced by symbolic commitment.

Five Years in Cologne: Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

I have lived and worked in Berlin, New York, Boston, and Paris — cities with their own dysfunctions and contradictions, but also with a shared understanding that artists form an integral part of civic life. I have seen institutions fail, repair themselves, and even reinvent under pressure.

What distinguishes Cologne is not the presence of these problems, but their density and duration. Many of the dynamics now shaping cultural life here — delayed decisions, unstable priorities, performative support paired with practical withdrawal — are increasingly familiar across Europe. In Cologne, they have simply been allowed to accumulate.

Across disciplines, artists describe the same landscape with weary precision. Dancers, composers, theatre-makers, cultural workers, freelance musicians — people with different aesthetics, politics, and working worlds — encounter strikingly similar conditions. Support programmes appear substantial on paper but disintegrate when approached in practice. Decisions drag on for months or years; when they finally arrive, they offer little traceable logic. Priorities shift mid-process, leaving projects stranded.

Beneath this lies an unmistakable signal that many cultural workers across Europe are beginning to recognise: artists are welcomed as symbols of vibrancy, but treated as expendable in practice — valued for presence, but not for participation or voice.

Over time, this climate wears people down. It drains initiative. It teaches artists to expect little and ask for less. The result is not immediate breakdown, but gradual erosion: a slow, steady movement away from the city, or away from its cultural life altogether. Cologne makes visible what happens when such conditions persist long enough — resignation, quiet exits, and the dismantling of a cultural ecosystem from within.

A Culture System Under Chronic Stress

From a clinical perspective, Cologne’s cultural system is exhibiting the four classic trauma responses:

Freeze
Budget freezes (Haushaltssperren) suspend individuals and institutions in prolonged uncertainty. Future planning becomes impossible. This psychological contraction is familiar from clinical work: when the ground does not hold, time itself begins to feel unsafe.

Flight
Flight has become the dominant adaptation. Ensembles relocate. Festivals downsize or disappear. Independent initiatives dissolve quietly. What remains is often misread as resilience, when it is actually erosion.

Fight
Fight manifests in leadership crises, internal conflicts, and public scandals. The opera renovation now entering its fourteenth year; abrupt departures; allegations of misuse of power—these are not isolated failures, but symptoms of systems turning inward, expending energy on infighting rather than development.

Fawn
The least acknowledged response is also the most corrosive. Artists adapt by becoming excessively compliant – lowering expectations, avoiding conflict, accepting conditions that would be unacceptable elsewhere. This response is especially pronounced among migrant and refugee artists, whose vulnerability is routinely exploited through unclear contracts, unpaid labour, or symbolic inclusion without structural support.

Together, these responses erode boundaries, diffuse responsibility, and normalise instability. A system can survive scarcity. What it cannot survive is chronic unpredictability paired with institutional silence.

From Cultural Capital to Cautionary Tale

Cologne was not always like this. We remember when the city had a clear pulse – when risk was possible, when networks and supports held. The 1970s and 80s generated impressive artistic lineages: radical experimentation, galleries that shaped international discourse, an electronic-music studio that drew composers from across the world, bookstores that functioned as gathering spaces, visual arts movements that defined a generation.

It was a city capable of creative metabolism – taking in, transforming, producing. That memory is important, because it reveals the scale of what is now being lost. The system no longer holds together. Leadership turns over, institutions lose ground, and artists quietly remove themselves.

None of this happened overnight. It is the cumulative effect of years of avoidance, fragmented leadership, and the erosion of structures that once sustained an unusually dense artistic ecosystem. Cities do not lose their cultural identity suddenly. They lose it when the conditions that allowed art to thrive – support, dialogue, risk tolerance, shared purpose — quietly disappear.

What a Systemic Intervention Would Require

If Cologne were a patient, the first task would be stabilisation: halt the cycles that inflict fresh harm. End perpetual budget freezes and abrupt cuts. Create planning horizons longer than a single fiscal year.

Second comes relational repair. Trust is rebuilt through reliable communication, transparent decision-making, and accountable governance—not branding.

Third is identity work. A city cannot call itself a cultural capital while dismantling the conditions culture requires. Identity without behaviour is fiction.

Fourth, restore executive function: fill key roles, clarify responsibilities, and establish mechanisms that prevent crisis from becoming the norm.

Finally, cultivate empathy as policy. Artists are workers performing emotional, intellectual, and social labour. Treating them as expendable destabilises the entire system.

A European Choice

What Cologne – and Germany – face is not simply a financial dilemma. It is a relational and democratic one. Across Europe, cultural systems are being asked to absorb austerity, political retreat, and ideological pressure while remaining endlessly resilient.

Resilience, however, is not an infinite resource.

Independent culture is not a luxury. It is part of Europe’s democratic infrastructure: a space for dissent, plurality, and cross-border imagination. When these structures are dismantled, what follows is not neutrality, but narrowing – of voices, of futures, of possibility.

The damage now underway is reversible. But only if responsibility replaces drift, and care replaces contempt. Artists are not asking for privilege – only for conditions that do not undermine them.

The question should no longer be whether cities can afford to support culture. It is whether they can afford the impacts that emerge when they do not.

Image Credit: “Ein new kunstlich Modelbuch”, Peter Quentel (German, active Cologne, 1518–46), Cologne, 1544, courtesy of the Met Open Access Initiative, CC0.