Czech-German Culture Days

The Czech-German Cultural Days were launched in 1999 by the Dresden-based Brücke/Most Foundation; at that time, they were known as the Czech Cultural Days and did not include a German component. The goal then, as now, was to use art and culture to help people in Saxony become more familiar with their Czech neighbors, to gradually blur the border in people’s minds, and to make the border region feel like a shared home.

In 2006, the festival was expanded for the first time to include a component in the Czech Republic, with the aim of bringing people there closer to their neighbors in Saxony. Since then, this part of the festival has been organized by the Collegium Bohemicum, based in Ústí nad Labem. Since 2023, the Veřejný sál Hraničář association from Ústí has been in charge of the program on the Czech side.

For 19 years, the Brücke/Most Foundation organized an annual festival that soon became the largest showcase of Czech culture abroad. Unfortunately, in 2017, it had to give this up because years of low-interest-rate policies had caused the foundation’s revenues—like those of many other foundations—to shrink so much that organizing the festival was no longer feasible. At that time, the Elbe/Labe Euroregion agreed to take over the organization of the Czech-German Cultural Days in the future. Even though we didn’t have much experience as cultural event organizers, it was important to us not to let this wonderful and time-honored festival fade away.

The festival always takes place in the fall, either in the first half of October or from late October to early November, depending on the timing of the fall break. Over a period of just over two weeks, around 70 events across a wide variety of genres are offered each year. In recent years, these events have increasingly been held outside the major cities of Dresden and Ústí nad Labem in order to spread the message of the Czech-German Cultural Days as far as possible throughout the border region.

For more information, visit tdkt.info

(This is an automatic translation by DeepL Translator.)