Berlin's Major Culture Venues in Transition: The Volksbühne's New Era and What's Really Happening at the ICC

Two Landmarks, Two Very Different Kinds of Transition

If you’ve spent any time around Berlin’s culture scene, you’ve probably picked up fragments of two different stories: something about the Volksbühne changing leadership again, and something about that huge, abandoned-looking concrete building near the fairgrounds that everyone calls the ICC. It’s easy to mentally file both under “Berlin culture venue in flux” and leave it there, but they’re on completely different clocks. The Volksbühne’s transition is measured in months, it never actually stopped running, and it’s about to get a very new artistic direction. The ICC’s transition is measured in years, arguably decades, and for now the building itself stays shut except for a couple of days every year or two.

The Volksbühne: From Interim Leadership to a New Intendant

The Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz has spent decades as one of Berlin’s most argued-about theatres, and its recent history explains why a change of Intendant here always draws attention far beyond the usual theatre crowd. Frank Castorf ran the house for twenty-five years, from 1992 to 2017, building a reputation for confrontational, political, ensemble-driven work that became inseparable from the building’s identity. When the city announced in 2015 that Castorf would be replaced by Chris Dercon, former director of London’s Tate Modern, the backlash was immediate: Castorf and more than 200 employees, including the playwright René Pollesch, signed an open letter protesting the move, and much of the core ensemble left rather than stay on. Dercon’s own tenure lasted 255 days, from September 2017 to his resignation in April 2018, widely described afterward as an artistically and commercially difficult chapter. Klaus Dörr held an interim leadership role in the years that followed, before René Pollesch, one of the very artists who had protested Dercon’s appointment, took over as Intendant in 2021.

Pollesch died suddenly on February 26, 2024, at the age of 61, just three years into that tenure. Berlin’s Senate initially planned an interim directorship to bridge the 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons, and had lined up the directing duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller for that interim role. They backed out before taking it, reportedly unwilling to commit given the theatre’s uncertain financial footing after the city’s broader culture budget cuts. Instead, Celina Nicolay, the theatre’s Künstlerische Betriebsdirektorin (artistic operations director), stepped in as caretaker, deliberately declining to call herself Intendantin. In her own account of the period, she summed up the approach simply: someone had to hold the place together, and the fact that it worked reflected the strength of a staff with decades of institutional experience rather than any single person’s leadership.

The numbers back that up. Despite roughly 2 million EUR in citywide culture budget cuts during her tenure, the Volksbühne kept its long-standing tradition of running without a deficit. Ticket revenue rose by about 646,500 EUR year over year, and attendance climbed from approximately 128,780 visitors in 2024 to about 138,780 in 2025, not counting guest performances. Nicolay also opened one of the interim seasons with a new production of Peer Gynt directed by Vinge and Müller, the same pair who had stepped back from the interim Intendanz itself, and she supported ambitious, legally complex productions like Florentina Holzinger’s work at the house during this period.

Photo by Steve Pancrate on Pexels

On February 7, 2025, Berlin’s Cultural Senator Joe Chialo announced that Matthias Lilienthal would take over as the Volksbühne’s new, permanent Intendant. Lilienthal isn’t a newcomer to the building: born in Berlin in 1959, he served as chief dramaturg and deputy Intendant at the Volksbühne during Castorf’s early years in the 1990s, before leaving in 1998. Since then he has been artistic director of the Theater der Welt festival, artistic and managing director of Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) from 2003 to 2012, and Intendant of the Munich Kammerspiele from 2015 to 2020, working most recently as a freelance dramaturg and curator. He takes office in August 2026 with an “Artistic Board” rather than a solo model of leadership: Florentina Holzinger, the acclaimed Austrian performance artist known for provocative, physically extreme stage works including the opera-performance “Sancta” she previously staged at the Volksbühne, and Marlene Monteiro Freitas, a choreographer whose work spans dance and political performance.

What Volksbühne Visitors and Newcomers Can Expect This Year

Lilienthal’s first move as Intendant isn’t a play. Volksbad am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz is a temporary public swimming facility with a 25-meter lane, built directly in front of the theatre, opening August 7, 2026, and running through early October. It offers swimming courses for children and community days, framed explicitly as an accessible, low-cost way for Berliners to cool off during the late-summer heat, with theatrical touches woven into the setup rather than a straightforward municipal pool. Holzinger is contributing a performance intervention staged in the pool later in the summer. Lilienthal has described the whole gesture as, in his words, a loving embrace of the city of Berlin, a deliberately warm opening statement before the more conventional theatre programme takes over.

The main season of premieres begins October 1, 2026. Highlights include an immersive house tour opening the Pater Auditorium space from Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll, an adaptation of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfektionen” by Anta Helena Recke, “The School of Self-Defense” from Brazilian choreographers Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira in October, Gisèle Vienne’s adaptation of Robert Walser’s “Der Teich” over winter, and new ensemble work involving actors including Lena Brasch and Milan Peschel. If you’re new to Berlin and curious about the Volksbühne, this is a genuinely good moment to start paying attention: it’s the first fully new artistic direction the house has had since Pollesch’s death, and the opening season is designed to be accessible even if German-language theatre isn’t your usual scene, given the pool, the house tour, and the international, dance-and-performance-heavy programming Lilienthal has brought in.

Beyond the main building at Linienstraße 227 on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Volksbühne also runs a second venue, the Prater, at Kastanienallee 7-9 in Prenzlauer Berg, which hosts additional performances and events. The theatre’s official website lists current programming for both venues along with accessibility filters, including productions offered with audio description or surtitles and subtitles, which is worth checking if that matters for your visit.

The ICC: Berlin’s Most Famous Empty Building

If the Volksbühne’s story is about who runs the show, the ICC’s story is about whether the building gets used at all. The Internationales Congress Centrum opened in 1979 as a genuinely futuristic piece of architecture: a roughly 313-meter-long, silver-clad structure with an angular, almost spacecraft-like profile that made it an instant icon of West Berlin’s postwar identity and a landmark of Cold War-era convention architecture. It hosted decades of international congresses and trade fair events before closing entirely in 2014, when asbestos contamination was discovered throughout the building and remediation became unavoidable.

That closure has now lasted well over a decade, and it has been an expensive kind of standing still. Berlin has reportedly spent around 2 million EUR a year simply keeping the empty building in a preserved, secure state while no active use took place. The original remediation cost estimate of 259 million EUR has since grown considerably, with more recent figures put at 350 to 400 million EUR, and even planners involved in the project have suggested those newer estimates may still understate the real cost. The building did see brief, exceptional public use during this period: in October 2021 it hosted an art project called “The Sun Machine Is Coming Down” as part of the Berliner Festspiele festival, offering a rare glimpse inside a structure most Berliners had never actually entered.

The Long Road to Reopening

The ICC’s redevelopment has moved forward in a series of clearly dated steps, and if you’re trying to figure out how close it actually is to reopening, the roadmap so far looks like this:

1. Autumn 2023Berlin's Senate and House of Representatives agree to allow the ICC to be reused by private investors through a concept-based procurement procedure rather than a straightforward sale.
2. November 25, 2024The Senate Department for Economy, Energy and Public Enterprises, led by Senator Franziska Giffey, officially launches the concept tender process.
3. August 2025The competition for participation is completed and evaluated, narrowing the field to a single consortium taken forward into a detailed dialogue process with a jury.
4. June 12, 2026An official award recommendation is issued for the Projektpartnerschaft Quartier ICC, a nine-company consortium led by the Leipzig-based developer Coloured Fields, including Arup Deutschland, GRAFT, HOCHTIEF Infrastructure, Max Dudler, and other architecture, engineering, and cultural-management partners.
5. Target 2028Berlin aims to finalize the preconditions for awarding long-term building rights (Erbbaurechte) to the consortium.
6. From 2029First construction measures could begin on site.
7. 2032 or 2033A phased, gradual opening of the redeveloped Quartier ICC is planned, rather than a single reopening date.

The consortium’s usage concept, according to Berlin’s own official announcement, keeps Hall 1 largely intact as a flexible venue for concerts, congresses, and large events, while expanding Hall 2 from about 4,000 to roughly 14,000 square meters for exhibitions, education, research, fashion, and immersive experiences. The ground floor is planned as a public north-south passage lined with gastronomy, bars, studios, and galleries. Two new towers of around 100 meters each are planned on the neighboring plots at Messedamm 9 and 11, adding hotels, housing, offices, modernized parking, and a public rooftop terrace overlooking the historic ICC building, with new public plazas on both the north and south sides. The stated goal is a genuinely round-the-clock district: officials and project partners have talked about “24/7” operation with an eventual 5,000 to 10,000 daily visitors, a mix of culture, commerce, and creative industry meant to make the site feel alive at almost any hour, a striking contrast to the sealed, silent building it has been since 2014. Governing Mayor Kai Wegner described the award recommendation as giving the ICC “a genuine prospect” after more than a decade of standstill, while Senator Giffey called it a step toward filling the building “with life again.”

The One Way to See Inside the ICC Right Now

Short of waiting for the mid-2030s, there is exactly one reliable way to get inside the ICC before redevelopment begins: 49h ICC, a free open house tied to Tag des offenen Denkmals (Day of Open Monuments), Germany’s nationwide heritage day held on the second Sunday of every September. The ICC has opened its doors this way periodically rather than annually, with editions in 2021, 2023, and 2025, and the next one scheduled for September 12 to 14, 2026, around the national Tag des offenen Denkmals date of September 13, 2026.

During these openings, visitors can walk through large parts of the building’s preserved foyers and conference halls, seeing the futuristic design details, signage system, and interior architecture largely as they looked when the ICC was still in active use. Programming around the core visit has included guided tours, photo walks, and occasional unusual extras like themed workshops, some free and some carrying a small charge. Entry itself has consistently been free, but access requires a timed-entry ticket, and demand has been intense every time tickets have gone live: the most recent edition sold out within minutes of release and briefly overwhelmed the booking site. If you want to get inside the ICC in September 2026, the practical takeaway is simple: watch visitBerlin.de and its social channels closely in the weeks before the event, have your preferred time slot ready, and be prepared to book the moment tickets open, since checking back later after the initial release has historically meant missing out entirely.

What This Means If You’re Settling in Berlin

Neither of these stories should change how you think about Berlin’s culture scene in the near term, but both are worth having on your radar for different reasons. The Volksbühne is very much open, has kept running smoothly through its leadership gap, and is about to enter a genuinely new chapter that starts with something as approachable as a public swimming pool before moving into a season built around international performance and dance. If you’ve been curious about the theatre but intimidated by its reputation for dense, German-language work, the 2026/27 season under Lilienthal is arguably the most newcomer-friendly starting point it has had in years. The ICC, by contrast, is not something to expect a use for anytime soon: treat it as a long-term city story rather than a venue you’ll casually visit, and if the idea of seeing inside a genuine piece of Cold War-era Berlin architecture appeals to you, mark your calendar for the next 49h ICC opening rather than assuming you can just show up.

Compliance Note

This page reflects publicly available information about the leadership transition at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and the redevelopment status of the Internationales Congress Centrum (ICC) in Berlin, current as of mid-2026, drawn from official Berlin Senate press releases, the Volksbühne’s and visitBerlin’s own websites, and reporting from Der Tagesspiegel, taz, nachtkritik.de, tip-berlin.de, iamexpat.de, and entwicklungsstadt.de. Programming, ticketing, construction timelines, and cost estimates are set independently by the relevant institutions, the Berlin Senate, and private redevelopment partners, and can change, sometimes on short notice. Confirm current dates, ticket availability, and programme details directly with the Volksbühne, visitBerlin, or the relevant Senate department before relying on any specific date or figure in this article.