Berlin, 29 August 2011 More than half the visitors to Berlin’s cultural institutions are tourists. This is documented by the latest Kultur-Monitoring (KULMON) annual report, a visitor survey of Berlin’s cultural institutions. Almost 60 percent of all the visitors interviewed in the survey are guests in the German capital.

The proportion of tourists amongst museum-goers is particularly high. Last year 38 percent of visitors came from Germany and around 37 percent from abroad. The majority of the visitors to the city’s theatres came from Berlin. Orchestras accounted for the largest share of Berliners (around 73 percent), followed by the theatres with a share of almost 65 percent of audience members from the German capital. Opera houses, ballet and dance theatres represented just under 61 percent.

In 2010 the memorial sites - the Berlin Wall Foundation, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Topography of Terror - participated for the first time in the visitor monitoring. Just under 90 percent of their visitors are tourists, almost 52 percent from abroad. British (13.79%), Dutch (11.96%), US American (9.67%) and Danish (7.15%) visitors are particularly interested in historical sites.

“History in the 20th century – both the good and the bad sides – can be experienced first-hand in Berlin” says visitBerlin CEO Burkhard Kieker. “The way in which the city comes to terms with its past attracts people to it. This is confirmed by the latest KULMON results.”

Since the beginning of the year the three musical theatres of Stage Entertainment GmbH have taken part in the Berlin Kultur-Monitoring survey: Bluemax, the Theater am Potsdamer Platz and the Theater des Westens.

The culture survey is a joint initiative of the Berlin cultural administration and visitBerlin in cooperation with the Centre for Audience Development at the Free University Berlin. The project is financed from special funds of the tourist cultural marketing campaign of visitBerlin, from contributions from the cultural institutions themselves and from EFRD resources of the cultural administration’s programme “Promotion of Innovation Potential in Culture (INP)”.

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