Lausitz Festival deals with new beginnings

The Lausitz Festival 2026 wants to encourage new beginnings - and is bringing acting stars Corinna Harfouch and Götz Schubert to the stage for a production of "Hamlet". The three-week arts festival (August 25 to September 13) was created to provide a cultural accompaniment to the changes brought about by the coal phase-out in the mining region of southern Brandenburg and Saxony.

It is about constantly recreating and reshaping the world, said festival director Daniel Kühnel at the presentation of the program in Berlin.

The seventh edition of the cultural festival at some unusual venues in Lusatia in Brandenburg and Saxony has the motto "creatively" - an artificial word made up of creature and creative. According to the festival organizers, this is intended to celebrate the human ability to always dare to make a new start, despite all setbacks and obstacles.

15,000 visitors reached last year

The festival, which has a budget of around 3 million euros, organizes concerts, readings and other projects in addition to theater productions. The organizers said that they had to make do with less funding and offered fewer events than last year. However, the festival has a long-term perspective, said artistic director Kühnel. Around 15,000 visitors came in 2025.

Big acting names involved

The Shakespeare play "Hamlet" will be restaged in a hangar on the site of the former Cottbus-Nord airfield - with actors Corinna Harfouch, Götz Schubert and Linn Reusse (cinema film "Goethe"), among others. The director is Marcel Kohler.

Actor Schubert, who has already appeared at the Lausitz Festival in previous years, is known as the Görlitz detective in the ARD crime series Wolfsland.

Harfouch is one of the best-known German stage and film actresses. In addition to her role in "Hamlet", she will also be giving a reading at the Lausitz Festival. The festival organizers have also announced that Swiss director Christoph Marthaler will be staging an abysmally humorous evening of musical theatre.