As part of the heimaten Festival, Common Voices Radio—the Multilingual Radio in Halle and surroundings broadcast on Radio Corax 95.9—went live on air to ask: What does home mean? For many, home is closely connected to a familiar scent or taste. Common Voices Radio therefore transformed the public space in front of the passage.13 district centre in Halle-Neustadt into an open-air kitchen and a mobile radio studio: for collective cutting, cooking, and storytelling. You can now listen to the multilingual editorial team discussing life in Neustadt and the heimaten project while delicious dishes simmer on the stove.

The heimaten Festival for Plural Democracy is driven by the conviction that a sense of belonging is shaped through collective action. The multi-week, decentralized festival is supported by the heimaten Network, an association comprising over thirty cultural institutions and civil society initiatives. From September to December 2025, numerous events take place throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. At a time when democratic frameworks are under severe and increasing threat, the festival sets an example of pluralistic resistance by emphasizing that diversity is not a threat, but a source of strength and resilience.

How to address the rightward shift? This is the question posed by hip-hop collective BSMG, who are reacting to contemporary sociopolitical shifts with a three-part programme comprising a concert, a workshop, and a panel discussion featuring numerous guests. Through musical resistance, a defensive stance, diasporic knowledge transfer, and practical self-organization, the programme aims to create an experiential space for Black, African, and migrant communities. The events are explicitly oriented towards people who are affected by social exclusion—as well as anyone interested in a just, post-national, and antiracist future.

For a special issue in the framework of the heimaten Festival, tuerspion magazine is calling for contributions in a wide variety of formats, as long as they can be printed: poems, short stories, essays, photos, comics, QR codes for songs… The open call is aimed primarily at people living in Lower Saxony who have been affected by anti-Semitism and/or racism, inviting them to discuss issues such as: Can the term Heimat (home/homeland) be reclaimed? Does it make more sense in the plural? Can culture be a home? The deadline for submissions is 15 August 2025. More information can be found on the tuerspion website.

The outcome of the German federal election in February 2025, alongside developments in neighbouring countries and in the global context, make it clear that the shift to the right requires smart strategies of resistance and a strong and capable civil society. This is where the discussion series Heimatization. On Belonging and Plurality comes in, which takes place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) from March to November 2025. It focuses on perspectives on plural democracy, sheds light on historical and current models of participation, and demonstrates how cultural interdependencies shape society.

Based on an initiative launched in September 2024 by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (HKW), numerous cultural institutions and civil society actors have come together to form the heimaten Network. It brings together various projects and partners from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland who, one year after the network was founded, will jointly organize the decentralised heimaten Festival for Plural Democracy, with an extensive programme from September to December 2025. All information on the festival events can be found on these pages.

‘According to Article 20, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, all state power comes from the people. Some things can be said with certainty about this people: almost thirty percent have a history of migration, and that percentage will only continue to increase in the future. People desire in different ways, have differing political opinions, belong to different religious communities, are of different ages, and have different incomes and levels of wealth at their disposal.’ This is what the co-curators of heimaten, Max Czollek and Ibou Diop, write in their core concept. They continue: ‘If, as stated in the Basic Law, all state power comes from the people, this also means that all state power comes from a plural society. This reality is where heimaten comes in; heimaten, used as a verb [...], but heimaten can also function as a plural noun because Germany is conceived of as a place of plurality.’

In his curatorial statement on the heimaten project, the director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Prof Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, focuses among other things on the distinction between the terms and concepts of ‘Volk’ (people) and ‘Bevölkerung’ (population). It is crucial for the process of making a home and for understanding what Germany was, is, or wants to be. Ndikung writes: ‘This project is a possibility of unlearning Heimat and learning heimaten.’