Festivals & Open Air in Leipzig 2024

Festivals & street parties in Leipzig

Leipzig is a festival city. That may sound like a marketing phrase, but if you look at how many top-class, annually recurring festivals this city hosts in the course of a year, it quickly becomes clear that this is not an exaggeration, but simply the truth. Anyone who has ever scrolled through the city's calendar of events knows that Leipzig takes cultural events, literary festivals, film festivals and cultural festivals seriously, and with a regularity that is impressive. The year begins with the Leipzig Book Fair in spring, one of the most important book fairs in Europe and also something of a family festival of German-language literature: publishers, authors, translators and readers meet here on the exhibition grounds, but also throughout the city, as the accompanying Leipzig Reads program transforms bookshops, cafés, clubs and cultural centers into reading stages. Shortly afterwards, at Whitsun, Leipzig is transformed into a completely different festival: the Wave-Gotik-Treffen is the largest gothic festival in the world and attracts around 20,000 visitors in black, steampunk and Victorian costumes to the city every year, turning Leipzig into a walk-in work of art for a weekend that you really have to experience, whether you are a gothic fan or not. In the fall, it's the turn of DOK Leipzig: the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film is one of the most renowned film festivals in the world, attracting filmmakers, producers and festival organizers from all over the world and showing documentary films for over a week that are better than anywhere else. Also held in the fall is the Lachmesse, a festival for cabaret and cabaret that takes place on numerous stages in the city every year and proves that political satire can also be presented in a festival format. The Filmkunstmesse Leipzig, which takes place annually in September, is itself an important industry meeting place for independent cinema and shows how much festival culture takes place in Leipzig beyond the big audience event. What all these festivals have in common is not only the quality of their content, but also the way in which they play out in the city: no shielded areas on greenfield sites, but events that turn Leipzig itself into a backdrop, involving cinemas, bookshops, cultural centers and streets and creating the feeling that you are right in the middle of the action. Take a look at our calendar of events, see which festival is waiting for you and just go. Leipzig delivers.