Looking ahead at culture highlights in 2017

Hamburg's shining new Elbphilharmonie concert hall starts the new year on January 1 - just days before its official opening - with Sasha Waltz and her celebrated dance company. They will invite the audience to explore the new venue's foyer to the sight of choreography and sound of music. The opening concerts ten days later feature works by Beethoven, Cavalieri, Liebermann, Wagner and Zimmermann.

It's time to head to the Berlin International Film Festival. Beginning on February 9, movie buffs will have to wait patiently in long lines in the cold to see films featured in the competition, the forum or the retrospective. In 2017, the latter is devoted to science fiction classics. Dutch film director and producer Paul Verhoeven heads the jury that awards the coveted Gold and Silver bears.

Before the Leipzig Book Fair opens its gates to the public on March 23, Cologne hosts its wildly popular LitCologne international literature festival beginning March 7. Almost 200 author readings are scheduled over the course of 12 days. The festival kicks off with a show of solidarity for persecuted Turkish writers and journalists - including exiled former Cumhuriyet editor in chief, Can Dündar.

Documenta artistic director Adam Szymczyk decided on a new approach for the 14th edition of the world's most important contemporary art exhibition: for the first time in 60 years, it opens not in Kassel, but in the Greek capital city, Athens. "Learning from Athens" is the motto of the show. At the same time in Berlin, an exhibition opens on 500 years of Protestantism called "The Luther Effect."

The next stop is Italy and the Venice Biennale art show - a must for curators, collectors and critics from all over the world. At the upcoming 57th edition of the art show, Germany will be present with award-winning performance artist Anne Imhof, (pictures above). Had enough of art already? Then head over to France for the International Cannes Film Festival, which starts on May 17.

Back to Germany in June: two months after the Documenta opens with its special branch in Athens, the exhibition proper opens on June 10 in the German city of Kassel. That same day, the "Skulptur Projekte Münster" renowned sculpture show opens its gates to the public, too. For a brief time, Germany becomes the epicenter of the art world. It's the 14th Documenta, and the 5th Münster sculpture show.

The 2016 Bayreuth Festival reportedly was a bit lacklustre, so hopes are high for the next season. Hartmut Haenchen is due to conduct "Parsifal" and a two-day symposium on Richard Wagner in the Nazi era is also on the agenda. Things are bound to be controversial as usual.

The exhibition "Cultural Revolution and Photography. A new perspective of 50 years of Chinese history of Photography" opens on August 18 at the Berliner Museum of Photography. Four days later in Cologne, the start of Europe's biggest trade fair for interactive games, the Gamescom, will have hundreds of thousands of gamers thronging to the city on the Rhine.

In September, the Beethovenfest in Bonn takes place with this year's motto, "The distant beloved." The festival starts on September 8, and the program promises to be more lyrical than in previous years, which were marked by "Changes" and "Revolutions." In nearby Frankfurt, the Städel Museum takes a keen look at the friendship between French impressionist artists Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse.

Our whirlwind tour through the 2017 culture scene next takes us to the year's largest publishing event, the Frankfurt Book Fair, which opens on October 11 and welcomes France as its guest of honor. Highlights include the 2017 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the German Book Prize. Fans of the opera can also look forward to the re-opening of the Berlin Staatsoper this month.

Museums are slowly realizing that for decades, they haven't really dared to budge past their own cultural backyards. "Global resonances" at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof is an exhibit that looks at what the Berlin National Gallery collection might look like today if the museum hadn’t collected its works based almost exclusively on western developments and trends of modernity and modernism.

The Art Basel in Miami Beach is a huge hit with art lovers. For four days beginning December 7, the art world gets together in sunny Florida for the only art show in the world, where collectors have been spotted wearing simple flipflops.