The accusation that some major donors to the Humboldt Forum Foundation could be right-wing radicals or anti-Semitic is said to have been unfounded – or hardly so.
Harry Nutt
The plaque for Ehrhardt and Anneliese Bödecker in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, which has since been removedBerliner Zeitung/Markus Wachter
It was a bitter lesson for the culture tanker Humboldt Forum, which was already under severe criticism, when the busy architect and author Philipp Oswalt made new, painful revelations a good year ago. Ehrhardt Bödecker, a former banker and major donor to the Berlin Palace Association, who honored his sponsors in the passageway through the Eosander portal in the form of decorative medallions, had allegedly made a name for himself with right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic statements in the last years of his life.
The Bödecker plaque was then attached as a precautionary measure, and the Bödecker family tried to limit the damage. He was known “as a pugnacious conservative and Prussian enthusiast with numerous merits”, wrote daughter-in-law Elvira Tasbach and son Andreas Bödecker in a statement and confirmed that Bödecker sometimes published in “right-wing extremist circles”. “This realization is painful and fills us with great sadness,” said Elvira Tasbach and Andreas Bödecker in November 2021.
No other suspected cases
The Humboldt Forum Foundation promised to examine the Bödecker case and was also willing to investigate other suspected cases. Now the Humboldt-Forum Foundation (SHF) can give the all-clear, after having entrusted the law firm Raue with a confidential investigation into those donors who gave more than 100,000 euros. The Raue law firm came to the conclusion that, with the exception of the donors from the German Donors’ Association and one anonymous donor from Switzerland, all donors are known by name to the association. Of these 113 donors, 106 are honored in the Humboldt Forum on the plaques in Portal II. The others expressly wish to remain anonymous, but according to a press release by the SFH, the Raue law firm found no evidence of right-wing extremist or even extremist activities in these cases either. The suspicion that the association had accepted large donations from right-wing extremists or institutions has not been substantiated.
The SHF had commissioned an expert opinion from the Munich Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) on the banker Ehrhardt Bödecker. In it, the IfZ came to the conclusion “that Bödecker’s positions were not scientifically derived and that he was fixated on an imagined, positively transfigured image of Prussia”. Regarding the allegation of anti-Semitism, the report found an “ambiguity between clear anti-Semitic clichés on the one hand and the counteracting of anti-Semitic resentment on the other”.
Poorly formulated
On the one hand on the other hand? That is at least formulated nebulously and does not become any clearer through the attempt by the SHF to understand the report as exoneration. “The report on Ehrhardt Bödecker,” says the SHF press release on Monday, “also comes to the conclusion that he was neither a right-wing extremist nor anti-Semitic in a right-wing extremist sense. What exactly, one wonders, is meant by saying that Bödecker was not anti-Semitic in a right-wing extremist sense? Does it get any better if he was anti-Semitic in a different sense?
The SHF sees the investigations by the law firm Raue and the expert opinion of the IfZ as proof that the Berlin Palace Friends’ Association did not violate the applicable donation guidelines by accepting the numerous donations made by Ehrhardt Bödecker over the years. At the same time, the SHF announces that the donation guidelines have been revised and clearly specified.