2024-10-10 15:54:00
For four years, Germany’s largest and most powerful cultural organisation, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, has been trying to reform itself. Now he could report a provisional result. But their outgoing president leaves his successor with many problems.
You can imagine the Prussian Foundation for Cultural Heritage (SPK) as a huge cultural cargo ship sailing the world’s oceans without a fixed destination. On board there are art treasures from several millennia, from the bust of Nefertiti to paintings by Rembrandt and modern icons from Klee to Warhol, as well as a state library, a costume collection and a crew of 2,000 men and women who maintain, research and they preserve everything. But unfortunately this great and proud ship is missing in every corner.
Entire pieces have to be renewed over and over again, which sometimes takes decades, as in the case of the Pergamon Museum. Great new buildings are being planned, such as the Museum of the 20th Century. And then there is not enough money for the most daily activities and the structures are too bureaucratic. The SPK, which is based in Berlin and largely funded by the federal government, has neither the structure nor the finances to really keep up with other supertankers in the international museum world.
Inspired by an evaluation report published in 2020 by the Science Council, suggested by the then Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media Monika Grütters, but also to justify a larger budget, the foundation underwent a long reform process. It is tied primarily to their longtime captain, sorry, President Hermann Parzinger. The archaeologist will retire in 2025 after fifteen years of service, and will be succeeded by the current general director of the Dresden State Art Collections, Marion Ackermann.
Earlier this week, the SPK presented the interim status of its structural reform to demonstrate: something has happened and more is happening. A hierarchical level was saved at the State Museums of Berlin, freeing up almost eight million euros, which will be divided between the 17 individual museums.
However, you can quickly calculate that in the end there won’t be much left around the house. No additional staff will be approved for the time being, so there will not yet be a permanent post to assist visitors to the Neue Nationalgalerie – with 650,000 museum visitors per year.
Byzantine and bureaucratic: the SPK
Although the house is now on TikTok, Mies van der Rohe’s famous building does not have its own website. The site is always the same for all state museums. In a few years, it was said at the press conference, this too should change.
Like everything else. From the group structure to the mobile holding. Global balance instead of camaraderie. “SmartFuture”, more sponsorships. When you delve into the structures of the SPK complex through the many slides of the presentation, you first realize what a byzantine and tortuous structure it has grown over the decades.
What was supposed to contain the art treasures of Prussia after 1945 and preserve them during the division of Germany was transformed from an improvised structure into a large civil service structure, in which the directors of the institutes request business trips to beginning of the year. the first-come, first-served principle because… they don’t have a fixed budget to do it. Things will be different now. According to the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie Klaus Biesenbach, the bureaucracy is already much lower than at the beginning of the reform.
In the past, for example, the principles according to which money was distributed between them were not clear in the individual SPK institutions. The management of the museum is now managed exclusively by the management of the foundation (the position of general director has been abolished) and has autonomous budgets. “The different controlling interests are eliminated”, states the presentation with its diagrams and optimistic tones, and “the consolidated project autonomy is further anchored and lived”.
The language of the reformers is confident and hardened by bureaucracy. But one thing is clear: the strengthening of the SPK depends on two important factors that neither Hermann Parzinger nor his successor Marion Ackermann can control. The Bundestag has yet to decide on the urgently needed money. And the 2,000 public sector workers who keep the giant ship running must be taken with you on the journey to the new world.
Nothing happens against their will, there is co-determination, not even the creation of “process acceleration tools” or the desired “better service orientation”. The reform of the SPK is not least part of its corporate culture and cannot be prescribed. So it’s not a liberation, it’s a process.
Structural reform is aimed at 2030, but the end of internal restructuring is not in sight. Because like any company, a Prussian ship must always be made seaworthy. “The foundation,” Hermann Parzinger says in passing, “must remain in permanent reform.”
#Bureaucratic #traffic #jam #Preußenstiftung #reformed #sooner
