Berlin – It was the cultural and political bomb of last summer: almost exactly a year ago, the Science Council demanded in an expert opinion that the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), founded in 1957, be broken down into its archives, libraries and museums, and the scientific institutes should be assigned to them. As a result, Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters set up a “reform commission” under its own presidium, which, after many meetings and votes last week, issued “recommendations” that were accepted yesterday by the Prussian Foundation’s board of trustees.
If everything turns out as suggested here, the powerful Prussian Foundation will soon be unrecognizable. Much of the details, such as the financing, are still completely open, and the Bundesrat, i.e. the state governments, and the Bundestag, which is due for election in September, have the last word on this federal-state foundation. Now there is no longer any demand that the foundation institutions should “work together more closely in terms of content and interdisciplinary”. However: Exactly this demand has been made again and again since 1957, but never really met. It is legendary that the Ethnological Museum bought a new Koran for an exhibition instead of borrowing one from the Museum of Islamic Art or the State Library. The problem is not a lack of autonomy, but rather unwillingness. But in the German administrative state one can hardly force one’s will.
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