Anyone who donated at least 500,000 euros for the facade will be honored with a plaque and portrait in the rebuilt Berlin City Palace. So until recently was the banker Ehrhardt Bödecker. At the beginning of November, the architecture critic and former head of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Philipp Oswalt, referred to a whole series of anti-Semitic and racist remarks by Bödecker in the years before his death in 2016. Bödecker’s son then asked the Humboldt Forum to remove the plaque. The Humboldt Forum had previously quickly distanced itself from the statements made by the major donor. Other problematic donors are not known.
Maybe that’s because you didn’t look too closely. Because the list of non-anonymous donors contains other figures from the right margin, even if not always by name. One of them is the Stuttgart orthopedist Karl-Klaus Dittel, reported the 3sat magazine “Kulturzeit” on Wednesday evening. Dittel is not only a member of the “Sponsorship Association of Baden-Württemberg in the Friends of the Berlin Palace”, which collected donations for the sculptures “Clio” and “Love” from Portal V in the Schlueterhof. He was also one of the founders of the “Association for the Preservation of the Rule of Law and Civil Liberty”, which supported the AfD with large posters and free newspapers in election campaigns worth several million euros. The association served anonymous AfD donors, coordinated by Gaol AG in Switzerland, as a facade for illegal party donations.
Philipp Oswalt also came across other names from the right-wing scene on the list of donors. For example Thomas Sambuc, who is honored as a donor of at least 100,000 euros in Portal II. He ran for the AfD in the Stuttgart municipal council elections in 2019. The “Gesellschaft Berliner Schloss”, which has also donated over 100,000 euros, is also mentioned there. The association has three board members, one of whom is the Berlin AfD politician Daniel Krüger, another is the architectural historian Guido Hinterkeuser, who signed the “Joint Declaration 2018”, a petition from leaders of the new right-wing scene against immigration.
The “Prussian Evening Munich” also made donations for the palace, an organization in which, according to the Bayerischer Rundfunk, “right-wing conservative academics, expellee officials, AfD politicians and neo-Nazis” perform. One of them was Lieutenant Franco A., who is now on trial on suspicion of terrorism.
Does the Humboldt Forum really have to show Rudolf August Oetker in a prominent location, a man who was a member of the Waffen SS?
Another donor is Claus Wolfschlag, an author of the Boys freedom. Also the Young freedom himself donated for the jewelry element “Sima with lion heads”. The foundation was evidently so uncomfortable that it recently asked the friends ‘association to repay the donation, which the head of the friends’ association, Wilhelm von Boddien, refused for legal reasons. The entry “Junge Freiheit” has nevertheless been deleted from the donation list.
It’s not just about new rights, but also about old rights: One of the major donors is the Rudolf August Oetker Foundation. The foundation supports worthy projects. But does the cosmopolitan Humboldt Forum really have to show Rudolf August Oetker in a prominent location, a man who was a member of the Waffen SS before he became one of the great industrialists in the Federal Republic of Germany? A study that was commissioned by his family after Oetker’s death in 2007 came to the conclusion that Oetker and his family were “pillars of the Nazi society”. “They wanted to be close to the regime and benefited from its policies.”
In an interview, the General Director of the Humboldt Forum, Hartmut Dorgerloh, said meekly: “More transparency with large donations would be good”, but gave little hope: the donors who wanted to remain anonymous would probably stay that way too – for “data protection reasons”. It is possible that you will never find out how much money from anti-democrats, revanchists and right-wing radicals is in this public building and which parts could only be built because they existed.