Cultural policy of the traffic light coalition – culture

Germany’s next Minister of State for Culture comes from the Greens. This is one of the many surprises that the traffic light coalition announced on Wednesday afternoon in Berlin. On the one hand, this is surprising because the prominent Hamburg Senator for Culture, Carsten Brosda, has been considered to have taken office for months. And on the other hand, because the Greens have barely made a name for themselves in terms of cultural policy in recent years. That is why one in the cultural scene puzzled on Wednesday who could take over the new office – most of them guessed a woman: Claudia Roth, the former manager of Clay stones shards? Or is it Katrin Göring-Eckardt? Neither these names nor any other really intrude. By Thursday at the latest, when the Greens present their cabinet members, this matter should also be clarified.

Much has been said in recent weeks about how important the office is in these troubled times. How big the tasks are, not just in questions of past politics such as the restitution debate – no, also in finding a new, unifying narrative for the republic. However, the coalition agreement does not allow a clear idea of ​​what will change after the eight years in which Monika Grütters has enormously upgraded the office and made her authority a well-oiled political machine. The intention to make culture a “national goal”, one of the few concrete projects, has a more symbolic character.

It is at least clear that the emphasis should be shifted from high culture and top institutions to the wider area, from consumption to participation and doing it yourself: “We want to enable culture with everyone …, regardless of organizational or form of expression,” intonate the coalition partners their culture chapter and give a linguistically playful sample: “from classic to comic, from Low German to record store”. The cultural sector has to learn four new words: “Accessibility, diversity, gender equality and sustainability”.

The worries of free artists and creative people take up a lot of space

While the focus under Grütters was on building representative institutions in Berlin, the coalitionists only have one succinct sentence left: “We are reaffirming the federal government’s cultural commitment to the capital.” There is nothing in the coalition agreement about opera houses, museums and the other temples, which devour most of the cultural budget, as if their reliable work was guaranteed anyway.

The talk is all the more about the independent scene, from clubs, live music and galleries. Even the promotion of independent publishers is to be examined “in order to secure the cultural diversity on the book market”. The Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Culture Fund are to be expanded “as drivers of innovation”. The state skepticism of the FDP, the traditional sympathy of the Greens for alternative culture and an old left-wing distrust of the SPD towards supposedly bourgeois high culture come together here to form an astonishing triad.

Much space is taken up by a topic that has only been discussed more widely since the beginning of the pandemic: the situation of free artists and creative people. It is suggested that the traffic light coalition will continue the current subsidies. And then, at the end of the Corona tunnel, initiate real reforms: In the future, federal funding should be linked to compliance with certain minimum fees, the artists’ social security fund should be financially strengthened and the increase in the additional income limit from non-artistic work should be maintained.

Whether the traffic light coalition will succeed in solving the major problems left by Grütters cannot be said on the basis of these five arid pages. “We are developing the Humboldt Forum as a place for democratic, cosmopolitan debate,” they mumble casually about the failed major project of the Grütters years. A new beginning in terms of personnel and concept would be necessary here, as even the Federal President has called for. In an earlier version, the coalition is said to have announced that it would remove the controversial cross from the palace dome, but this passage has been deleted.

When it comes to restitution, the paper does not go far beyond the goals of the grand coalition

And the SPD, FDP and the Greens also comment on another construction site: “We are continuing the reform process of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation together with the federal states,” it says vaguely. But this reform process should be reanimated rather than “continued”. After all, they make the “fundamental improvement in governance” a “prerequisite” for higher federal contributions. However, it is not very clear who they are threatening.

Even with the handling of Nazi-looted art, which has been criticized again and again for years, the new coalition has postponed the grand solution for the time being. There should be a right to information, the statute of limitations for claims is excluded, and the advisory commission is to be “strengthened”. It would be necessary to find a legal regulation that turns the judgments of the commission into more than just “recommendations”.

As far as the coming to terms with colonialism and the restitution of stolen works of art in German museums are concerned, the paper does not go beyond what the SPD and CDU / CSU set out to do four years ago: more provenance research, more digitization, more international cooperation, including a “learning.” – and place of remembrance colonialism “is planned. But why do the coalitioners only speak of “returns” without obligation, instead of announcing a clear plan for more extensive restitutions, following the example of Emmanuel Macron? That would have also helped to move the hesitant countries, which are responsible for most of the museums, to take further steps. Corrections could also be made to the Museum of the 20th Century before the costs of the ecologically fatal luxury building that was out of date get out of hand.

What can at least be heard in and between the lines of the paper is a new culture in cultural policy that relies less on brute political methods and more on transparency and listening and uses measures such as fixed-term contracts and diverse juries to combat the encrusted structures in culture. Only one would have liked to have found out more about all of this. There is little to suggest that the traffic light coalition is particularly interested in this area.

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