“Democracy is inconceivable without humor,” says Gerhard Polt. The cabaret artist is a driving force behind the initiative for a “Forum Humor”, a planned multi-purpose place for comic arts. But especially in the back and forth with the city administration and politicians in Munich, the now 393 members from Luise Kinseher to Eckart von Hirschhausen to Stefan Zinner have often had nothing to laugh about in the past five years. For their dream house, the abandoned cattle bank in the slaughterhouse district, the association received neither a commitment nor the estimated 16 million euros in renovation money. Nothing has happened since the building was put out to tender in September 2021, says forum chairman Reinhard Wittmann: “It can only be bad faith.”
Instead, the humor seekers in Bernried were “received with open arms”. And as it now looks like, the Forum Humor will actually move to the artists’ village on Lake Starnberg. Yesterday, the Federal Building Ministry announced that the new Bernried community center will be subsidized with 5.68 million euros as just one of two “National Urban Development Projects 2022” in Bavaria. The heart of it all: an exhibition hall with a total area of 700 square meters for the Forum Humor.
The association had already flown to Bernried for a summer festival in 2021, which is currently being repeated – with “all the elements that were also planned for Munich,” says Wittmann, such as exhibitions, performances and a conference (“humor heals”). The Bernried town hall proved to be so cooperative that the club developed an exit scenario from Munich.
The Weilheim architect Titus Bernhard adapted his unrealized plans for a community center in the town center (construction costs 7.5 million euros), the community submitted the application for funding to the federal government, and Wittmann mobilized members of the Bundestag from all parliamentary groups. Now you can realize all ideas in Bernried, but you have to adapt the concept and distribute your activities to several places from the lake shore at the Buchheim Museum to the monastery to the Höhenried Clinic. Does that mean that all plans for a “branch” of the humorist forum in the Viehbank in Munich have died? “You have to ask Mayor Reiter about that,” says Wittmann and laughs with a snort.