It is 12:42 p.m. when Gerd Schmelzer finally enters the conference room in the state parliament. The man who, alongside Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU), is at the center of the committee of inquiry into the Nuremberg Museum of the Future. Surrounded by cameras, a briefcase under his arm and a lawyer at his side, a short “Grüß Gott” to everyone.
The 71-year-old is well-known in Nuremberg, as a real estate entrepreneur he has developed wasteland into projects, and his company name “Alpha Group” is emblazoned on commercial buildings in the very best locations. Schmelzer is a former club president and gingerbread manufacturer, football and Christkind are two important factors in this city. The construction tycoon is also the husband of Nuremberg’s cultural mayor Julia Lehner (CSU) and supports her party with donations. And Schmelzer is the landlord of the Augustinerhof, where the future museum was opened in 2021 as a branch of the Deutsches Museum. Whose development and conditions are now occupying this U-committee.
The opposition in the state parliament suspects that the project is a waste of tax money. Söder, who had been promoting the idea for this since 2014 as Finance Minister, is said to have created a personal monument in his hometown, is the accusation – “no matter what the cost”. And the Greens, SPD, FDP and AfD consider a connection between the costly project and Schmelzer’s donations to be conceivable, i.e. suspected nepotism around the CSU. For several months, the panel has been digging through files and interviewing witnesses.
The witness Schmelzer basically already anticipated his testimony in an interview with the Nuremberg News on the weekend. He described the U-Committee as a “political spectacle” and as a “transparent election campaign maneuver” by the opposition. Donations to the CSU were only intended to support his wife and her party in local politics. Schmelzer donated a good 45,000 euros to the CSU twice, in 2017 and 2019. As has recently become known, there have also been a number of small donations of less than 10,000 euros in recent years which, according to the party law, are not to be published. The rent is reasonable, said Schmelzer, as the builder of the property he has always borne the entrepreneurial risk. The real waste of tax money is therefore this U-committee.
In his meeting, however, things are less gaudy. When asked by MPs, Schmelzer reports, for example, that he had never had discussions with Söder about rent or the like, and that the finance minister at the time had not “acted” on him. “Of course we knew that Markus Söder was positive about this project and would see it as a gain for our city”. And Söder knew “where the best place in Nuremberg is”. It’s “not some sort of secret matter,” says Schmelzer, and the future of the area has been a topic of conversation in Nuremberg for many years.
Dispute in rental agreement. The Supreme Court of Audit (ORH) summed up the costs of the 25-year lease for the public sector to a total of 200 million euros. And the ORH stated that the contract was “landlord-friendly”. A report commissioned by the Greens, SPD and FDP 2021 analyzed that the tenant had allowed himself to be cheated: the museum paid 35 million euros too much for the duration of the contract. Recently, however, the U-Committee received one of two reports that it had requested from well-known experts. The document is the Süddeutsche Zeitung whose thesis in short: the museum is expensive, but not too expensive. The “very high” rent can ultimately be explained as normal for the market, above all because of the structural design to the special needs of the museum.
The future museum in the best location in Nuremberg. Landlord Gerd Schmelzer didn’t give a damn what he was building there.
(Photo: Daniel Karmann/dpa)
Schmelzer says on Monday: He could have built supermarkets, a hotel or a parking lot there. But he didn’t “give a fuck” about what he was building. And it wasn’t primarily about maximum yield, but “of course it has to pay off.” That’s why he went into the project with an “inner conviction” that he wanted “to do something valuable for the future of my family and also the city”. The calculation of the rental price was “fair” and “not done out of hand”.
Monday is a meeting marathon for the U-Committee. A total of seven witnesses are invited until late in the evening, including Julia Lehner and Nuremberg’s ex-OB Ulrich Maly (SPD). Wolfgang Heckl is there early in the morning. The Director General of the Deutsches Museum signed the lease. Heckl defends the choice of location, only the Augustinerhof has met the requirements of the museum management – within the old town ring. That was a “conditio sine qua non” from the beginning, i.e. an indispensable prerequisite. An offer outside the city center “we should have rejected”. The reason is the experience with a less frequented branch of the Deutsches Museum in Bonn, “location, location, location is what counts,” says Heckl. There they count only 30,000 visitors a year, in Nuremberg already 120,000.
The clarity of this statement is somewhat surprising, since, according to internal analyzes from Heckl’s house, alternative locations such as the Nuremberg Aufseßplatz were examined before the bid for Schmelzer’s property – and the experts certainly collected pro-arguments. “In the end, what counts is what the museum management says,” says Heckl when asked. Söder, in turn, had no influence on the choice of location; but “of course” the result then fell on “fertile ground”. The rental negotiations between his staff and Schmelzer’s company were “intensive”, there was “hard haggling” – and “at the end of the day a rent was reached that was acceptable for both sides”.
The bottom line is that they now have a “world-class museum,” Heckl enthuses, with which they are attempting to exhibit the future. And because that is difficult to “discuss futures”. Taking people with you and allowing the largest possible number of visitors to participate cannot be described as “monetary”. Almost priceless.