After the personnel disputes and revelations of the last few months, a new era is beginning at the Munich-based Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation: The lawyer Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen will be the new managing director, succeeding Marcel Lepper, who left the company last February was dismissed without notice for reasons not explained today. The foundation announced this on Wednesday. Pfeiffer-Poensgen has made a name for herself as an experienced and committed cultural official and politician: from 2004 to 2017 she headed the Cultural Foundation of the States. She then served as Minister for Culture and Science in North Rhine-Westphalia for five years.
The financially excellent non-profit foundation urgently needs your professionalism. Its first two bosses, Armin Mohler and Heinrich Meier, ran it as a private college and a conspiratorial professorial lodge. Insiders reported dubious financial practices, lack of transparency and cheating.
The perseverance of the long-established foundation grandees has only recently been proven
These circumstances, as well as the fact that not a single committee member resigned after the revelations in the SZ and other media, may have been the reason why it took eight months to find a successor to Marcel Lepper, who was fired.
It remains to be seen whether Pfeiffer-Poensgen, born in 1954, can achieve the urgently needed rejuvenation of the foundation and its audience. Otherwise, she brings a lot of things with her that are good for the elite institution, which resides in a villa at Nymphenburg Palace: she doesn’t belong to the Munich scientific circle or a party, and she also takes people seriously who don’t hold a professorship – and she is a woman . Both the board and the board of trustees are made up exclusively of male professors.
A whole mountain of tasks now awaits Pfeiffer-Poensgen: not only the financial and administrative practices of recent times have to be examined, but also the political history of the foundation, which was considered a think tank for the New Right until the 1980s. The fact that Marcel Lepper, who had already initiated this, was thrown out only eleven months after his inauguration could be seen as a sign of the perseverance of the long-established foundation grandees.