The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (BADSK) does not like to be talked about. But in recent years, the “Supreme Care Center for Art”, as it was founded by the Free State in 1948, has been attracting attention less with its often award-winning events than with discord within its own ranks. The most recent section in the chapter “Internal Disputes” was introduced by the composer Moritz Eggert on March 14, when he criticized a program proposal for a peace concert by the Academy with Ukrainian and Russian composers on Facebook.
Katja Schaefer, the secretary general of the academy, suggested Rodion Shchedrin as moderator. Eggert, President of the German Composers’ Association and professor at the Munich Music Academy, found the idea of putting the composer, who is considered a Putin friend, on the podium impossible. “I’m always ‘thrilled’ at how sensitively and empathetically the BADSK reacts to current issues,” wrote Eggert on Facebook.
The music department reacted angrily to this post, as the program suggestions were the content of an internal, confidential e-mail. At the beginning of May, the music department therefore held an extraordinary meeting. The most important item on the agenda: “the behavior of member Moritz Eggert”. Five of the 30 full members followed the invitation of the music department director Nikolaus Brass, Academy President Winfried Nerdinger and the general secretary were also present. They unanimously condemned the indiscretions as “damaging the work and reputation of the Academy”. And agreed that in future Eggert would only receive the information that all members must receive in accordance with the statutes and rules of procedure.
In the Mauser case, Eggert denounced the collective protection of perpetrators
He was excluded from the entire communication of the academy, says Eggert on the phone. This is made possible by the rules of procedure that the institution gave itself in May 2020. According to paragraph 2, the content of the meetings, meeting documents and the course of the meeting must be treated confidentially in order to ensure an “open, diverse and also controversial discourse”. This also applies to meeting minutes (§ 4). If a member violates this, they can be banned for up to three consecutive sessions and will not receive any invitations or minutes.
Members were not consulted when it came to introducing these Rules of Procedure. According to Nerdinger, the board of directors, i.e. his person and the five department heads, decided unanimously. One of them, the then director of the literature department, Georg M. Oswald, left the academy in May 2021 along with five other writers. The trigger was an SZ interview with Nerdinger, in which he criticized the state corona policy in the cultural sector. In this context, Oswald, also in an SZ interview, sharply criticized the president’s sovereign understanding of his office.
The writer Petra Morsbach also recently wrote in an article in the FAZ the Academy “Authoritarianism in the guise of representative democracy”. The author wrote that the president enacted restrictions without proposal or debate, which he felt entitled to impose because he was elected. She considers the expulsion of the composer Eggert to be “a frightening fall from grace”. The justification that Eggert had reproduced internals “strongly coarsened and distorted” and “the reputation [der Institution] harmed,” she says, “from the vocabulary of censors from Cuba to China and leading to arrests in Russia of people who said “war” instead of “special operation””.
The Secretary General’s proposal to invite a moderator close to Putin sparked a renewed dispute
However, the roots of the great anger at Eggert go back further. With his often provocative texts in “Bad Blog of Musick”, a blog he created for the New music newspaper he has often provoked the institution, especially at a time when the academy found it difficult to distance itself from its former music director Siegfried Mauser, who was convicted of sexual assault. The academy waited for three court instances before the music department, under pressure from its member Brigitte Fassbaender, decided in October 2019 to have an exclusion process voted on, which Mauser forestalled at the last second by voluntarily resigning. During these months, Eggert denounced above all the collective protection against perpetrators, because a number of members, exclusively men, supported Mauser and subliminally doubted the credibility of the women. “Of course, that was extremely badly received, since then I’ve been persona non grata at the Academy,” says Eggert.
The composer regrets that he allowed himself to be carried away by the entry on his Facebook page “at a moment of extremely weak character”. But he announced early on internally that he thought Shchedrin’s appearance was a very bad idea, he says. Later on Facebook he only underlined how “stupid” (Eggert) he thought the idea was. In his blog “Report for a (Bavarian) Academy” On May 2, he apologized for this, but continued to provoke, attacked the Academy’s efforts to maintain secrecy and, he writes in an email, would also welcome “if the Ministry of Education questioned the funding of this mausoleum.”
A particular thorn in his side is the allocation of the so-called Upper Franconia funds from the Friedrich Baur Foundation. The foundation, based in Upper Franconia, has been supporting the academy since 1953 with a fifth of the income from the foundation’s assets, so the allocations make a significant contribution to its overall financing. “On average, it’s around 170,000 euros a year,” says Georg von Waldenfels, former Bavarian finance minister and chairman of the Baur Foundation. The sums fluctuate and also depend on “whether we can finance Upper Franconia projects or not”. In 2006 the foundation decided to establish its own Upper Franconia budget. The “Lied & Lyrik” festival, which the Foundation organizes every two years in cooperation with the Academy, is also financed from this.
The academy wants to reorganize the allocation of the Upper Franconia budget
For Eggert it is a “private festival of the general secretary”. Most members are not aware of the possibility of submitting proposals, he says, and the departments are not involved. In addition, performances by artists are paid much better there than in the academy itself. Waldenfels sees Eggert’s attacks as a “private small-scale war against the academy,” which he attributes to budget issues. There was already an appointment with Eggert and Petra Morsbach in March. “Obviously he can’t or doesn’t want to understand the topic of Upper Franconia funds.”
In any case, the Academy is determined to reorganize the planning of the allocation of the Upper Franconia budget. So far there have been program agreements, says director Nikolaus Brass, the music department was also involved. But he would like input from all departments. He therefore suggested forming an overarching Upper Franconia committee to which each department sends two members. “I would imagine a format in which film, literature, art and music interact,” says Brass.
The election for the emissaries of the individual departments is in progress. And Moritz Eggert is a candidate.
On Thursday, July 7, at 5 p.m., the “Public Annual Meeting” of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts will take place in the Academy of Sciences, Alfons-Goppel-Straße 11, free admission.