Christoph Stölzl is one of those historical figures whose death marks the end of an entire era. In the case of Stölzl, this is not due to the fact that he had to make far-reaching, momentous decisions over a very long period of time; or because he created an aesthetic life’s work that will remain visible for all generations to come. Stölzl held a strategically important function for a long decade, which historically means only one moment, namely from 1987 to 1999. He was the founding director of the German Historical Museum in Berlin during the years of reunification, i.e. during the constitution of what was temporarily called the “Berlin Republic”.
Today one can hardly imagine with what reservations, even fears, this reunified Germany was accompanied, not least in its western part. Would it become excessive and arrogant again? Was its European-Atlantic integration in danger? Was there a new nationalism? Would it seek out new, guilt-free historical continuities? Such suspicions arose even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Helmut Kohl initiated the founding of the Berlin History Museum and took advice from the very successful director of the Munich City Museum, Christoph Stölzl. When he presented the project at the Trier Historikertag in 1986 to a guild agitated by the historians’ dispute, the tumult in the hall was so great that Christian Meier, as president of the historians’ association, had trouble taming the hecklers.
Stölzl, of course, enjoyed the loud argument. In a deliberately low, nasal voice in the unmistakable official Munich dialect of the best Montgelas tradition, he spoke about the intellectually entertaining possibilities of bringing German history into the museum. It should be noted here that “Munich officials in the best Montgelas tradition” is one of those historical classifications that Stölzl, as a lounge lion, was able to throw around like confetti. Incidentally, as the founder of the museum, he kept his word: the nascent Berlin History Museum, whose completion and opening Stölzl himself was no longer able to accomplish, became the site of lavish, revue-like exhibitions, each one more glamorous and funnier than the next.
Stölzl belonged to Berlin’s transition period like the notorious techno clubs
The farewell in 1998 turned out to be programmatically dazzling. In the show “Myths of Nations” Stölzl exposed the national as a common principle, not least aesthetically endlessly fruitful. The world of historical hams and battle paintings, flags, signs and symbols, the Rütli oaths and the storming of the Bastille, the regicides and folk songs, epics and steel engravings appeared as a unit throughout all wars and hereditary enmities. In doing so, Stölzl historicized and Hollywoodized the feared and dreaded nationalism of Germany’s new beginnings in the Berlin nineties, which were torn apart by construction sites and riddled with parties.
Stölzl is part of this unforgettable transitional period, which is still intoxicating in retrospect, as are the “Tresor” club and the “Ostgut”, the legendary forerunner of “Berghain”. He worked on a construction site, in a permanent provisional arrangement, i.e. in the chaos that was soon mourned with the obituary “It was the best time”. In retrospect, one can ask whether Stölzl was lucky with this provisional nature and whether the careful sorting of the methodically collected objects into epoch spaces would not have underchallenged and bored him. As an exhibition organiser, he was more of an impresario and theater director who preferred to work with bangers and rosin than with inventories and history-didactic strategies.
When the tall gentleman with the elegantly shimmering, very egg-shaped bald head began to need glasses, he chose those heavy horn frames that one also remembered from the silent films of the 1920s and which were not yet back in fashion at the time. In this way, the boundlessly educated museum man created an impression of magic and illusion artistry. But alas, posterity weaves no wreaths for the mime and the exhibition artist, and that was even true for Stölzl’s further career, in which he was never again able to realize the captivating wit that was his real talent.
As a Conservative, he was unreliable
As a politician, first for the FDP and later for the CDU, his gift for historical associations even got in the way of him, for example when he compared the Berlin election results with landslide victories in the 1930s or the entry of the Left Party into the Berlin city government in the House of Representatives with toneless pathos represented as the seizure of power by communism. Not even his own party comrades from Reinickendorf or Zehlendorf could follow such parallels, for lack of historical education. His guest appearance as Berlin Science Senator remained just as episodic as the months in the editor-in-chief of the World. In the CDU, people began to call him “Professor Stölzl” more and more often, and that was not meant nicely.
Presumably one sensed in the Berlin district and local association milieu how unreliable Stölzl was as a conservative. Because the descendant of the Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl was without a doubt conservative, in love with the past, not least in a place where it had once been highly modern. But how witty, how dialectic that could be! In the dispute over the demolition of the Berlin Palace of the Republic and the rebuilding of the old city palace, he argued aesthetically by mixing up the times of history. If the GDR hadn’t capitulated aesthetically to the West with the Honeckersches Palast, but had stayed true to the style of Stalinallee and had built “a communist Chicago” in the center of Berlin – then one could do without the Prussian palace, Stölzl explained with a completely serious expression. There was the historical association confetti again, with which Stölzl was able to upset historians’ days and SED comrades alike in a confusing way.
Since 2010, Stölzl has found a worthy job as director of the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Weimar. This did not prevent him from being present at many Berlin events, sometimes even accompanying nostalgic chansons of windblown modernity on the double bass. He has now died at the age of 78 in Evenhausen, Bavaria. He will remain as one of those who created the new Berlin.