The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (German: Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; SPK) is a German federal government body that oversees 27 museums and cultural organizations in and around Berlin, Germany. Its purview includes all of Berlin's State Museums, the Berlin State Library, the Prussian Privy State Archives and a variety of institutes and research centers. As such, it is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world,[4] and also the largest cultural employer in Germany with around 2,000 staff as of 2020. More than four million people visited its museums in 2019.[2]
The SPK was established in 1957 with the mission to acquire and preserve the cultural legacy of the former State of Prussia. Its current operations include the preservation and care of the museum collections and the continuation of academic and scientific research to encourage learning and understanding between different peoples.[5]
In July 2020, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Monika Grütters announced that the SPK would be dissolved and converted into four independent foundations: State Museums, State Library, Secret State Archives and Ibero-American Institute.[6] This followed recommendations by the Science Council that the SPK was too unwieldy in its current form. As a result, a reform commission has been set up consisting of representatives from the federal government, several German states, the SPK Presidium and museum directors to implement the dissolution by 2025.[7]
Founding
During World War II, the cultural artifacts and fine arts in Prussia, especially in Berlin, came under increasing threat of loss. To protect them from Allied bombing, millions of items were evacuated to relative safety in monasteries, castles and abandoned mines around Germany starting in 1941. With the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, many of these collections wound up damaged, destroyed, or variously hidden in the Allied occupation zones. All the former Prussian institutions ceased to officially exist when the State of Prussia was abolished in 1947, placing these assets in further doubt. As Germany became divided into West and East, what remained of the buildings and scattered collections were also separated by the Iron Curtain.[8]
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation began in 1957 by a West German constitutional mandate to find and preserve the collections still stored throughout the former western occupation zones. In 1961, efforts began to move these materials to West Berlin. From the mid-1960s onward, a series of Modernist buildings were constructed at the Kulturforum to serve as new homes for the collections, including the Gemäldegalerie, the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Berlin State Library. Upon German Reunification in 1990, the Foundation's role expanded considerably to encompass many of the most important cultural properties of the former East Germany. The most important tasks today are in the consolidation of collections, reconstruction of physical space, conservation-restoration and Provenance research.
Nazi-looted art
In 2012 the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation announced the restitution of four works by Munch and Kirchner to the heirs of Professor Curt Glaser, an art historian and collector who was persecuted by the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage. The works were: Edvard Munch's Girls on the beach (mezzotint), Prayer of an old man (woodcut) and Death and the Woman (etching) and a woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bauer entertainment[9]
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation was a defendant in the case of the Guelph Treasure. Led by president Hermann Parzinger, the Foundation argued in court filings that the sale by a consortium of Jewish dealers to Hermann Göring was not under duress, and that a claim should not be handled by a court in the United States because Germany was protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act .[10][11][12][13]
Dissolution
In 2018, Minister of State for Culture and Media Monika Grütters appointed a panel which was commissioned with a report on the future of the Foundation. By 2020, the panel proposed dissolving the Foundation and instead creating four separate foundations with separate management: one to oversee the Berlin state museums, one for the Staatsbibliothek (State Library), another for the Geheime Staatsarchiv (Secret State Archive) and a fourth for the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Iberian-American Institute). It also proposed reorganising the foundation’s finances.[14]
Buildings
Domicile of the president and the administrative center in Berlin-Tiergarten
After Von der Heydt's death in 1874 the building became home to the first Chinese ambassador to Wilhelm II, who decorated its splendid rooms with valuable works of art. In 1938 the villa was bought by the Nazi government and used as an official residence by Hans Lammers, Cabinet Minister in the Reich Chancellery.
The house was severely damaged in World War II, with only the basement and the outer walls remaining. In the immediate post-war years it was occupied by a sweets factory and an illicit still. The villa's gloomy ruins also once formed the backdrop for a spy film. It was not until 1971 that plans for reconstruction of the building began under the aegis of the German Federal Buildings Authority. Renovations completed in 1980.[15]
The Foundation has since expanded operations to a new office building at Von-der-Heydt-Straße 16.
Institutions administered
The Heritage Foundation has overall responsibility for the following institutions and facilities:
The foundation awards the annual Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Prize to the winner of a competition between the best students from Germany's conservatories. Each year a different instrument is chosen.
The Ernst Waldschmidt Prize is awarded every five years for academically valuable achievements in the field of Indology, in particular in the fields in which Waldschmidt himself specialized: Buddhism, Indian and Central Asian archaeology and art.[16]
The Heritage Foundation also awards scholarships for one- to three-month research and work residencies in Berlin. The scholarships are primarily intended to enable foreign scholars to work at the museums, libraries and archives and make professional contacts with staff.[17]
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, co-chairs the German/American Provenance Research Exchange Program (PREP) for Museum Professionals for 2017-2019.[18]
^Cascone, Sarah (2022-08-30). "The $250 Million Guelph Treasure Will Not Be Returned to the Heirs of Jewish Collectors, a U.S. Court Has Ruled". Artnet News. Retrieved 2023-11-08. Germany evoked the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which limits the circumstances under which U.S. plaintiffs can sue a foreign government, but a Washington, D.C., District Court allowed the case to proceed in 2017. The decision was upheld twice on appeal, and then went before the Supreme Court, which sent it back to the District Court, with SPK as the only remaining defendant. It was a landmark decision that could hamstring Holocaust-era restitution efforts.
