The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation must be reformed if it is to be considered Germany’s most important cultural institution wants to remain internationally compatible. The annual report for 2023, which has now been presented, shows where things are going wrong – and where things are going well
The reform of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) remains a major issue, whether it moves forward or stalls, and whether the federal states release more money for it or not. But regardless of this, the operation of Germany’s largest cultural institution continues undeterred, despite all the upheavals, most recently the pandemic.
So 2023 is the first full year that allows a comparison with pre-pandemic times in terms of visitor and user numbers. The SPK’s annual report is now available. What used to be announced in a lengthy press conference for people to write down has been made available in a clear printed form for years. Small-scale reform, to be sure; but it works!
The SPK is divided into five sub-institutions, of which the State Museums with 16 facilities and even more, namely 22 buildings, and the State Library with its two locations are by far the largest. Unfortunately, there is no breakdown of the foundation’s budget according to these sub-sizes; hopefully, however, there is internal breakdown, because only then can the reform with the desired greater autonomy of the individual museums succeed.
Total budget of over 415 million euros
The SPK’s total budget last year was a good 415 million euros. Of this, 250 million was spent on personnel and material costs, and 114 million euros was spent on construction costs last year. The latter are fully financed by the federal government. The federal government also covers the lion’s share of the operating budget, 157 million euros.
The federal states, whose approval of the reform and above all whose co-financing is currently being fought over behind the scenes, are contributing 52.5 million euros. Their share is “capped”, which means they are protected from budget increases. When the enormous burden of renovating the old buildings became clear after 1990, the states withdrew from overall financing and left the federal government to cover the construction costs alone.
In 2019, the total budget was still 401 million euros – the increase of three and a half percent compared to 2019, four years ago, can only be described as “moderate”. Another argument that the reform of the foundation also needs to be accompanied by a good stack of euro notes.
Isa Genzken exhibition as a visitor magnet
The foundation only generates 31.6 million euros in its own income, which is less than eight percent of the total budget. It is worrying that last year a further 21.7 million euros had to be taken from “third-party funding reserves”, i.e. from previous years, in order to balance the budget. Let’s say it is a consequence of the Corona slump.
At least in terms of visitor numbers, this has now bulged out again. The museums recorded almost 4.4 million visits (and not visitors, because some people come more than once) in the reporting year, even more than in 2019, when the figure was 4.2 million. In 2023, the figure was 3.6 million, which shows how laborious and protracted the recovery was. And the 840,000 visitors that the Pergamon Museum recorded in 2019 could no longer be reached in the reporting year because the museum was already closed from October 23, i.e. for a good two months of the year.
Overall, the museums on Museum Island accounted for the lion’s share of almost 60 percent of the total, with 2.57 million visits, while the Kulturforum accounted for around a million, or almost a quarter. The Isa Genzken exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie contributed to this with a remarkable 250,000 visits.
Little response to the picture gallery
The low level of interest in the Gemäldegalerie is catastrophic – there is no way to sugarcoat it: one of the world’s best collections of old masters was discovered by just 193,000 visitors. The fact that a special exhibition of such stature as the one on Hugo van der Goes could not record more than 81,000 visits is, to put it mildly, embarrassing. On the other hand, the slightly positive figures at the Hamburger Bahnhof are encouraging, with 367,000 visits this time. Contemporary art, which is more subject to fluctuations than antiquities, for example, has a noticeably solid footing in Berlin, a success also for the management duo Fellrath/Bardaouil, who have been in office since the beginning of 2022.
The State Library has maintained its level of 934,000 visits and 1.1 million out-of-house loans, and has even increased slightly compared to pre-Corona times. What has not grown, or only slightly, is the number of media units in the collection, from 12.2 to 12.3 million. That is hardly more than is published annually in the German-speaking book market alone. It is obvious that the number of printed journals continued to decline. But the fact that the number of electronic journals was also reduced and actually collapsed, from 69,000 to 42,000, still requires further explanation.
All in all, the annual report presented by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation for 2023 is unspectacular. Business as usualThis is certainly good news, given the excitement surrounding the future direction of the massive foundation.
