Cash-strapped city councils in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most densely populated state, have come under fire for targeting culture to plug the holes in their balance sheets.
The small city of Leverkusen, near Cologne, made headlines in February when its Museum Morsbroich was threatened with closure. The artist Gerhard Richter called the plans “alarming” in an open letter to the city’s mayor. He said that “[a public art collection] is not a financial investment that can be plundered depending on the cash situation”.
The museum occupies a special place in the country’s cultural life. It was Germany’s first museum dedicated to Modern and contemporary art to open after the Second World War. During the Nazi era such art was mostly banned or destroyed. The international accountancy firm KPMG concluded that shutting the museum would save the indebted city around €778,450 annually. As we went to press, a petition supporting the museum had attracted 10,000 signatures.
“If we close the museum, Leverkusen will be much poorer than it is today,” says Roswitha Arnold, the city’s head of cultural affairs. “It’s definitely the wrong decision. Culture is an investment in the future and gives our city its identity.”
Other museums in the region, including the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, the Kunstmuseum Bochum and the Deutsches Museum in Bonn, have come under threat in recent years. But protests have helped keep all of them in operation for now.
Some say that Germany simply has more museums than it can sustain. According to Christiane Lange, the director of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 700 new museums have opened in the country since 1990. “All these museums are competing for funding, visitors and attention,” she told the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Not just museums have been feeling the pinch; state-controlled businesses are affected too. The Cologne-based public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk announced that its “difficult budgetary situation” had forced it to sell 37 works from its collection—including paintings by Max Beckmann and Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner—at Christie’s London on 21 and 22 June. The plans were criticised by Germany’s culture minister, Monika Grütters, who said: “Art should not be uncontrollably demoted to purely speculative objects.”
NRW is Germany’s industrial heartland and its most important region for steel production, the chemical industry and energy generation. As these traditional sectors have declined, NRW’s economy has started lagging and culture spending has become an easy target.
“Local authorities are under no obligation to finance culture, so when it comes to budget cuts, the voluntary services are always the first victims,” says Eckart Köhne, the president of the German museums association. “But culture gives little financial respite as it generally only takes up around 1-2% of the total budget.”
To reduce the debt of local authorities, in 2012 NRW introduced a bailout programme for the poorest cities in the region. In exchange for the fiscal aid, however, these financially weak local authorities are contractually obliged to balance their budgets. The scheme, in which Leverkusen is participating, put the Museum Morsbroich under the scrutiny of KPMG. But the city’s department of cultural affairs says the data used in the report is inaccurate. Local authorities have therefore delayed the decision on the museum’s future until the autumn (it was due to be made on 27 June).
Roswitha Arnold hopes to find the money to fill the budget deficit in other areas. She says: “We are obligated to fulfil certain requirements. But we can’t totally collapse the cultural affairs in our city.”