Latest news with #PrussianCulturalHeritageFoundation
Asharq Al-Awsat
07-05-2025
- Business
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Saudi Museums Commission, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to Deepen Museum Collaboration
The Saudi Museums Commission, one of the eleven sector-specific commissions under the Ministry of Culture, and Germany's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) have taken a significant step forward in their cultural partnership by activating an executive program focused on long-term collaboration in the museum sector. Central to this initiative is the development of a loan index, outlining a selection of artworks and artifacts from the SPK's various Berlin-based museums to be shared with the Museums Commission over a five-year period. This loan program forms part of the broader executive program signed by both parties. The agreement outlines key areas of cooperation, including joint exhibitions in art and archaeology, long-term loans, strategic cultural projects, and capacity building through training and residencies. Two dedicated training programs have been agreed upon as part of this collaboration. One of the flagship initiatives, Museums in Motion, will bring together up to 80 cultural and museum professionals from both countries over five years through four interdisciplinary training sessions. Participants will engage in joint learning activities in both countries, fostering sustained dialogue, professional exchange, deeper cross-cultural understanding, and long-term institutional partnerships. In a parallel initiative with the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (National Gallery of Contemporary Art) in Berlin, a professional secondment program will support talent development in the museum field. Over the next five years, experts from Hamburger Bahnhof will contribute to training and mentorship, fostering the exchange of knowledge and best practices in museum management and curation. This executive program reflects the Kingdom's commitment to strengthening international cultural dialogue and advancing professional exchange in the global museum community.
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The complicity of Leni Riefenstahl
Leni Riefenstahl welcomes Adolf Hitler to her villa in Berlin, in 1937. Photo by Prod DB © Bayrische Staatsbibliothek – Vinc/Alamy There has been a remarkable documentary about Leni Riefenstahl before. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) was commissioned by Riefenstahl herself and she participated in it fully. In ridiculously good shape at the age of 90, she revisited the key locations of her life – the mountains, where she starred in her early romantic dramas; Nuremberg, where the Nazi rallies were held and she made Triumph of the Will (1935); the stadium in Berlin where she made Olympia (1938) – and gave prolonged, combative interviews. Again and again, she insisted that art had nothing to do with politics: 'I just observed and tried to film it well,' she said. As far as she was concerned, she claimed, Hitler's speeches might just as well have been about trees or fish as politics. The documentary's director, Ray Müller, who took on the task after many had shied away from it, adopted a leisurely approach, indulgently covering her whole career, from her first appearance as a dancer in the early Twenties, to her photographic work in the Sixties and Seventies among the Nuba people of Sudan. This wonderful, horrible life eventually clocked in at a little more than three hours long: Müller, while fulfilling his assignment, had taken care to give Riefenstahl enough rope to hang herself. You cannot mistake what she was really like. The documentary deservedly won an Emmy. Riefenstahl died in 2003, but her partner and collaborator, Horst Kettner, whom she had been with since she was 60 and he 20, lived until 2016. Her archive, including some 700 boxes of tapes, film footage, photos and documents, was then bequeathed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. The German TV presenter Sandra Maischberger, who had conducted the last major interview with Riefenstahl in 2002 and come away realising she had been deceived, made a deal to have the archive sorted and catalogued in exchange for the rights to use it for this new documentary. As producer, she recruited Andres Veiel, best known for his 2017 film about Joseph Beuys, as director. The intention, clearly, was to convict Riefenstahl of active collaboration with Nazi crimes at last. Riefenstahl, the result, consists entirely of archival material. The approach sounds stultifying, but this is a riveting watch, a masterclass in how to animate such material through inventive treatment. Montage and cross-cutting are always effective in documentaries, but Riefenstahl goes much further. The old media – slides, cassette tapes, crumpled prints of photos and film stock – are transformed. The stills are never still, the camera moving across them, panning in or out. The footage of Riefenstahl, on screen or in television interview, is altered by close-ups, slow motion, silencing: alienation effects that make us observe her, not just listen. The picture quality throughout is astonishing. There is a terrific minimalist score by Freya Arde, pulsing and rattling, which has the effect of keeping us in the present, distancing us from what we are seeing. The subject is not so much Riefenstahl's career itself but her unrepentant management of her reputation until the end of her life. 'For something to be remembered, other things must be forgotten,' we are ominously told at the outset, as if full disclosure is on the way. Yet it has to be said that this archive, doubtless previously edited by Riefenstahl, the control freak's control freak, yields little compelling new evidence for such a posthumous conviction. There's a suggestion that, during her very brief time as a war correspondent in Poland, she ordered some Jews to be removed from the scene, and that this set direction was taken literally and they were shot. But it remains hearsay. She was post-truth before the concept had been invented. She always insisted that she, like many other Germans, knew nothing at all of Hitler's crimes until the very end of the war, but, implausible as that may be, nothing here conclusively proves otherwise. The film ends with a tape of a phone call from a supporter telling her, codedly, that in one or two generations, Germany will return to 'morality, decency and virtue'. 'Yes, the German people are pre-destined for that,' she agrees. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The film-makers clearly intend this film as a warning from history, in the context of the rise of the AfD. It forms an essential coda to the 1993 film. The most telling critique of Riefenstahl's career, however, remains Susan Sontag's 1974 takedown of her work for the New York Review. For it is Riefenstahl's films themselves that best embody and most reveal her brutal faith in the victory of the strong and beautiful. 'Riefenstahl' is in cinemas now [See also: David Attenborough at 99: 'Life will almost certainly find a way'] Related
Saudi Gazette
07-05-2025
- Business
- Saudi Gazette
Saudi Museums Commission and Germany's SPK launch executive program to boost museum collaboration
RIYADH — The Saudi Museums Commission and Germany's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) have activated an Executive Program to deepen long-term cooperation across the museum sector, marking a major milestone in bilateral cultural collaboration. The program includes the creation of a loan index featuring selected artworks and artifacts from SPK's Berlin-based museums to be shared with the Museums Commission over a five-year period. It also covers joint exhibitions in art and archaeology, strategic cultural initiatives, and capacity-building through training and residencies. A key feature of the partnership is Museums in Motion, a flagship initiative set to unite up to 80 cultural professionals from both nations through four interdisciplinary training sessions held in Saudi Arabia and Germany. The program aims to foster professional exchange and long-term institutional partnerships. Additionally, a secondment initiative with Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart will support Saudi talent development in museum management and curation. Over five years, SPK experts will provide training, mentorship, and collaborative knowledge-sharing. — SG
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A $300 Million Art Trove and the Labyrinth of Nazi-Era Art Claims
A new chapter has opened in a bitter 17-year battle for the Guelph Treasure, one of the most valuable art troves claimed by the heirs of Jewish victims of Nazi rule, after the discovery of documents in a German archive indicating that its sale in 1935 was made under duress. The trove, estimated to be worth $300 million, consists of gem-encrusted medieval ecclesiastical artifacts, primarily reliquaries and crosses. The most valuable of these is a 12th-century reliquary shaped like a church and made of gold, silver and copper; it is adorned with figurines of biblical characters carved out of walrus tusk. The dispute dates back to 2008, when the heirs of four art dealers who were members of a consortium of Jewish owners of the Guelph Treasure filed a claim with the current holder, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. Since then, the case has grown ever more complicated, in part because the composition of the consortium cannot be fully reconstructed, despite much research. And now, there is a new claim, by the heir of a consortium member, Alice Koch, whose interests had not been considered before. The claim comes as Germany considers a major change in settling restitution disputes. The government has announced it will dismantle its advisory commission on Nazi-looted art and replace it with a binding arbitration tribunal, but the timing of this switch is not yet clear. Today, the Guelph pieces are prize exhibits at the Museum of Applied Art in Berlin, which is overseen by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Earlier this month the foundation agreed to hold a new hearing with the German government's advisory commission on Nazi-looted art because of the fresh evidence that the documents revealed. Lawyers representing the Koch heir, whose great-grandmother owned 25 percent of the Guelph Treasure, discovered the German archival documents, which show that Koch was forced to pay the punitive 'Reich flight tax' in October 1935 before fleeing to Switzerland. She used her proceeds from the sale of the Guelph Treasure, which took place four months earlier, to pay the Nazi regime's bill for 1.2 million Reichsmarks, said Jörg Rosbach, the Berlin lawyer representing one of Koch's heirs. The sum is equivalent to millions of dollars today. 'This was a discriminatory tax used against Jews,' Rosbach said. 'One of the important questions in determining whether a sale was under duress is whether the seller was able to dispose of the revenue freely. Alice Koch was not.' In 2014, the German advisory panel rejected the claim by the heirs of four dealers who were part of the consortium — a claim in which Koch's heirs had no part. In a statement explaining its reasoning, the commission said that while it was 'aware of the difficult fate of the art dealers and of their persecution during the Nazi period,' there was no indication 'that points to the art dealers and their business partners having been pressured during the negotiations.' The heirs of the four dealers — Isaak Rosenbaum, Saemy Rosenberg, Julius Falk Goldschmidt and Zacharias Max Hackenbroch — then pursued their claim in a U.S. lawsuit, right up to the Supreme Court. Those legal proceedings ended in July 2023 after the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia confirmed a previous decision that U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction over the case. The consortium bought the collection in 1929 with the intention of selling it for profit. They sold some 40 items, primarily in the United States. The heirs' claims concern the remaining 44, which were sold in 1935 to the state of Prussia, then governed by Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler's top lieutenant. Rosbach contacted the foundation in 2022 with the new evidence supporting Koch's claim. 'We agreed that we would start talks as soon as the court proceedings on the Guelph Treasure in the U.S. came to an end,' Rosbach said. By April of last year, negotiations still had not started, so he submitted a claim on behalf of Koch's heir to the advisory commission, he said. Markus Stötzel, the lawyer representing the heirs of the four dealers, also filed a fresh claim with the German advisory commission around the same time. But for the advisory panel on Nazi-looted art to consider a claim, both parties must consent. After accusations of 'delaying tactics' by the heirs, and under pressure from the advisory commission and the German culture minister, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation agreed to a commission hearing. The discovery of the documents introduces 'a new aspect that we have to take very seriously,' said Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. 'This is a very complex, very convoluted case, and it has to be conducted with due care,' Parzinger said. He said the delay in agreeing to a hearing was because the foundation was trying to identify all the potential claimants for the treasure. 'Despite comprehensive research by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the original composition of the consortium that sold the Guelph Treasure in 1935 is not fully known,' the foundation said in a statement. This tangled case may be among the last that the German advisory panel tackles. The German government and 16 states have announced plans to dismantle the commission and replace it with the arbitration tribunal whose decisions will be binding. The new tribunal will also permit claimants to have unilateral access to it, rather than the current requirement that the holder of an artwork must also consent. The advisory commission's requirement for consent from both parties has long frustrated heirs because, in some cases, the trustees of German museums have simply refused to refer a dispute to the panel. But the arbitration tribunal has yet to take shape. Its introduction, planned for this year, is likely to be overseen by a new government led by Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union. (Negotiations with the Social Democratic Party, his preferred coalition partner, are still in the early phases, and it may be weeks before a new culture minister is named.) Regardless of the new government's composition, 'I think the plan to introduce arbitration has reached the point of no return,' said Benjamin Lahusen, a law professor at the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder. Until the tribunal starts work, however, the advisory commission remains the recourse for claimants. Adding to the complexity of the case is a third group of claimants, the heirs of Hermann Netter and another of Koch's heirs, who are represented by another law firm. Netter was a jeweler who owned 25 percent of the Guelph Treasure. Those heirs' lawyers have initiated talks with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation but have not submitted a formal claim.
