Governing citizen

The emissaries of the old Berlin coalition, which is also to become the new one, hold tight. Where there is nothing to be heard about the most pressing issues such as housing construction, there is even more silence about culture. Could it actually be that in the days and weeks that will be decisive for the years to come, the citizens of the city are condemned to just waiting?

One of the people who may have the chance to speak after reading this question is Bernd Schultz. The Berlin jargon named him a “governing citizen” years ago. The flippant title means two things: on the one hand, that Schultz, the founder and long-time boss of the auction house “Grisebach”, is a citizen in the sense of Theodor Mommsen, on the other hand that he does not hesitate to utter sentences that are not understood as anything other than instructions are. Schultz gets cultural and city politics on the go, but – and this fundamentally distinguishes him from the many who always only demand – he certifies each of his concerns through his own performance, his own money and actions.

For example, he initiated the project of a museum in exile that is to be built behind the ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof. Before anyone from Berlin politics could make the matter their own, Schultz put his heart and soul into the collection of important artist’s drawings for auction in his own house in order to make the six and a half million euros the foundation of the museum. With every idea that comes to him, one can assume that it is already on the way to being realized at that very moment.

His uneasy spirit hangs on the Exile Museum, which is to be built at Anhalter Bahnhof

This was the case with the art fair “Orangery”, which Schultz, who had a late career but then turned all the more energetically into a gallery owner and dealer, initiated in 1982 in order to give back to the bobbing West Berlin a corner of the importance that the city as a whole had before the Nazi regime. Regime had possessed. At that time it was the world metropolis of the art trade. From 1986, Schultz set his ambition with the auction house “Villa Grisebach” to get some of it back in the long term. The fact that the name is borrowed from the beautiful town house, which itself first had to be rescued in order not to be demolished in favor of car traffic, shows, for example, that Schultz is always concerned with the whole of the city.

Born in 1941 into a Bremen merchant family, he refused the career path he had initially chosen as a merchant, studied art history and quickly became a partner in the West Berlin gallery Pels-Leusden, which he had brought forward. An excellent connoisseur and catcher of people, he inspired the Deutsche Bank to save what was almost the last urban villa ensemble in Charlottenburg (he later bought the villa from which he was named). And he worked – spurred on by Richard von Weizsäcker’s appearance as Governing Mayor of Halbstadt – in the rescue of Watteau’s “Kythera” painting in Charlottenburg Palace. This last-minute campaign signaled to him what civic action is capable of when it is driven by one’s own appearance.

The job as a merchant, which Schultz initially did not want to take up, he passed as head of the world-renowned auction house with the greatest conceivable success. His uneasy spirit depends on the Exile Museum, for which he created a high-performance structure from scratch and won like-minded fellow campaigners, including the Nobel Prize winner for literature Herta Müller. The currently meeting coalition would do well to put the museum project on the political agenda before Bernd Schultz pushes it there with all his authority. This city citizen celebrates his 80th birthday this Sunday, if he finds the time.