In the maze of the Humboldt Forum: Hartmut Dorgerloh’s contract extended

The news comes as a bit of a surprise. Hartmut Dorgerloh will remain General Director of the Humboldt Forum until 2028. The Board of Trustees, chaired by Claudia Roth, has extended his contract by five years. Didn’t the Minister of State for Culture want to change the structures in the highly complicated palace complex?

Difficult from the start

Hartmut Dorgerloh, in office since June 2018, is a proven cultural manager and a skilled pragmatist. Probably not a visionary: But even the founding director was not happy with high-flying plans. Dorgerloh has always tried to make the best of the situation over the past five years; And then there was the pandemic.

As the long name suggests, the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace is based on a fundamental planning problem. Inside and outside only get along to a limited extent. Castle nostalgia and forward-looking cultural institution: That doesn’t fit mentally well. And even less since the affixing of the cross and the pious inscription on the dome.

One roof, many actors. The polyphony is already inherent in the cooperation between the partners, according to the communication on Dorgerloh’s further commitment. The Humboldt Forum Foundation, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation with the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, the Humboldt University and the City Museum work here. The general director has to deal with a number of museum directors, and they determine what is happening in the exhibition and the collection policy.

Recently there was talk of transferring the Humboldt Forum to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation – which in turn is undergoing lengthy reforms. For now, the status quo remains. In spite of the nice title, the general manager cannot freely switch and rule and help the giant house to a cultural corporate identity.

Germany’s largest cultural project likes to console itself with the fact that it is not finished and that it is in a learning process. The Prussian bureaucracy got on the nerves of the Humboldt brothers more than 200 years ago. They preferred to stay away from Berlin.