Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and Deutsche Welle finalise media partnership
Press release from 12/21/2006
Deutsche Welle and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation have agreed to work more closely together as partners in the future. All three pillars of Deutsche Welle - DW-TV, DW-WORLD and DW-RADIO - will be increasingly focussing on outstanding events in the context of current affairs reporting, particularly at the National Museums in Berlin, but also at the State Library and the Ibero-American Institute. Joint projects are also planned: From January, DW-TV's cultural magazine programme "Kultur. 21" will broadcast a twelve-part series on collection items from the Foundation's institutions: "Mein Kunst-Stück". Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, is delighted about the cooperation: "More than 50 per cent of museum visitors are already long-distance tourists. The co-operation with Deutsche Welle will make our collections even better known worldwide."
The foundation is clearly setting the tone abroad with its metropolitan programme: The National Museums in Berlin organise major exhibitions on the basis of international collaborations, which regularly achieve sensational visitor numbers. For example, two years ago well over 1 million visitors saw the exhibition "Arte da Africa" curated by the Ethnological Museum Berlin in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, last year over half a million visitors saw the exhibition "Visions of the Divine - Masterpieces of the Museum Island Berlin" in Tokyo and Kobe, over 600,000 visited the Berlin Egyptian collection in Mexico City. There were further exhibitions in Moscow, Paris, Dublin and Taipei. The Brazilian presentation "Deuses Gregos" by the Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities is currently attracting record numbers of visitors. It has already attracted 300,000 visitors. Further exhibitions, for example in China, will follow. With these guest performances, the collections convey the German capital as a cultural metropolis and allow audiences all over the world to share in Berlin's cultural treasures. In return, high-calibre special exhibitions come to Berlin, which also attract a wide audience to the museums.
Through the co-operation with Deutsche Welle, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation will present itself more internationally and thus also promote Berlin and Germany. Art and culture will raise the profile of Germany abroad and strengthen interest in dialogue.