Islam debate, Russia, constitutional complaint: Prussian Cultural Heritage Yearbook 2015 published
Press release from 01/31/2017
In the 51st volume of the yearbook, you can find out, among other things, how museums are challenged by the current debate about immigration and isolation - but also that a red ICE would sound louder than a green one, that we look at our mobile phones an average of 88 times a day, that Goethe already had a price list for plaster moulding and what connects northern Chile with Berlin's electric cars.
Two highly topical articles on the debate about Islam: Stefan Weber, Director of the Museum of Islamic Art at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, explains what museums can achieve in this context - he argues in favour of understanding cultural education as an opportunity for self-reflection and debate. His colleague Nanette Snoep from the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony) writes about how her museums are setting an example against Pegida.
Another focus of the 2015 yearbook is cooperation with Russian museums: after a review of 20 years of German-Russian cooperation on objects relocated due to the war, two texts present a new research project on sculptures long thought lost, including some by Donatello. Vasily Rastorguev, curator at the Pushkin Museum, describes how the works made their way from Berlin to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow after the Second World War.
Hermann Parzinger discusses what the concept of "Shared Heritage" actually means in practice for the Humboldt Forum. The Humboldt Forum's digital day after tomorrow was the topic of the "perspektiven15" future conference - some of the contributions are included in the yearbook: Biologist Martin Korte, for example, focuses on the influence of digital media on our brains, while Sara Devine from the Brooklyn Museum reports on the idea of creating a dynamic and approachable museum.
The yearbook also focuses on the protection of cultural assets. It deals with the changing role of archaeological museums in the 21st century, which is increasingly shifting from collecting to protecting objects, and with a joint German-Egyptian excavation project. Ursula Hartwieg from the Coordination Centre for the Preservation of Written Cultural Property will explain that the protection of cultural property, especially written cultural property, must be coordinated and what role politics and institutions have to play in this.
Many other articles also offer insights into the work of the foundation's institutions, such as Jörg Magenau's text on the Wagenbach and Aufbau publishing archives, with which German-German history and great literature become the property of the Berlin State Library. About the "Virtual Concert Hall" at the State Institute for Music Research. About archive relocations during the Second World War. On the social consequences of lithium mining in Atacama. About the completed provenance research project on the "Gallery of the 20th Century". And about the first constitutional complaint against a Federal President - triggered in 1957 by the establishment of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
- Jahrbuch Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Vol. LI / 2015, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2016; 472 pages with 179 illustrations, 155 of which are in colour; ISBN 978-3-7861-2780-2, ISSN 0342-0124; price: €35.00.
Review copies are available from Gebr.
Some selected texts from the yearbook are also available as free downloads on the foundation's website .