2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

On 26 May 2025, the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, chaired by Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer, approved the agreement between the public sector and the House of Hohenzollern on disputed ownership issues and authorised the President of the SPK to do everything possible to implement these agreements.

SPK President Hermann Parzingerexplains: "The agreement with the House of Hohenzollern really is a great success in the interests of our museum visitors. They will benefit the most, as many important artefacts have now been secured for the public once and for all. I would like to thank everyone who was involved in this successful negotiation - the BKM with the former Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth and the current incumbent Wolfram Weimer, also and especially the former head of office Andreas Görgen, and the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. The House of Hohenzollern and Georg Friedrich Prince of Prussia and, of course, my colleagues Christoph Vogtherr from the SPSG and Raphael Gross from the DHM."
Since the 1990s, there have been negotiations with the House of Hohenzollern about the return of objects that were in the collections of the SPK, the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation and the German Historical Museum. The Hohenzollerns had submitted applications under the Compensation and Equalisation Act (EALG) in the course of German unification. The SPK was initially concerned with collections from the Hohenzollern Museum in Monbijou Palace, which had been transported to the Soviet Union after the war and returned to the GDR at the end of the 1950s.

As the negotiations progressed, it became increasingly clear that complex legal and provenance issues were at stake here, which had their origins in the Weimar Republic. As early as 1925/26, an agreement had been reached in the so-called "Property Distribution Treaty" following the end of the monarchy on what was to be state property in future and what was to be private property. The provisions of this agreement were not clearly formulated with regard to various property items and the negotiating parties were unable to reach an agreement on who was entitled to the property. There was hardly any progress in the negotiations for many years, apart from the drawing up and exchange of special lists of the disputed assets.

The solution that has now been negotiated provides for the establishment of a foundation under private law to settle the disputes, to which ownership of the disputed assets will be transferred. The founders are the Federal Republic of Germany, the states of Berlin and Brandenburg, the Prussian Cultural Heritage and Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundations, the German Historical Museum and Georg Friedrich Prince of Prussia. The founders transfer their ownership claims to the disputed works to the new foundation. The board of the new foundation, named "Stiftung Hohenzollernscher Kunstbesitz", is made up of the presidents of the Prussian Cultural Heritage and German Historical Museum Foundations and the Director General of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation. The Foundation's supervisory body is a Board of Trustees consisting of six representatives of the public sector and three representatives appointed by the House of Hohenzollern. The final agreement settles all claims of the House of Hohenzollern against the three cultural heritage institutions.

The SPK is contributing 1685 works to the new foundation. These include important porcelain items such as the dinner service for the Breslau City Palace acquired by Frederick II in 1750, which was made especially for this location in 1767 in the recently founded Königliche Porzellan Manufaktur Berlin (KPM). In terms of art and cultural history, these artefacts are of outstanding importance and allow for cross-references to the holdings of the Museum of Decorative Arts. For decades, they have formed an integral part of the permanent collection presentations at both locations of the Kunstgewerbemuseum (at the Kulturforum and in Schloss Köpenick) and can now continue to be shown there.

As part of the solution that has been found, a compensation arrangement has also been agreed which stipulates that the House of Hohenzollern will receive back certain objects from the Hohenzollern Museum's old collection in return for relinquishing its ownership rights to the objects that are transferred to the foundation. This mainly concerns objects of lesser art-historical significance, which the museums had already realised around ten years ago could be given away without significantly affecting the collection. The SPK is giving away a total of 2999 individual objects, including 2122 coins, for which duplicates exist in the holdings of the Coin Cabinet, and personal objects such as fans, boxes, individual porcelains and similar items. In addition, three more important objects will be sold. These are a table with a porcelain top based on a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Ludwig Hesse for the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur (KPM) from 1832 and a board game with 30 pieces from the collection of the Kunstgewerbemuseum. The SPK is also donating the painting "View of Potsdam from the Brauhausberg" by Karl Lindemann-Frommel (around 1845) from the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie.

Other important works of art will remain the property of the SPK: the dispute over the so-called "19 list" with a total of 19 works of art of outstanding importance from the SPK and SPSG has now been settled. The parties had differing views on whether these belonged to the state or the House of Hohenzollern. From this list, the SPK collections include the so-called Princess Group by Schadow and the painting "The Dance" by Watteau. All of these objects have now been clearly assigned to the public domain. The framework contract for the agreed solution also stipulates that the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage will receive further archive holdings that are currently located at Hohenzollern Castle. The so-called "Castle Archives" contain significant holdings on Prussian history and the history of the Hohenzollerns, particularly in the 20th century, and will in future supplement the records on the history of the House of Hohenzollern already held in the Secret State Archives, most of which end with the fall of the monarchy around 1918.

Press photos:www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/newsroom/presse/pressebilder.html