What is special about German museums

---

Michael Hierholzer Mr. Hollein, does the museum at the beginning of the 21st century have duties that go beyond the three traditional areas of activity - collecting, conserving, educating?
Those continue to be the fundamental duties of the museum. However, education is playing an increasingly greater role. It is also the area that will certainly grow even more important in the future. Today the museum is increasingly becoming a place that enables people to have experiences different from those gained in front of a television set or a computer. That is because a museum is concerned with the cult of authenticity, because it cultivates a different way of dealing with information. Today, however, self-preservation has also become an essential task of the museum - in the general sense that the museum must be preserved as a model and in the concrete sense that the individual institutions need to maintain a sound financial basis. These are all factors that will also shape the fundamental duties of the museum.
The educated middle class, which invented the museum in the 19th century as the centre for representing and expressing its understanding of itself, is no longer the intellectual and financial supporter of this cultural institution. What kind of people are you dealing with today?
The social backgrounds of the visiting public are very heterogeneous. You have to take them all seriously in terms of their expectations and their level of knowledge. The audience today is different from what it was 50 years ago, but visitors continue to be the basis upon which a museum receives support - from public funds, from patrons and sponsors.
The Stadel Art Museum, of which you have been director since January 2006, is based on a foundation established by a Frankfurt businessman in the year 1815. Is that again a model for other museums?
A museum as a foundation under civil law is an unusual form of organisation in Germany and the whole of Europe. As a rule, Germany's major museums stem from aristocratic collections. To that extent, the Stadel plays a special role and we actually like saying that the Stadel is the oldest and also most important museum foundation in Germany. Now, almost 200 years after it was founded, this civil-law foundation is proving to be probably the most progressive organisational form for a museum and also the best basis for the future. We shall therefore see a whole series of institutions moving in a similar direction. That, however, also has an impact on tradition, history and identification. It is not very easy to rapidly transform a former royal collection that has always been funded by the state into a civil-law foundation, thereby transferring responsibility to private citizens.
There are some 6,000 museums in Germany, of which roughly 600 alone are devoted to presenting art. In your opinion, what distinguishes the German museum landscape, what makes it different?
In Germany we have an unbelievably strong, federally structured cultural landscape. That is one of the counry's very special advantages, which also differentiates it from other countries. There is an urgent need to maintain and further develop this system. But it is precisely here that the situation is changing: museums can now no longer fulfil their core duties of collecting, conserving and informing only with funding from the public sector. Each individual institution must now look for its own solution.
Is a museum that doesn't develop its collection a dead museum?
It is certainly an inflexible museum if the history of the collection cannot be continued, cannot be contrasted. It then becomes a completed project, although that is what a museum should never be.
German museums frequently attract international attention with major exhibitions. They attract large numbers of visitors who would perhaps otherwise not have been drawn to art so easily. What value do these special exhibitions have for museum work today?
We must see the exhibition as a manifestation of a research concept that exists not only before, but also after the exhibition. An exhibition is merely the public phase of a long research process. It attracts attention; it is intended to draw a large number of visitors. However, this also has a direct impact on the work in the museum. The items of a collection also have to be repeatedly presented in special exhibitions - a path we are currently following at the Stadel. We must view the collection as something that never stands still, that always has something new to offer the visiting public.
People are again talking more about national identity: can museums contribute to its creation?
On that subject I am rather cautious. Museums can present a national identity if one exists. A museum can't create something that isn't there, but it can trenchantly reveal something that is not immediately obvious. In that sense, a museum can indeed create clarity.
And what about a European identity? Can museums promote that?
We are constantly working on a European identity by showing how strong the connections, ties and interrelationships have always been between individual European regions and cultures. Yet we must also recognise that museums are a stronghold of a Eurocentric understanding of art and culture. That does have positive aspects, but we often ignore developments in art history outside Europe.
These are also insights that ensue from museum visits. What significance do museums have for general education?
An increasingly greater significance. The broader our public and the more diverse their levels of knowledge and the ways in which they approach our collections, the greater our duty becomes as an institution of education. We now compensate for a number of things that used to be done elsewhere. Museum education and didactics have become so important today that entire departments with large numbers of personnel are concerned with imparting knowledge. That was not the case 30 years ago. The main thing here is creating an understanding of the institution and what it contains as well as an educational mission that goes beyond the museum.
On the other hand, in recent years museums have increasingly become "events centres." Doesn't that contradict the idea of museums as centres of education?
I don't see it that way. It really ought to be clear that a museum visit is part of our leisure activity. And education can also take place in a playful way. That doesn't lead to a degradation of the institution.
— Deuschland