One does not want to know exactly who is cursing Monika Grütters in Berlin. The old and new Culture Minister of State has announced via a daily paper, who is her favorite candidate for the Generalintendanz in the Humboldt Forum - and thus many high-ranking cultural officials presented their candidate Hartmut Dorgerloh actually right along.

As a reminder: The Humboldt Forum is to move into the new old city palace as the main tenant, it will be a mixed form of museum, cultural center and science laboratory. Sounded for a while for the future. But the project has increasingly critics, the ethnological collections that are to be shown in the imitation castle are considered historically strained, much came in and because of the colonial times to Berlin. Germany has hardly worked up this part of its history - but soon exposes the non-European artefacts behind neo-Prussian facades.

Much is still pretty nebulous. The three so-called founding directors, who had been brought in to take over the initial installation of the castle (more precisely: the Humboldt Forum and its museum areas), only condensed the fog. These three interior designers - among them the famous British museum expert Neil MacGregor, 71 - are supposed to pretend visions, but do this job only part-time.

Land of poets, thinkers and collectors

One of them expresses the request, one may once again celebrate another Germany in the castle, Germany before the Nazi dictatorship, the land of poets, thinkers and collectors. However, before the Nazi dictatorship, Germany was not always a showpiece - which is precisely what the ethnological objects recall.

The new, yet to be appointed general manager is to become a successor to these three incumbent founding directors, the final man of the castle, who cherish the visions of his part-time predecessors, maintain and occasionally dust. It is not good for the castle, the visions for it, and the current personnel policy does not make it any better.

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Humboldt Forum: He should become Berlin's cultural mediator

So now, in her own way, Grütters has made it clear who she wants. Namely Hartmut Dorgerloh, who heads the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. Sanssouci Palace, exhibitions on treasures and monarchy, that's what you associate with it. 2018 should be under the motto "At table!" the former courtly food culture is at the center of activities.

Who would not have imagined everything for this center of world cultures, which the Humboldt Forum claims to want? A personality accustomed to communicating with a wide variety of cultures, even more obvious, perhaps even from a non-European country.

Silent administrator

Now it will probably be someone who primarily represents the Prussian cultural bureaucracy. Although the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg suffers from a declining number of visitors, all in all, Dorgerloh has managed it properly and above all quietly. In gratitude that he did not do anything wrong from Grütters' point of view, he is now allowed to take over the one, the special castle in the city, which is to be completed by the end of 2019 after all the destination castles.

A career of Grütter's grace. What the others want, does not matter, because actually the many-headed foundation Humboldt Forum is yet to decide, but only actually. Maybe some of these minds do not even bother that Grütters is about to jump in, maybe something has been tuned to somebody, either way, they're all going to be embarrassed. However, Dorgerloh will not be perceived in the future either, without thinking of Grütters and her political form. So feudal is this with democracy in 2018.

Only on Monday it had been decided who (under the General Intendant) should be the head of the museum lock collections, namely Lars-Christian Koch, a music ethnologist. He got the job because the actual candidate, the renowned Stuttgart museum director Inés de Castro, had canceled. With Koch you have a house call, he is recruited from the staff of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (to which the collections belong). He was a departmental director until he recently became interim director of the Ethnological Museum.

Both new recruits know how Hierarchy works in Berlin: complicated and simple at the same time. At the Humboldt Forum Hierarchy means that even the general manager has little to say as the lord of the castle, and above him there is the board of trustees - who, as you can see now, meet and bow down, which the Minister of Culture proposes. The large project City Palace is finally incorporated into the provincial, the small-Klein of the Berlin dealer.

Unless the Foundation Council ensures a surprise.