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Dresden (dpa) - The corona-related restrictions in the museums make the so-called provenance research, i.e. researching the origin of objects in the collections, more difficult. The Dresden art historian Gilbert Lupfer, director of the German Center for Cultural Property Losses (Magdeburg), sees her "currently severely disabled". Distance and access restrictions in offices are a challenge, in the home office only data maintenance and image processing are possible. "And important external archives, indispensable for research in the Nazi area, for example, are more difficult to access." The waiting list for appointments in the Federal Archives will last until 2022 because the number of places in the reading rooms is reduced due to the corona. "This is a problem because a lot of the files have not yet been digitized."
According to Lupfer, the awareness of the task at public institutions has grown in the past.
This is also evident in the interest in the “first check” offer of the Magdeburg Center, the central national and international point of contact for illegal confiscation of cultural property in museums, libraries and archives.
This allows smaller museums or libraries to get a rough overview of their holdings.
According to Lupfer, this is used in Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Bavaria.
Since the center was founded in 2015, 14 projects have been funded with around 530,000 euros in the area of Nazi looted property.
This year, according to Lupfer, over 40 applications were received for the spring, "and a similar dimension is also emerging for the autumn".
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Lupfer fears that the effects of the corona pandemic could slow the process down and that funding could become a problem.
It is questionable whether provenance research will take a back seat when budgets are tight as a result of the pandemic.
At the moment, "the best will to promote funding is also there politically," says the head of the research department at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) and warns: "It remains an important and permanent task, a moral and political obligation that must be done."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210421-99-287132 / 2