It cannot be denied that the former banker Ehrhardt Bödecker, who died in 2016, represented right-wing and anti-Semitic positions in word and writing.

Bödecker's family has now also admitted this in a lawyer letter in which they also paid tribute to the services of the “passionate defender of the achievements of Prussia and the Empire”, for example in the publication of the writings of the German-Jewish publicist Theodor Wolff.

The question is what this realization means for the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace, for the reconstruction of which Bödecker and his wife donated more than one million euros.

The family asks to remove the medallion in the passage from the west portal to the Eosanderhof, with which the couple, like all major donors, was honored.

At the same time, the Humboldt Forum Foundation announced that it would commission “a renowned contemporary history institute” to investigate the allegations against Bödecker.

Certificate of Reputation for Donors?

For the publicist and architecture professor Philipp Oswalt, who sparked the debate with an article in the Berliner Tagesspiegel, this does not go far enough. In a circular he called for a thorough examination of the castle facade patrons in order to clarify how “right-wing extremists” would have influenced the building project. Should every single donor now submit a political certificate of good repute? It should come as no surprise that among the forty-five thousand people who responded to the Berliner Schloss association's appeal for donations, there were hardly any Left Party voters, but many who were nostalgic for Prussia.

The Bödecker case did not embarrass the Schlossverein, whose founder Wilhelm von Boddien freely admits that when accepting money, attention was paid not to convictions, but to civil reputation. The federal policy, which has made the reconstruction of the baroque facades a private matter, is disgraced. The short-term advantages of the mixed financing of the Humboldt Forum, which the then building minister Tiefensee negotiated with the Berlin mayor Wowereit in 2006, have turned into long-term disadvantages. First, a cross was placed on the palace dome, which takes the spirit of the project ad absurdum. Then there was a dome inscription that most cultural politicians had never heard of. And now the forum has a debate on opinion that is damaging its public image again.It wanted to be a house open to the world. Now it is a stage for the German dispute.