Thirty years ago, Christoph Stölzl wrote in the FAZ a plea for the installation of the Pietà by Käthe Kollwitz in the interior of the Neue Wache in Berlin.

When art critics objected that the installation of an enlarged version of the Kollwitz sculpture in place of Heinrich Tessenow's oak-wreathed stele was unhistorical, he responded with an everyday observation.

"I listened to many conversations about the history of the monument." According to Stölzl, the majority of the participants found Tessenow's version heroic and intimidating.

He also countered the criticism that Kolwitz's work appealed too strongly to the feelings of the viewer: "Some say: That's getting sentimental.

What's wrong with it?

There has been too much callousness in the face of the horrors of this century.”

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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That was his tone: direct without being intrusive, knowledgeable without being dismissive.

He could listen when others were talking and talk in such a way that the other side was listening too.

Everything he did was an invitation to dialogue.

With this talent for conversation, he shaped the cultural public in Germany for a good four decades.

The void he leaves will be visible for a long time.

The idea for the Bismarck exhibition came to him spontaneously

Christoph Stölzl was perhaps the most important cultural and political player in the transition from the Bonn to the Berlin Republic.

The historical symbol of this transition was the German Historical Museum, of which Helmut Kohl appointed him founding director in 1987.

In the first few years, Stölzl repeatedly had to defend the house, which was to be built on the bend in the Spree based on a design by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi, against accusations from the media and the historians' guild.

With its construction, it was said, German historical memory would be renationalized.

Then came reunification, and Stölzl was able to realize his museum program.

In a conversation with the FAZ, he later described how the idea for the first exhibition came to him.

"Kohl asked:

'What do you do first?'

I wasn't prepared for that.

Probably because this giant was standing in front of me, I spontaneously said: 'Bismarck.'"

The Bismarck exhibition in August 1990 was a triumph that few expected.

It proved that the founder of the empire, whose inheritance is once again the subject of bitter disputes, can also be portrayed with wit, verve and a suggestive selection of objects.

It was the best possible calling card for the new history museum, which was still waiting a decade and a half before it finally moved into the renovated armory.

Other memorable presentations soon followed with "Myths of the Nations" and the show on the year of peace 1648, before Stölzl applied for a new job.

From culture senator to music school rector in Weimar

Back then, in 1998, he wanted to become President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

The fact that he didn't become one was just as much a sign of a turning point as his appointment as head of DHM eleven years earlier.

Kohl was voted out, the new social-democratic federal government favored Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, and Stölzl, after an interlude as feature editor of the “Welt”, went into politics, where he first tried his hand as Berlin culture senator and then as state chairman of the CDU.

In 2010 he became rector of the Weimar Music Academy and remained so until last year - an activity that did not prevent him from carrying out additional cultural-political tasks such as that of a shop steward for the Jewish Museum Berlin, which became defunct in 2019.

His last commitment was to set up the Exile Museum at Anhalter Bahnhof,

Christoph Stölzl, born in Westheim near Augsburg in 1944 and director of the Munich City Museum from 1980 to 1987, descended, as he liked to emphasize, from the old Bavarian nobility as well as from learned Bohemian Judaism, from teachers, officers and liberal politicians;

his aunt Gunta was a master weaver in the Bauhaus.

This mixed background, combined with extensive history studies, gave the graduate of Munich's Ludwigsgymnasium and Saarbrücken University a sense of style that the Federal Republic of the nineties sorely needed.

With the same grandeur with which he entertained guests of state, Stölzl could explain to a columnist the difference between suits made of Moiré and Bird's Eye fabric.

Above all, he gave everyone he spoke to the feeling that his heart was in the matter.

Lots,

Those who knew him still have his laughter in their ears.

Now it is silent.

Christoph Stölzl died on Tuesday at the age of seventy-eight in Evenhausen near Rosenheim.