A few months ago, the German constitutional scholar Christoph Möllers offered a wise observation in an interview with Die Zeit: "Maybe it isn't all that hard to make good cultural policy. It takes informed restraint and a talent for raising the necessary money." Plenty of politicians, he said, had done well on that course. Legitimate political cultural projects exist, of course—Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, for example—but they could only ever be the exception.
For some time now, however, you can watch arts funding become ever more tightly bound to a political agenda. The most extreme and chilling example is the far-right political party AfD in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, which wants to fund only "patriotic" art. Yet parties of the center are politicizing cultural support, too. After the antisemitism scandal at Documenta 15 in the summer of 2022, federal funding came under threat, and the then culture minister Claudia Roth (Greens) made further financial support conditional on structural reforms at the institution (which duly followed). Then, as everyone knows, came Berlin's culture senator Joe Chialo (CDU) with his notorious (and failed) antisemitism clause, which sought to bind artists applying for funding to a pledge against antisemitism based on the contested IHRA definition.
Threats instead of trust
The latest case comes from Wolfram Weimer, the nonpartisan federal culture minister who, since taking office, has styled himself more culture warrior than enabler. Should the Left Party (Die Linke) join Berlin's new state government—with Elif Eralp at the top of its ticket, the party came out clearly ahead in the recent September election—Weimer would reconsider the federal cultural funding the capital has only just secured. "The federal government has only just agreed, in the new capital financing agreement, to significantly strengthen culture in Berlin and to invest €2.9 billion over the coming decade," Weimer said in a press release. "This can only happen if it is ensured that the federal government does not become the financier of a cultural policy that threatens to systematically exclude Jewish artists." He accused the Left of "openly displayed antisemitism."
Admittedly, the party does have questions to answer on antisemitism. And it's true that calls to boycott Israeli artists keep surfacing in the cultural sector (and not only in Berlin). But Weimer has now managed to recast his office as if his job weren't to support culture but to put a wholly unleashed, extremist scene in chains. Rather than trust and negotiation, cultural policy seems to be sliding into an era of extortion.
Whether Weimer could even act on his public musings is one question (the capital financing agreement, which runs until 2037, has been signed). But the mere impression that money only flows when the politics line up is fatal. It doesn't just run counter to constitutionally guaranteed artistic freedom. It also shakes a conviction that has taken root in Germany since the 1970s: that a culture free to develop with state support ultimately benefits everyone.
More adversary than ally
That savings must be made, and will keep being made, is one thing. These days, though, it looks as if cuts—or questioning funding altogether—are meant to punish "unruly" art. That's an alarming signal, and the cultural scene must stand together against it. That the culture minister seems more adversary than ally here makes for a depressing state of affairs.
In Saxony-Anhalt, in the wake of the state election, you can see art institutions networking and bracing for a possible AfD government and an authoritarian cultural policy. Even if the rest of the country isn't there yet (and the political situation varies widely from state to state), other institutions should follow their lead. Art and its values must be argued over, but first art has to be able to exist. Politicians also make trouble for themselves when they give the impression that they're responsible for cultural content—which, formally, is precisely what they are not.
Amid today's culture wars, it's easy to forget (on all sides) that politics and art carry different responsibilities in a democracy. As Möllers put it: "As culture minister, you can set accents with care. But you can't barge in with a program and force a change of direction from above."