German Lost Art Foundation moves into its headquarters in Magdeburg

The board of trustees of the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion (DZK) met for the first time in its new head­quar­ters in Magde­burg to­day. The items on the agen­da in­clud­ed ap­point­ing the full-time mem­ber of the ex­ec­u­tive board and se­lect­ing the mem­bers for the Foun­da­tion’s sci­en­tif­ic cu­ra­to­ri­al board.

Chair of the board of trustees and Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sion­er for Cul­ture and the Me­dia Moni­ka Grüt­ters stat­ed: “In the record time of less than one year, we’ve es­tab­lished the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion. Now we can move in­to our head­quar­ters in Magde­burg. Our man­age­ment team is com­plete with to­day’s ap­point­ment of a full-time ex­ec­u­tive board mem­ber. With Rüdi­ger Hütte, for­mer deputy chief of the Fed­er­al Pres­i­den­tial Of­fice and pre­vi­ous State Sec­re­tary in the Thuringian Min­istry of the In­te­ri­or and Jus­tice, we’ve gained an ex­pe­ri­enced ex­pert for this de­mand­ing task. I am con­fi­dent that Rüdi­ger Hütte to­geth­er with Prof. Uwe Schneede will suc­ceed in ef­fi­cient­ly meet­ing the chal­lenges ahead dur­ing the de­vel­op­ment phase of the Foun­da­tion.”

Grüt­ters con­tin­ued: “We’ve al­so laid the ground­work for ap­point­ing mem­bers to the sci­en­tif­ic cu­ra­to­ri­al board as an ad­vi­so­ry body. I be­lieve it’s im­por­tant to draw on the ex­per­tise of dis­tin­guished fig­ures from both Ger­many and abroad.” The new ap­pointees are: Evelien Campfens, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the Dutch Resti­tu­tion Com­mis­sion; Prof. Dr. Uwe Fleck­n­er from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ham­burg; Dr. An­nette Ger­lach, di­rec­tor of the State Li­brary Cen­tre of Rhineland-Palati­nate; Prof. Dr. Anne Gryn­berg, di­rec­tor of the Comité d´his­toire auprès de la CIVS (French com­mis­sion for the com­pen­sa­tion of vic­tims who suf­fered dis­pos­ses­sion); Dr. Ute Haug, chair­wom­an of the Prove­nance Re­search As­so­ci­a­tion, Prof. Dr. Eckart Köhne, pres­i­dent of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Ger­man Mu­se­ums; Ruedi­ger Mahlo, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Claims Con­fer­ence in Ger­many; Is­abel Pfeif­fer-Poens­gen, sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Cul­tur­al Foun­da­tion of Ger­man States; and Frau Mal­go­rza­ta Quinken­stein from the Berlin Cen­tre for His­tor­i­cal Re­search at the Pol­ish Acade­my of the Sci­ences. Two ad­di­tion­al ap­point­ments, in par­tic­u­lar that of an Is­raeli mem­ber, are cur­rent­ly be­ing dis­cussed.

The Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion was es­tab­lished at the be­gin­ning of the year to pool the re­sources of prove­nance re­search in Ger­many, par­tic­u­lar­ly in con­nec­tion with Nazi-loot­ed art. Its re­spon­si­bil­i­ties in­clude as­sum­ing su­per­vi­sion of the tasks of the for­mer Magde­burg Co­or­di­na­tion Of­fice and the for­mer Of­fice of Prove­nance Re­search. The board of trustees is the su­per­vi­so­ry body of the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion. It is com­prised of fif­teen mem­bers who rep­re­sent the found­ing au­thor­i­ties: the Ger­man fed­er­al and state gov­ern­ments and the lead­ing mu­nic­i­pal as­so­ci­a­tions.