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The Neptune Fountain in Weimar: Is everything going to be fine for ARD now?
Photo: WENZEL-ORF / Getty Images / Westend61
Goethe is supposed to have said that even stones that are placed in your way can be used to build beautiful things. The authenticity of the quote is doubtful, but the way to the new ARD culture platform was definitely a rocky one, whether the people in charge of the public broadcasting network can build something beautiful out of the bureaucratic language and media-political rubble that they have picked up along the way still show. In any case, the location has now been determined where the ARD community facility is to be located: the Goethe City of Weimar.
This was announced by MDR director Karola Wille together with ARD program director Christine Strobl and ARD chairman Tom Buhrow at a digital press conference on Thursday.
According to Wille, the platform should be “a place of networking” where creative artists can come together, “a place where innovative digital cultural formats” are promoted.
The ARD pestige project is to start with its own web address for the German Choir Festival at the end of May 2022, which, according to Wille, is to be accompanied "cross-media".
Difficult development
A little more specifically - but really only a little bit - the MDR front woman commented on the contents of the new facility on only one point: With the first large project of the culture platform under the title "ARD Creators", the corona situation should be difficult shaken cultural operations are supported. The initiative includes an artistic ideas competition on the question: "What connects our society?"
That fits in with the difficult development history of the ARD project, which threatened to be crushed in the east-west conflict within the federal network of broadcasters. In the dispute over the broadcasting tax, Saxony-Anhalt's Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff, whose CDU parliamentary group wanted to prevent the increase, repeatedly called for more public-law community projects to be established in the eastern federal states and therefore also in his government area - a kind of structural aid through the back door.
Those in charge of the ARD made it clear that they wanted to comply with Haseloff's request, with the settlement of the then already planned cultural platform in East Germany.
This is how Haseloff's people were supposed to break the deadline for deliveries.
There was a hectic commuter diplomacy from ARD grandees to Saxony-Anhalt, which in the meantime could make one doubt whether the state distance of the public broadcasters as stipulated in the broadcasting contract was really observed.
Tactical maneuvers within the ARD
The ARD chairman Buhrow alluded to this at the press conference on Thursday when he spoke of how he had "mediated in the state parliaments" for the project, but was ultimately only able to convince 15 of 16 of these parliaments. The cultural platform was on the brink because of the possible so-called underfunding of the institutions - and could only be considered further when the Federal Constitutional Court implemented a resolution to increase the broadcasting fee.
Nevertheless, due to the difficult federal structure of the ARD, the culture platform was not yet dry. On the one hand, because the East German federal states wrestled with each other over the facility, and on the other hand, because the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation mobilized against the Eastern Initiative. But this blocking attitude has now been broken - also thanks to tactical maneuvers within the ARD: The cultural platform will be located in Weimar, Thuringia, but the MDR program department Halle, located in Saxony-Anhalt, is to take over the cultural coordination for the ARD. In this way, the eastern federal states are pacified among one another, because they too are in competition for media prestige projects.
Everything is insanely complicated at ARD.
And, oh well, they don't want to talk about a culture platform anymore at the broadcasting network, instead they have agreed on the term culture portal so that there is no confusion with the platform of the ARD media library, where everyone will hopefully soon be from Weimar-driven cultural content coordinated by Halle should be accessed in the future.
It will remain a difficult matter to build something beautiful out of the bureaucratic language bureaucratic and media-political rubble - we will never find out whether that was in the spirit of Goethe.