Marion Ackermann is stepping into Germany’s biggest museum job at a time of great upheaval at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation—a culture behemoth encompassing 2,400 employees and 25 libraries, archives, research institutes and museums housing more than five million objects in Berlin.
Ackermann succeeds Hermann Parzinger, who retires after 17 years as president of the foundation (known by its German initials SPK), and she will be the first woman in the role. Ackermann arrives two months after the government and states agreed to increase funding for the SPK and six months after parliament passed a sweeping reform designed to address what a group of independent experts termed the foundation’s “dysfunctional” structure.
No one can argue that these steps, though important, will banish all the SPK’s troubles. Least of all Ackermann, who sees a building backlog as one of her major challenges. “We have a massive amount of construction—some projects need to be finished in time, others still to be started,” she tells The Art Newspaper.
Established in 1957 to oversee West Berlin’s world-class art collections, the SPK has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, largely focused on combining the collections of the former East and West and reshaping the city’s museum landscape, with major projects such as the reconstruction of Museum Island, which this year celebrates its 200th anniversary.
A renovation of the Pergamon Museum began in 2012. Initially scheduled for completion in 2019, the museum is now not expected to fully reopen until 2037. Costs have soared correspondingly—the latest estimate is about €1.5bn. “A major part of the Pergamon will open in early 2027,” Ackermann says. “That will be a very big event.”
That same year, construction is due to finish on the Berlin Modern—a new museum of 20th-century art designed by Herzog & de Meuron—whose costs have trebled since it was first conceived. But plenty of other buildings in the SPK’s portfolio need urgent renovation. Ackermann says planning for the Altes Museum, the fifth and final museum on Museum Island to be overhauled, is likely to begin before work on the Pergamon wraps up. Meanwhile, planning is also under way for the urgent renovation of the Staatsbibliothek building on Potsdamer Platz, and a new depot is under construction in southeastern Berlin.
New funding agreements
In March, the outgoing German government and 16 states signed the new funding agreement, which takes effect in January 2026. The annual funding for the SPK will increase by 10% to €130m, with 75% coming from the federal government and 25% from the states, whose contribution recognises the flagship role Berlin’s museums play on a national level.
This accounts for less than a third of the SPK’s budget, which was €415m in 2023. That year, the federal government and states provided one-off funds for specific projects, while the government also contributed €114m for construction projects. “I am very glad that the federal government and states have united to support the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation,” Ackermann says. “But the financial situation remains challenging, so we will need further commitment.”
One of Ackermann’s key tasks will be to ensure smooth implementation of a law reforming the byzantine structure of the SPK, approved by the Bundestag on 31 January, five years after an expert panel’s report described the SPK as “structurally overwhelmed”. Parzinger has said the reforms, which take effect in December, will make the SPK “more modern, more efficient, more synergetic and quicker”.
The SPK’S board of trustees will be reduced to nine from 20. The president will lead an executive board consisting of up to seven representatives of the foundation’s institutions. Top-level staff will no longer be civil servants, instead serving limited-term contracts. One layer of hierarchy—the Berlin State Museums—has been eliminated.A key consequence of this last reform is far greater autonomy for individual museums, which will now oversee their own staffing and budgets. “Getting rid of the middle level of the bureaucracy was a revolution and a huge relief,” Ackermann says. “The individual institutions must be able to shine.”
Ackermann brings a wealth of relevant experience, having run the Dresden State Art Collections, a similarly large organisation overseeing 15 individual institutions with world-class collections. She was the unanimous choice of a commission charged with finding Parzinger’s successor. Claudia Roth, who until May was the German culture minister, described Ackermann as “an excellent museums manager, art expert and strategist who is extremely well-connected both nationally and internationally” and has a “proven track record in successfully shaping transformation processes”.
Education and communication
Among Ackermann’s priorities will be boosting the SPK’s work in education and communication. “We are not adequately equipped, and so we are not working at the same level as comparable institutions,” she says. “I am trying to look not just for state funding, but I will also turn to private people and companies for support, particularly in these areas—education and communication—and not just in Berlin and Germany but worldwide.”
Ackermann says she wants to examine how visitor numbers can be improved too. In 2023, the SPK’s museums notched up 4.4 million visitors (2.6 million of these were to Museum Island). Nevertheless, none of Berlin’s museums featured in The Art Newspaper’s annual list of the 100 most-visited museums for 2024.
“I always wonder why the collections of the Berlin museums don’t attract the same numbers of visitors as, for example, the Louvre,” Ackermann says. “Paris is bigger than Berlin, for sure, and the cities’ overall tourist numbers are not comparable, but what are the other reasons? I would like to find out. We need to work in a more audience-orientated way, also targeting specific groups, and to celebrate our long-term projects. We should be able to increase our visitor numbers.”
She says her experience in Dresden equips her well for her new position, which is, however, “very much more complex”, adding that “political communication plays a big role”.
“One of my main challenges will be to manage my own energy and resources,” she says. “It will be a question of setting priorities and finding the right rhythm.”
