Hamburg Culture Prize Renamed After Namesake’s Nazi Ties Emerge

A culture prize that has been awarded in Germany for nearly five decades will be renamed due to the Nazi ties of the man who was the prize’s namesake when it was founded. The Senator Biermann Ratjen Medal will now be called the Medal for Art and Culture in Hamburg.

The change comes after a 2024 article published Die Welt am Sonntag, the Sunday magazine of the German newspaper Die Welt. In it historian Helmut Stubbe da Luz provided proof that Hans Harder Biermann-Ratjen, who would eventually be appointed as Hamburg’s senator for culture in the postwar era, confirmed his Nazi Party membership in a 1943 application to the Third Reich’s literary authority, when he wanted to publish a novel. The article acknowledges that there had been some question as to whether this application meant he was a candidate for membership or a full member.

Biermann-Ratjen was invited in 1945 to take on management of art and cultural affairs in Hamburg, a post that had no “political affiliation” and came with the title of senator, according to Stubbe da Luz. A local newspaper published his July 1945 radio lecture “Is Art Necessary Today?” At the time, his involvement with the Nazi Party was brought into question, but in 1946, during a moment of the government’s de-Nazification, he was deemed not to have been a member, with Stubbe da Luz calling his “political rehabilitation” achieved. He would go on to serve in the Hamburg parliament from 1949 to 1966.

When the culture medal was conceived, in 1973, Stubbe da Luz explains, Biermann-Ratjen was determined to have been “probably a member” of the Nazi party “but only nominally.” When the award was first granted, in 1977, Biermann-Ratjen was thanked for “a significant part of Hamburg’s cultural reconstruction.”

The Senator Biermann Ratjen Medal was inaugurated by the Hamburg Senate in 1978 and has been awarded more than 100 times. Artists have taken home the prize, including Anke Feuchtenberger (2023), Uta Falter-Baumgarten (2013), Thomas Peiter (1986), Hans Kock (1986), Arnold Fiedler (1985), Karl August Ohrt (1985), and Willem Grimm (1981), as well as art dealer Renate Kammer (2013).

The first Medal for Art and Culture in Hamburg will be awarded this summer to Peter Hess, who founded Gedanktafeln Hamburg, a project that creates memorial plaques for historically significant Hamburgers (including those who resisted the Nazis), and who brought artist Gunter Demning’s project Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Blocks”), small memorial stones devoted to people murdered by the Nazi regime, to the city in 2002.