The next few years will see the creation of the Humboldt-Forum – one of Germany’s most important cultural construction projects – on Berlin’s Schlossplatz (Palace Square). The Berlin State Museums’ non-European collections will find a new home in the building being erected behind the reconstructed facades of the Berlin City Palace, along with the Humboldt University’s scientific collections and sections of the Central and Regional Library Berlin.
But the Humboldt-Forum has to be more than just a palace, more than just a museum! The idea is to create a meeting place for people of different cultures, to promote the peaceful co-existence of these cultures and to invite answers to questions affecting our globalized world. That’s what the name Humboldt stands for: bringing together different cultures and encouraging intercultural exchange in order to create a multi-faceted relationship between all the world’s cultures.

For the world’s cultures, the Humboldt-Forum is a “third place”, a place where they enjoy the authority to engage in discussion on the fundamental issues affecting them. Cultures on not “on show” here, they are at home and able to put forward their own assessments and positions.

The Humboldt-Forum is the proper place for such discussions. The cultural patrimony contained in the collections of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Central and Regional Library Berlin and the Humboldt University constitutes our rich fund of historical visual evidence. Contemporary forms of expression in the arts and media have an equally important role to play in interpreting this evidence. Presentations and performances interact with the discussions. In this process of active intermeshing, the Humboldt-Forum cannot be thought of merely in terms of its collections or resources; instead, these must be an integral part of the Humboldt-Forum’s purpose and mission and be deployed accordingly. This concept turns the entire Humboldt-Forum into an agora or place of assembly: the Forum as a whole must make use of all ways of mediating knowledge and information, depending on the specific projects in question.

The Humboldt-Forum is not just another addition to Berlin’s Museum Island. It is all about the role culture has to play in finding solutions to the problems of a shrinking, globalizing world, not about political or economic strategies for dealing with such problems adopted by those with decision-making authority. The productive yield of the Forum will be model answers, not decisions. This is a uniform approach to which all players are committed. The Humboldt-Forum is not a collection of different institutions; there should be one single authority responsible for its organization.

The Humboldt-Forum’s indispensability is not derived from the need to reconstruct a City Palace. By creating the Forum, Germany is providing a unique platform for intercultural dialogue. For this, there is no better place in the country. The Forum is a globally unique institution, centrally located in a European capital – once the centre of national power, now devoted to the cultures of the world.