BERLIN’S AKADEMIE DER KüNSTE APPOINTS NEW ARCHIVE DIRECTOR

Werner Heegewaldt has been selected as the new archive director of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, or Academy of Arts, in an unanimous decision, reports Tagesspiegel. The academy has a total of 400 members in six sections: visual arts, architecture, music, literature, performing arts, and film/media art.

The academy’s archive, more than three centuries old, is considered the most important and interdisciplinary of its kind in the German-speaking world, and includes over 1,200 bequests by artists, including the archives of Walter Benjamin, Heiner Müller, and Christoph Schlingensief, among others.

As an archivist and historian, Heegewaldt has long been associated with the renowned institution—having worked as its associate director since 2013, and acting director since autumn 2015.

The archive’s previous director Birgit Jooss left the position after her six-month probationary period in September 2015. Jooss, the former manager of the German Art Archive at the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, was controversially discharged by the Academy of Arts’s new president, Jeanine Meerapfel, causing negative criticism in the media, especially as Jooss had been selected by a committee headed by the Academy’s previous president, Klaus Staeck.