rub 11.

Petr Spielmann, Czech intellectual of European importance, director of the Museum Bochum, creator of the key collection of art behind the Iron Curtain in the West, one of the protagonists of the cultural policy of the West Germany. Or was it another way – a Mischling narrowly escaped death, Auβenseiter, querulant, upon his return to his homeland (except for his home town of Brno) “ridiculed, insulted, ostracized into the unknown, a Nobody in the No Man’s Land”? The Don Quixote of Czech art history? With the architects Bo and Wolhert, he revolutionized the concept of the museum, linking East and West, Germans and immigrants, exile from Comenius to the present day, and German-Jewish-Czech ties, without which he believed Czech culture had lost its uniqueness. He crossed political, national, confessional, disciplinary and temporal boundaries, broke up ghettos and reintegrated the fractured fates of art from Moscow to Paris. His Bochum Speech is a warning against the disinformation age, when instead of reality, “substitutes are presented (…) And man (…), disturbed, believes these substitutes”.