The Buchstabenmuseum Berlin is closing
buchstabenmuseum.de
buchstabenmuseum.de
Berlin is a modern typography hub, the influence Spiekermann has in the DACH region and maybe even beyond is hard to overestimate.
Apart from that if you come to Berlin and you are the kind of person that would have liked the Buchstabenmuseum you should try to get an opportunity to visit the crashed space station.
> Fixed costs and a lack of financial support are forcing us to take this step. In addition, the general cultural situation in Berlin is very precarious. It was a very difficult decision for us.
Via Deepl, original here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLuAW5DIANV/
Can someone please elaborate this for someone who is absolutely clueless about Berlin?
Berlin has been relatively underpopulated ever since WW2 which seems to have contributed to a de-gentrified situation which allowed an unique culture to grow. But time's are changing.
Look at this pop graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_population_statistics Still hasn't caught up with the peak in the 1930:s.
What does this even mean? Does this mean "low cost of living"? I feel like gentrification due to post-war generational housing shortages is now just a catch all term for increasing cost of living in general.
I recall that there were interesting similarities after depopulation events like the black plague. Suddenly there's a surplus of built infrastructure.
At it height 1 in 5 apartments were empty in Berlin which pushed rents down below 4 EUR per square meter. A 3 bedroom apartment for less than 500 EURs a month. This was de-gentrification the parent mentioned.
Since 2010 population grew and now Berlin has housing shortages like every other capital in Europe. Rents now top 20 EUR per sqm.
To answer the question in replies, good East Berlin developed in the relative anarchy when the Soviet Union collapsed and no new system was really established yet. (Being able to exchange deutschemarks for groceries is not capitalism - they had that in communism too.) The western end of Berlin, by contrast, wasn't culturally interesting in the same way, and didn't change much when the wall fell. Not that symphony orchestras and painting galleries aren't culture, but they're not the kind we're talking about here, the kind that develops bottom up when people are given the freedom to do what they want.
dang informed me by email that this is a bad comment and I deserve to be, and have been, punished for posting it.
Not on its own, though. Plenty of abandoned/underpopulated cheap places in europe that do not thrive. But it certainly is beneficial.
(in the case of Berlin, there was for example a special effect, that all germans living in west berlin did not had to go to the army (to not having to shoot their relatives in east berlin) - so lots of counterculture people evading the army came to Berlin and they created culture)
https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/02/chialo-einsparu...
Sister comments get excited about population growth, gentrification, rising rent prices, and everyone's favorite c-word. Those are all real things that are happening in berlin, that are favorite bogeymen to complain about at parties. None of them apply here.
Rising rents are much more of a residential problem. Prime commercial rents are also rising, but at 1.1%/yr... and non-prime/specialty commercial like the subway arches in Hansaviertel are generally stable or declining since COVID.
The museum cites loss of premises as a factor. The Deutsche bahn leases the subway arches typically on 5 or 10 year terms. Since they moved in 2016 it sounds like DB is declining to renew the contract and they are facing another move.
But the really big elephant in the room is a lack of funding. The museum has always been proudly privately funded and volunteer operated. But that still exposes them to indirect effects from public funding cuts, and berlin cut 13% of its culture funding in 2024. Private donations are down 6% year over year, and what there is has seen significant diversion to political and Ukraine support efforts. Similar impacts happen in volunteer time, but we're all waiting on the 5-yearly survey from 2024 to be released to get real data.
Fixed costs are often the killer for museums, and the buchstaben museum blamed these in particular. Heating and electricity, and general climate maintenance in nonstandard spaces like the subway arches is always expensive, and museums are relatively energy intensive to begin with. Wholesale electricity costs jumped 5-7x in 2021-22. They've since come back down to a more modest 30-40% increase, but that's still a huge problem for a small, privately funded institution like this. Especially coupled with public funding loss, reduced private donations, and staring down a move.
Bear in mind, German non profits can't create endowments like American ones can. Most categories can't even roll budget from one year to the next!
Hope this helps you understand why so many privately funded cultural institutions are dying in Germany and Berlin right now.
More of a problem is dependency on public funding or any kind of grant, where typically there are limitations on what you can use that grant money for, and “saving for the future“ is not one of them.
I guess I'm not in the 'everyone' group as I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Any chance you would explain for the ignorant?
They appear to work with many institutions in a consultancy capacity so I hope that this will still continue in future even though the museum itself has to close.
If you believe that you are better at picking winners (slop startups vs non-slop startups) than the rest of the investment world, then that's a valuable skill that you could use to earn a lot of money that you could then use to support museums if you choose.
This seems to have been said as if it is a bad thing. Is it, or did I misread what you meant?
Deduct extra points if you ever accepted stock options, ever tried to start a startup or did a side hustle because you wanted MORE than the bare minimum you need to survive. (Like those capitalist pigs do!)
Or if you are typing this from a mobile phone or laptop computer that costs an amount of money that would be unimaginable to the typical person for most of human history.
Otherwise you're golden. Socialism truly is the superior moral position. It's so obvious we can all agree. And you should lead by example by giving away everything that you might need less than some other random poor person out there.
Betting on business in general over long time periods tends to be a winning proposition. Betting on an individual company tends to be less of a winner in general.
But you cannot grow a small company into a large one by concentrating on short term profits. The S&P 500 is composed of 500 large companies.
Imagine if you were selling MSFT short every quarter since they IPO'd in the '80s.
Long live the overlords.
Nobody is going to make money on museums. As such, you either provide for them through tax dollars or you convince people to donate.
It opened in 2016.
This post is likely the most attention it has ever received.