Dresden has declared itself in the grip of a ‘Nazi emergency’. But when one museum boss was targeted by extremists, she opened her doors to talk
When museum director Hilke Wagner went to the opening of a new public artwork in Dresden’s market square, she anticipated a friendly gathering of culture lovers. Instead, she and her colleagues found themselves surrounded by far-right protesters with megaphones, vilifying the sculpture’s organisers and its Syrian-German artist as “traitors”. “We came back to our offices and cried,” Wagner recalls. “We didn’t know what we should do.”
Welcome to the fraught reality of cultural programming in Dresden, a city rocked by far-right extremism. Wagner arrived here in November 2014 to run the Albertinum museum, one of Europe’s most prestigious collections of Romantic to contemporary art. A month before her arrival, an anti-Islam protest movement, Pegida, appeared on Dresden’s streets, rapidly swelling in size and extremism. Last November, Dresden city council formally declared a “Nazi emergency”.
The AfD railed against any multicultural programming in favour of a ‘predominant German culture’
It was so much hate at once. For two weeks, I barely left the house. I became really paranoid
We had shouting, door slamming, a lot of arguments and accusations. But it did develop in a positive direction
