It may be some time before Germany forms a new government. How German cultural policy will look after the election depends on the composition of the future coalition.
Until that is decided, it may be helpful to look at the election programs of the possible governing parties. The spectrum has never been so broad. It ranges from the previous coalition partners, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), to the Greens, the liberal FDP and the Left (die Linken).
In principle, all parties that want to govern place great importance on foreign cultural and educational policy and want to promote or further expand it, with perhaps new accents.
The topic of looted art — be it Nazi- or colonial-looted art — has gained momentum in recent years, not least due to the debate surrounding Berlin's Humboldt Forum and the art trove discovered in a Munich apartment in 2012, when officials uncovered artworks worth more than a billion dollars at the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Nazi-era art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt.
