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The future of the Kunstverein is in jeopardy. These most experimental of Germany’s art centres are in danger of soon losing a good deal of their funding. A number of them recently gathered to discuss the situation in Cologne.‘Anyone wishing to find out about the history of Germany’s Kunstvereins,’ art historian Walter Grasskamp wrote in 1989, ‘finds themselves in the position of a linguist who sets out to study the language of a particular country and finds nothing but dialects.’ Twenty years later, in a very different political and economic context, this still applies. In Germany, where the Kunstverein as an institution was invented at the end of the eighteenth century (in Nuremburg in 1792), there are currently around 300 Kunstvereins with a total of over 120,000 private and corporate members paying annual subscription fees. With these contributions, they support the work of their Kunstverein and enjoy privileges such as free entry, reduced prices for yearly offerings, and other services such as organized art trips and guided tours. Away from the rich cultural life of major cities, Kunstvereins are often the only places where contemporary art – often with a local or regional slant – receives focussed attention in the form of exhibitions and accompanying events. Unlike public museums, they are not under pressure to legitimate their programs via attendance figures, allowing them to operate in a more self-determined and market-critical way. Today, however, instead of relying solely on subscription fees, Kunstvereins also seek external funding, sponsorship and municipal subsidies. Due to the current strains on public coffers (by no means a specifically German problem, of course), such public funding is likely to shrink, in some cases drastically, thus threatening the existence of Kunstvereins – and other structures in the cultural sector. ‘Last Chance to See: A Journey to the Dinosaurs of the Art World’, this summer’s joint project by the Cologne and Bonn Kunstvereins and the Dusseldorf-based Kunstverein for the Rhineland and Westphalia, addressed this topical situation, borrowing the first part of its title from Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s amusing series of accounts of travelling to visit endangered species. This is not the first time the institution of the Kunstverein has seen hard times, however, and in search of possible ways out of the current crisis, it is worth looking back. The early founders of Kunstvereins were generally neither philanthropists nor rich patrons, but representatives of an aspiring, wealthy bourgeoisie wishing, in the period leading up to the 1848 revolution, to challenge the supremacy of the aristocracy not only in economic terms but also culturally. One of the oldest, the Hamburg Kunstverein founded in 1817, was an exclusive club (fifty members only) with patriotic leanings, devoting itself primarily to looking at art together and cultivating social contacts. In 1826, a local rival emerged when a second Kunstverein was founded in the city with a new, commercial concept. It admitted more members, invested its membership fees in shares and used the profits to purchase artworks which were then raffled off among its members. The same year, the original Hamburg Kunstverein responded with its first public show of works for sale, a highly innovative format at the time, and one that was repeated regularly and successfully in following years. In 1848, the two Kunstvereins merged and cooperated with Kunstvereins in other cities in order to spread the burden of insurance risks and transport costs. The history of temporary and travelling exhibitions had begun – as had the history of the public museum: some museum collections still in existence today, such as those in Bremen and Hamburg, originally derive from the activities of their city’s Kunstvereins. Without a doubt, the most drastic and momentous crisis in the history of Germany’s Kunstvereins was the period of Nazi rule, with its outlawing of the artistic avant-garde and its exclusion of the Jewish population from cultural life. These disastrous events exerted a shaping influence on the agendas of Kunstvereins after the war, which focussed on rehabilitation, ‘the need to catch up’ with international modern art, and ‘re-education’ of the public: in the 1950s, the Wurttemberg Kunstverein in Stuttgart showed the Expressionists Heckel and Kirchner, the Cologne Kunstverein showed Max Beckmann, and in 1961, the Kunstverein for the Rhineland and Westphalia showed Jackson Pollock. The second shift of the post-war period came around 1968, echoing the student protest movement’s demands for more democratization and participation. For the programmes of many Kunstvereins, this also meant greater inclusion of contemporary art from around the world. One of the most spectacular exhibitions of these years was the ‘Happening & Fluxus’ show curated by Harald Szeemann for the Cologne Kunstverein in 1970, used by the curator as a trial run for the documenta in 1972. Wolf Vostell’s pregnant cow that was meant to calve in the exhibition space (but was not allowed) and the ‘bare facts’ presented by the Vienna Actionists in their actions and documentation generated a huge scandal and caused this Kunstverein to lose hundreds of members, while more free-thinking spirits joined precisely because of these transgressions. In the early post-war period, in addition to funds they were able to raise themselves, German Kunstvereins received considerable public subsidies – funding that is now highly uncertain due to the current public debt crisis. What, then, would be more logical for an institution whose roots lie in a wealthy middle class aspiring to visible status than a call for a new culture of patronage, such as that recently launched with a high media profile in the United States by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet under the banner of ‘The Giving Pledge’? But private funding, however important its contribution may be, cannot entirely replace public funding. As Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, remarked on the role of patrons and sponsors: ‘Their contribution cannot be relied upon because it is a gift and a gift can be given freely and it can be taken away.’ What is at stake here is the ability of countless contemporary art institutions to work freely, professionally, largely independent of market interests – thus also ensuring a plurality of exhibition practice. In the dry words of Florian Waldvogel, director since 2009 of Hamburg’s Kunstverein: ‘Every crisis is an opportunity, but the nature of this opportunity remains to be seen.’ In its long and eventful history, the Kunstverein model, with its specific possibilities for cultivating a loyal audience, has often proved that it is fundamentally attractive, adaptable, and able to overcome crises – and it will have to prove this again now.Barbara Hess is an art historian and critic based in Cologne Translated from the German by Nicholas Grindell