Hamburg Culture Prize Drops Nazi-Linked Namesake After New Research
A long-running honor in Hamburg is being renamed after historians established a clearer picture of the man for whom it was originally named. The Senator Biermann Ratjen Medal will now be called the Medal for Art and Culture in Hamburg, a change that reflects renewed scrutiny of Hans Harder Biermann-Ratjen’s wartime record.
The decision follows a 2024 article in Die Welt am Sonntag by historian Helmut Stubbe da Luz, who reported that Biermann-Ratjen confirmed his Nazi Party membership in a 1943 application to the Third Reich’s literary authority, submitted as he sought permission to publish a novel. The article noted that there had been some uncertainty over whether the application indicated candidate status or full membership.
Biermann-Ratjen later entered Hamburg’s cultural administration after the war. In 1946, during de-Nazification, he was judged not to have been a party member, and Stubbe da Luz described his political rehabilitation as complete. He went on to serve in the Hamburg parliament from 1949 to 1966.
The medal itself was inaugurated by the Hamburg Senate in 1978 and has been awarded more than 100 times. Past recipients include artists Anke Feuchtenberger, Uta Falter-Baumgarten, Thomas Peiter, Hans Kock, Arnold Fiedler, Karl August Ohrt, and Willem Grimm, as well as art dealer Renate Kammer.
The first award under the new name will go to Peter Hess this summer. Hess founded Gedanktafeln Hamburg, a project that installs memorial plaques for historically significant Hamburgers, including those who resisted the Nazis, and helped bring Gunter Demning’s Stolpersteine project to the city in 2002.
The renaming places Hamburg among the many German institutions reassessing public honors shaped by the postwar years, when cultural rebuilding often moved ahead of a full accounting of individual wartime affiliations.
