Launch of Kulturerbe Bayern, the Bavarian National Trust (Weekly Blog, 21 October 2018)

A blog by Catherine Leonard, Secretary-General

Next month I will be joining European colleagues to celebrate the establishment of Kulturerbe Bayern, the Bavarian National Trust. It’s a great pleasure to be part of the creation of a this new organisation.  Moreover an honour to have been invited to address the launch.

Kulturerbe Bayern will take care of cultural assets in Bavaria.  It will protect and preserve them “für jeden, für Generationen, für immer” (for everyone, for generations, forever).  We here at INTO are so pleased to play (a small) role in this important story.

A Bavarian National Trust?

Back in 2014, the then Chairman of the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, received a letter from Robert Brannekämper who was leading efforts to establish a ‘National Trust’.  Simon asked me to meet Mr Brannekämper, which I duly did in September 2014.  Now, this is not unusual as the Trust refers to INTO a lot of people with similar enquiries.  However not all of them lead to anything.   But I knew this particular Anglophile with a passion for Bavarian heritage was going to achieve his goal!

The meeting even made it into our 2014 Annual Report with the briefest of comments: “Our work to promote the National Trust concept continued in 2014 through our continuing support for the Czech National Trust and the nascent Portuguese National Trust. We held initial discussions with a group in Sweden considering establishing a National Trust and also advised the Bavarian government on the same theme.”  It was accompanied by the photo below.

Well, we continued to correspond after this initial meeting.  And it was truly wonderful to hear that the project had come to fruition!

INTO members welcome the Bavarian National Trust

The Bavarian team have invited a number of INTO members to Munich in November: the National Trust for Scotland, Czech National Trust, the Gelderland Trust and Herita. Along with some of our friends and colleagues from Germany and beyond.   We will all be part of a Symposium on ‘Sharing Heritage’ culminating with the official launch on 24 November.

As I prepare my speech, I thought it would be good to pass on some messages of support from the INTO membership.

What one piece of advice would you share with the new Bavarian National Trust?  Please drop me an email with your tips for our newest National Trust!

Many thanks!