Newsletter 2019-12-12-E: Concratulations to all participants for their great work; we’ve made it to round two.

Dear <<First Name>> <<Last Name>>,

this is an “ad hoc” newsletter. Today marks a milestone in the application for the Germany’s European Capital of Culture 2025: this afternoon, the jury announced the so-called shortlist. We have reason to celebrate. Nuremberg is in the second round. We should use the quiet days between the years to think about the best way forward.

We will miss the following competitors in round two: Gera, Dresden and Zittau. We should not underestimate the commitment these cities have and the great work they have delivered. Even if this process does not continue for them here, we hope that they will be able to leverage abundant positive rewards from having walked this path. We are convinced that they have achieved a great deal and that this will continue to have a positive effect in the future.

The following cities take part in round two; we are all happy and celebrate!

  • Magdeburg
  • Hanover
  • Nuremberg
  • Chemnitz
  • Hildesheim

We are glad that we can continue the process and have commented the status with the press statement which you will find below.

We wish you nice holidays and all the best for a great and eventful 2020!
Your team of the citizen initiative #NUE2025

Press statement of #NUE2025 in view of the success in the first application round

On behalf of all of us, our core team member Philip Zerweck made the following statement to the regional newspaper Nürnberger Nachrichten:
First of all, I congratulate Gera, Dresden and Zittau and wish them every possible success in harvesting the investment made in the future of their Civitas by their respective applications. Five cities take part in the second round—more than expected. I take the order of the nominations as an indication of the quality of the application. Magdeburg comes first. Then Hannover, Nuremberg, Chemnitz and Hildesheim. Now it is a matter of seriously openly studying the reasons for the jury’s decision, which will be detailed in the next 20 days, especially the comments in regard to the competitors. Let’s all take a mental step back and think twice: Have we chosen the right framework? Did we define the fundamental concepts correctly, or did we define them at all? In her laudation, Sylvia Amann, the chairwomen of the jury, said that it was primarily about urban area, about Europe and about an international concept of culture and thus civilization in the European context. In response to a journalist’s question about the decision-making process, she gave the reason which cities were not making progress: Ultimately, the jury wondered whether the applicant could be trusted to create a viable programme for ECOC2025 by summer 2020. We are therefore unsure whether this structural argument is right and whether Nuremberg has done its homework properly. In his laudation, Markus Hilgert, Secretary General of the Kulturstiftung der Länder (cultural foundation of the federal states, the Länder), emphasised the importance of transferring the processes’ learnings into a long-term cultural strategy. Nuremberg must take a new approach here. Whether Nuremberg, whether our metropolis really will be a winner, as the final ECOC2025 or as an applicant who will have won through the application—as Silvia Amman stressed—is now in our hands, in the hands of the citizens and their representatives.