To Friedrich Schiller There is no way around this. Because while other thinkers of his time argued vigorously about whether artistic beauty was more convincing than natural beauty, and whether the spirit was more important than instinct, he advocated, in a Solomonic way, for a dual-state solution: Beauty, wrote Schiller, is a “citizen of two worlds.” But is that true?

The figures that the German Museum Association has just presented speak above all about the urge for art. The local museums and exhibition halls were visited over 107 million times in 2024, significantly more than in the previous year. For example, while the cinemas were noticeably slow, just 85 million tickets were sold.