Hamburg's Senator Biermann Ratjen Medal, a culture prize awarded for nearly five decades, is being renamed the Medal for Art and Culture in Hamburg after historian Helmut Stubbe da Luz uncovered evidence that the prize's namesake, Hans Harder Biermann-Ratjen, confirmed his Nazi Party membership in a 1943 application. Biermann-Ratjen, who later served as Hamburg's senator for culture, had been deemed not to have been a member during post-war de-Nazification, but the new research prompted the city to rebrand the award.
The renaming matters because it reflects ongoing efforts in Germany to confront and correct historical whitewashing of Nazi-era figures in public honors. The prize had been awarded over 100 times to artists and cultural figures, and the change acknowledges that Biermann-Ratjen's political rehabilitation was based on incomplete information. The first renamed medal will be awarded this summer to Peter Hess, whose work includes memorial plaques and bringing the Stolpersteine project to Hamburg, directly honoring those who resisted the Nazis.