National Heritage. The German Law for the Protection of National Cultural Goods between individual and collective interests

在2016年颁布的保护国家文化商品(KGSG)的法律草案的讨论中，艺术收藏家和画廊老板强烈抗议计划中的对此类商品的出口限制。他们的批评是基于这样的假设，即财产权意味着对自己的财产的自由处置，而法律遵循的是一个不同的概念，即赋予艺术品的理想价值，使集体利益合法化，即使该物品是私人所有的。正是这种个人利益和集体利益之间的紧张关系赋予了法律独特的性质。然而，一件艺术品被归类为“国家价值”从而免于出口的标准从来没有明确制定过。因此，魏玛共和国、“第三帝国”和联邦共和国时期被列为“国家珍宝”的作品清单对什么是值得法律保护的国宝有非常不同的理解。该项目的核心是分析自1955年以来的清单--1919年的一项较旧的条例在这一年转变为法规--以及对法规的实际执行情况进行评估。其目标是了解各专家委员会随着时间的推移而明确和隐含的标准，并在此基础上对法律进行原则性评价，将其作为公共限制私有财产的范例。该项目的跨学科定位保证了法律实施的洞察力和建议，而这些见解和建议是法律和文化研究本身都无法产生的。

During the discussion of the draft law protecting national cultural goods (KGSG), which was enacted in 2016, art collectors and gallerists protested vehemently against planned export restrictions for such goods. Their criticism was based on the assumption that the right to property means free disposition over one’s own possessions, whereas the law follows a different conception that attributes an ideal value to works of art legitimizing a collective interest even if the object is privately owned. It is this tension between individual and collective interests that gives the law its specific character. However, criteria for the classification of a piece of art as “nationally valuable” and therefore exempt from export have never been clearly formulated. As a consequence, the lists of works classified as “nationally valuable” during the Weimar Republic, the “Third Reich” and the Federal Republic show very different understandings of what constitutes a national treasure worthy of protection by the law. The centerpiece of the project is an analysis of the lists since 1955 – the year when an older regulation from 1919 was transformed into a statute – and an evaluation of the practical implementation of the statute. The goal is to understand the explicit and implicit criteria of the various expert commissions over time and, based on this knowledge, to produce a principled evaluation of the law as an example of public restrictions of private property. The interdisciplinary orientation of the project promises insights and recommendations for the implementation of the law that neither legal nor cultural studies alone would be able to produce.