SPD on culture and media

The SPD wants to offer the Thuringian family card permanently so that families can visit theaters, outdoor pools, museums and leisure facilities free of charge. In addition, a youth culture ticket would give young people free admission to cultural institutions until they finish their training or studies.

The family card should stay for good. With it, families can go to the theater, museum or pool for free. Young people should get a culture ticket. It gives free entry to cultural places. It is valid until they finish their training.

The youth culture ticket is to be valid until the completion of vocational or academic training. The SPD justifies both offers by saying all children and young people should be able to experience culture. It also wants to evaluate the state program for family vacations and continue it permanently so that low-income families and family caregivers can take a break.

The SPD wants to make culture a mandatory task for municipalities and write it into the state constitution as a state objective. Thuringia is also to support a cultural state objective in the Basic Law, Germany's constitution.

The SPD wants to protect culture better. Cities and towns should have to take care of culture. Culture should be a goal in Thuringia's constitution. The SPD wants the same for Germany's constitution.

Municipalities in budget emergencies are to be allowed to spend a larger share of their money than before on voluntary tasks. The compensation for cultural burdens within municipal revenue sharing is to continue and be adjusted financially. The SPD also wants to push for the federal program for Thuringia's palaces and castles to be continued and expanded.

The SPD wants people working in the arts to be able to live from their work and is pushing for minimum fees, exhibition fees, and better social protection. Committees, grants, and commissions in culture and media are to be allocated on a gender-parity basis.

Artists should be able to live from their work. The SPD wants fair minimum fees. Artists should also get paid for exhibitions. Women and men should sit on juries equally often. They should get grants equally often.

Social security systems for people working in culture are to become markedly better; the platform sees them as needing protection like other workers. Parity is to apply when commissions, juries, and boards are filled. It is also to apply when grants and artistic commissions are awarded.

The SPD wants to preserve Thuringia's theaters and orchestras and give them financial security through long-term agreements. Children and young people are to get free access to culture, and museums, music schools, and libraries are to be secured as well.

The SPD wants to keep all theaters and orchestras in Thuringia. They should get secure money for many years. Children and young people should enjoy culture for free. Museums, music schools, and libraries should stay too.

Every child is to be able to visit a theater or orchestra, and children's and youth theaters are to receive institutional funding. Grant applications are to become simpler; statewide associations are to get institutional funding and important initiatives multi-year funding. For museums the SPD plans a trainee program, and libraries are to work more closely with schools as places of learning. Added to this is support for community arts, literature, music festivals, cultural tourism, and the digitization of cultural institutions, including a central culture portal. A further Thuringian bid for European Capital of Culture is supported.

The SPD wants to preserve the memories of the persecuted and of prisoners and to expand the educational and research work of memorial sites. New ways of teaching history are meant to foster critical historical awareness.

Memorial sites remind people of crimes in history. The SPD wants to strengthen their work. The memories of the victims should be kept. New programs should explain the history to people.

The platform names, among others, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the former headquarters of Topf und Söhne, and the Andreasstraße memorial. Work on Nazi-looted art and on collections from colonial contexts is to be strengthened through provenance research; a working group with the museum association is to identify needs and proposals. For the medieval Jewish World Heritage site in Erfurt, a World Heritage center is to be created together with the city.

The SPD wants to strengthen Thuringia as a media location and secure access for everyone to balanced, independent media. To that end, community media are to get more money and the boards of the public broadcaster MDR are to be made more diverse.

The SPD wants to strengthen independent media in Thuringia. Community media should get more money. These are stations where citizens make the programs themselves. More associations should have a say at the broadcaster MDR. Erfurt should stay a center for children's media.

The share of socially relevant associations on MDR's boards is to rise. Erfurt is to be developed further as a center for children's media, with a focus on teaching and learning media, game development, and productions made by children. Media funding is to open up more to new and experimental formats. Training and continuing education in media professions is to be supported, and libraries are to be strengthened as places for media education.