Bertelsmann Stiftung

Establishment of the foundation

At the end of the 1970s, there were discussions concerning who would follow Reinhard Mohn as chairman of Bertelsmann. Against this background and because he believed that the state must be able to count on its citizens' willingness to assume responsibility and take the initiative, Mohn founded the Bertelsmann Stiftung on 8 February 1977. It was officially approved by the authorities on 14 March 1977. The Bertelsmann Stiftung was initially endowed with 100,000 Deutsche Marks in capital. About two years later, it began its work.

Building the foundation's work

In 1979, Hans-Dieter Weger was appointed the first managing director. He developed the concept of an operational foundation that develops and oversees its own projects. One of the Bertelsmann Stiftung's first activities was the baseline study Kommunikationsverhalten und Buch ("Communication Behavior and the Book"), which was prepared in cooperation with Infratest. The Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Bertelsmann Group also provided support for the construction of the Gütersloh municipal library.

In 1982, the Bertelsmann Stiftung presented its first public report of its activities. In the report's foreword, Karl Carstens, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, praised the "achievement of foundations in the public sphere." In the meantime, the Bertelsmann Stiftung had come to play a central role in Reinhard Mohn's sociopolitical activities. Mohn functioned as the foundation's sole executive and was supported by a newly created advisory board from 1983 onwards. In addition to Reinhard Mohn and Hans-Dieter Weger, the board's members were Kurt Biedenkopf, Gerd Bucerius, Friedhelm Farthmann and Eberhard Witte. In 1985, a publishing house was founded as part of the foundation in order to handle the growing number of publications. Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung still exists today.

In 1988, the Bertelsmann Stiftung awarded the Carl Bertelsmann Prize (now known as the Reinhard Mohn Prize) for the first time. The recipients were employer organizations and trade unions in the construction, chemistry and metalworking industries. Today, the award continues to honor internationally renowned figures who have developed pioneering solutions to social and political challenges. In addition to working in Germany, the Bertelsmann Stiftung initiated several international projects in the 1980s, such as the Kulturraum Europa (European Culture Space). Further examples include a program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the construction of the Biblioteca Can Torró in Alcúdia on the island of Majorca.

Kurt Biedenkopf was elected as the first chairman of the advisory board in 1987, and Reinhard Mohn himself took over this position in 1990. Horst Teltschik then joined the foundation, a development that received a great deal of media attention. The former foreign policy adviser to Helmut Kohl became managing director of the Bertelsmann Stiftung in early 1991 and began focusing on the foundation's internationalization. At the end of the 1980s, the Bertelsmann Stiftung offices were built opposite the Bertelsmann corporate headquarters. Mikhail Gorbachev was a guest during his first trip to Germany after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Transferring the majority interest

In addition to Reinhard Mohn, Ulrich Saxer and Werner Weidenfeld were appointed to the Bertelsmann Stiftung executive board in 1993. New management was also hired. In the same year, Reinhard Mohn transferred the majority of the capital shares in the Bertelsmann Group to the foundation, a move intended to ensure continuity at the company. The transaction increased the foundation's stake in the company from 21.3% to 68.8%, being the largest shareholder. In the 1993 transfer agreement, however, shareholdings and voting rights were strictly separated, so that the foundation cannot exercise any significant influence on the Bertelsmann Group, which is still largely controlled by the Mohn family. As the foundation receives dividends for its holdings in the company, the transfer of shares resulted in a significant increase in the organization's budget.

Restructuring of governance boards

In 1998, Reinhard Mohn stepped down from his leading role at the Bertelsmann Stiftung. Mark Wössner was first elected chairman of the executive board, and, a year later, chairman of the advisory board. After Wössner's departure in 2000, the foundation's governance structure changed again: the executive board was replaced by an executive committee and the advisory board was replaced by a board of trustees. As an interim step, at the end of 2000 Reinhard Mohn became chairman of both the executive committee and the board of trustees, until Gunter Thielen succeeded him in both positions in mid-2001. With this step, Reinhard Mohn gave up all previous management functions, remaining only a member of the board of trustees.

Heribert Meffert succeeded Gunter Thielen in 2002 and continued to lead the Bertelsmann Stiftung until 2005. During his tenure, the executive committee became an executive board once again; the goal was to strengthen corporate governance by promoting greater transparency and independence. After Meffert left the foundation, it was jointly led by board chairs Liz Mohn and Johannes Meier. In 2008, Gunter Thielen returned to the Bertelsmann Stiftung as chairman of the executive board. Since 2012, the foundation has been led by Aart De Geus, former Dutch minister of labor and social affairs. Following his retirement at the end of 2019, Ralph Heck took over as chairman of the executive board in mid-2020.

The first offices of the Bertelsmann Stiftung were located in a residential building on Gütersloh's Carl-Miele-Straße. In 1980, offices were rented from the Bertelsmann Group instead. In 1986, the Bertelsmann Stiftung moved to a historic building on Moltkestraße, which had been erected by a subsidiary of the Reichsbank in 1893 and was owned by the central bank of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia until 1985. In 1989, the architecture firm Gerkan, Marg and Partners won a competition to design the new headquarters of the Bertelsmann Stiftung opposite the headquarters of the Bertelsmann Group. The building was completed in 1990 and expanded several times over the following years. In addition to the head office in Gütersloh, the Bertelsmann Group has an office in the Kommandantenhaus in Berlin, which has been used by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, too. It now has its own branch office on Werderschen Markt in the immediate vicinity of the Federal Foreign Office and the Humboldt Forum. Furthermore, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has an office in the European Quarter in Brussels.

In the mid-1990s, the Fundación Bertelsmann, an independent subsidiary foundation, was established in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia. The aim was to promote reading and media literacy in Spain. Today, the Fundación Bertelsmann focuses on vocational training and career guidance for young people in Spain.

Since 2008, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has also been represented in US-capital Washington, D.C, by a second independent foundation, the Bertelsmann Foundation North America, which addresses challenges related to democracy, digitisation and transatlantic exchange through a variety of publications, documentaries and infographics.

Criticism

The Bertelsmann Stiftung has been the subject of public debate. In 2007, Jens Wernicke and Torsten Bultmann published an anthology, entitled "Netzwerk der Macht – Bertelsmann" ("Network of Power – Bertelsmann"), which takes a critical look at the structure and activities of the Bertelsmann Stiftung. The book's 30 contributors focused in particular on the foundation's non-profit status and political influence. The anthology generated widespread public debate on the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Published in 2010, the book "Bertelsmannrepublik Deutschland – eine Stiftung macht Politik" ("Bertelsmann's Republic of Germany: A Foundation Sets Policy") by author and journalist Thomas Schuler gained even greater attention. In it, Schuler describes how the Bertelsmann Stiftung seeks to make contact with leading politicians and to advise them. He criticized the Bertelsmann Stiftung as being "undemocratic" and lacking in transparency. In his opinion, the originally good idea behind the foundation developed into a "distorted world," the basic organization of which he called into question. Schuler also criticized German foundation law, which allows foundations such as the Bertelsmann Stiftung to exist at all. Peter Rawert, an expert on foundations, noted that the Bertelsmann Stiftung is guaranteed a return on its holdings in the Bertelsmann Group that is probably lower than what could be achieved with a fixed-income investment. He also noted that in the United States this would have a negative impact on the foundation's non-profit tax status; moreover, he argued that the situation does not reflect the "standard of efficiency" normally endorsed by the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Commercial interests

Due to its majority interest in the Bertelsmann Group, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has been repeatedly accused of combining non-profit and commercial interests. In 2009, the journalist and author Annette Jensen asserted that the Bertelsmann Stiftung's proposals generate artificial demand, particularly in terms of the purported need to streamline local government, a demand which the foundation then meets, for example through the Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato. She suggested that the RTL and VOX television stations belonging to the Bertelsmann Group and numerous Gruner + Jahr magazines served the foundation by disseminating its messages. The sociologist and entrepreneur Frank Adloff has argued that it is indefensible that the foundation does not need to justify the use of its funds before any parliament or oversight authority. In the United States, he noted, non-profit foundations are not permitted to hold more than a 20% stake in a company in order to avoid possible conflicts of interest; in addition, they have to provide a public accounting of their expenditures.

Political influence

Another criticism involves a lack of democratic legitimacy. Commenting on the foundation's "engagement with civil society," Wolfgang Lieb, former state secretary in the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Science, has argued that this legitimacy is being increasingly diminished, and even replaced by, economic power. According to Lieb, private networks and behind-the-scenes advisors are thus turning into actual rulers. By consulting with politicians outside of government settings, Lieb suggests, the Bertelsmann Stiftung is pursuing a "privatization of politics," a situation that offers mutual benefits: civil servants and politicians are given a protected space where they alone are provided with information free of charge and where they can engage in discussion, while the Bertelsmann Stiftung secures access to all the projects it wants to influence. Thus, no matter who is elected, the Bertelsmann Stiftung is always part of the government. Speaking with broadcaster Deutschlandfunk in 2007, the former SPD politician and publicist Albrecht Müller called the foundation an "anti-democratic institution."

In 2008, the journalist and politician Julika Sandt criticized the growing influence of the Bertelsmann Stiftung on German health care, saying that initiatives developed by the foundation lead to preferential treatment for privatized clinics and medical care centers to the detriment of self-employed physicians. According to Sandt, because Brigitte Mohn was a member of both the Bertelsmann Stiftung executive board and the supervisory board of Rhön-Klinikum, the foundation's neutrality in the health sector is questionable.

In 2012, Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers' Association, spoke critically about the influence of the Bertelsmann Stiftung on education policy. He described its studies as "unscientific" and as "scare tactics." Its activities almost always involved turning some alleged administrative failure into a scandal, Kraus said. He called on politicians to stop allowing themselves to be influenced by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and to take criticism of the foundation seriously.