Inside Wirtschaft - Der Podcast mit Manuel Koch | Börse und Wirtschaft im Blick · Manuel Koch

#1498 Inside Wirtschaft - Peter Raue zum 85. im Salon Schinkelplatz: „Ich habe mir mein eigenes Reich gesucht“

March 26, 2026·58 min·4 clips

At age 35, Raue discovered his father was half-Jewish, his birth was illegal under Nazi law, and his biological father's name was an anagram of his own.

1. Inside Wirtschaft host Manuel Koch interviews Berlin entertainment lawyer Peter Raue at an 85th birthday celebration event at Salon Schinkelplatz. 2. Peter Raue has run a law firm of 80 lawyers at Potsdamer Platz for over 50 years, specialising in art law, and has served as longtime chairman of the Friends of the Nationalgalerie Berlin. 3. The episode's core hook is Raue's thesis that art — whether Mahler, Picasso, or a Berlin techno club — belongs to the same fundamental human need, and that his entire career has been devoted to protecting that space. 4. Raue describes the 1956 Picasso exhibition at Munich's House of Art as his 'tectonic experience': standing before Guernica without armored glass at age 12, then noticing a bicycle saddle transformed into a bull's head, he understood art could communicate in a language nothing else could. 5. He moved to Berlin in August 1961, two weeks after the Wall was built, explicitly because he saw the city as 'half empty' with space to fill — arriving with a single suitcase to a room on Augsburgstrasse. 6. Berlin's intellectual and cultural environment of the early 1960s included Beckett staging productions at the Schlosspark Theater, whose premiere of Waiting for Godot lost half its audience at intermission — a piece now treated like Hamlet. 7. Raue deliberately chose law over acting after seeing Hamburg theater legend Gründgens and concluding he could never reach that level — a decision he calls 'a blessing.' 8. The Berghain VAT case: a tax official retroactively demanded 12 years of 19% VAT instead of the 7% cultural rate, which would have caused the club's ruin; Raue spent a night at Berghain to understand it, then argued that a DJ building a programmatic arc over hours is equivalent to a conductor. 9. In the Berghain negotiation, when the official raised the club's 'dark rooms,' Raue replied that one could also go to the toilet at the Philharmonic — and a judge quietly informed him they would prevail before the formal decision was announced. 10. Raue lost the Kai Diekmann penis case: the Taz newspaper published a mural claiming Diekmann had undergone enlargement surgery; the appeals court ruled it was irony and therefore protected art; the Taz then named Raue its 'Unman of the Year.' 11. The MoMA Berlin exhibition attracted 1.2 million visitors after Raue persuaded MoMA director Glenn Lowry over drinks in Schöneberg to keep all 100 works in Berlin for nine months rather than splitting them across London, Frankfurt, and Madrid. 12. Insurance logistics required that works be distributed across multiple planes — no single plane could carry all 100, nor could each work fly alone — because the insured value per plane crash scenario exceeded defined limits. 13. A pre-exhibition survey found that many Berliners associated 'MoMA' primarily with the German magazine Tomorrow rather than the New York museum; Raue commissioned a million-euro ad campaign with the tagline 'the star is coming' that withheld the name until opening. 14. Raue describes his art collection — over a thousand works — as emerging from encounters with artists including Beuys, Uecker, Baselitz, and Rebecca Horn, not from a systematic collection concept; he stopped buying at 80 on the grounds he would not own pieces long enough. 15. His daughter Rebecca, named after artist Rebecca Horn, studied under Georg Baselitz and specifically asked her father not to attend her first exhibition because his presence would have overshadowed her work. 16. Raue is physically direct: he cycles through Berlin wearing a gold helmet, drinks tap water, and ties his own bow ties — a skill he demonstrates live during the event. 17. Koch conducts the interview in a conversational salon format with audience questions; the tone is warm and sometimes comic, with Raue self-deprecating about his singing voice and exam results. 18. Raue's delivery is discursive and anecdote-rich, frequently interrupting himself to name-check figures (Weizsäcker, Götz Friedrich, Siemens), and the audience asks follow-up questions at the end. 19. Listeners who follow Berlin cultural politics, German art law, or post-war German cultural history will find the specificity and insider access compelling. 20. Listeners expecting business or financial analysis — the show's usual remit — or those who do not read German cultural context will find the episode's references opaque.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Inside Wirtschaft - Der Podcast mit Manuel Koch | Börse und Wirtschaft im Blick