SPD honors Binding workforce
Skyline culture prizes go to the Junges Museum Frankfurt and the employees and employees of the brewery. SPD mayoral candidate Mike Josef will campaign for the preservation of the traditional company.
The men and women wearing black hoodies with a white eagle print and the logo of the Binding brewery in the hall of the Masonic lodge Zur Einigkeit are silent. They are too depressed to shine. The Radeber Group has declared the brewery unrentable and wants to close it. The fear of the end is too great. The occasion on Sunday evening is still a beautiful one.
Ina Hartwig (SPD), Head of the Culture Department, honors the workforce with one of two SPD Skyline Culture Awards. Like actor Michael Quast in 2018 and before that the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, the Frankfurt Club Voltaire or Eckhard Herrel and the Ernst May Society. “When UNESCO declared beer an intangible cultural heritage in 2020, it was clear to us that Binding had to get the prize,” said acting SPD chairman Kolja Müller.
In 1870, Conrad Binding bought a small brewery in Frankfurt’s old town and from 1881 made the brand big on the Sachsenhausen hill. Now the brewery is to be closed. The chairman of the works council, Christian Schipniewski, accepts the award for the employees. He looks at the 150 invited guests of the traditional brewery. “I see 1200 years of service here. When I started bonding 35 years ago, many of them were still children. Today they are seasoned men and women who also work at Binding. Then you get pain. There has to be a solution other than closure,” he says.
A podium will be given to him by SPD mayoral candidate Mike Josef and the journalist and former FR editor Claus-Jürgen Göpfert. Josef found out about the closure from a journalist. “There were no discussions or hints beforehand. Binding belongs to the city of Frankfurt and is a custodian of a cultural asset.” He also calls on the state of Hesse to speak to Radeberger to find a solution for preservation.
Almost 20,000 signatures have already been collected, says Schipniewski. “The Eintracht fan curve will continue next week. Then there will be even more.” Thunderous applause penetrates the hall. City councilor Josef, guarantees that no housing will be built on the “industrial site” on the backs of workers. The magistrate agrees on that.” He does not want to allow property speculation like before with Henninger. Schipniewski proudly wears the transparent skyline statue.
Susanne Gessner, director and curator of the Junges Museum Frankfurt, is just as proud. “The museum is for children and young people up to the age of 16. The beer from the Binding brewery is purely legal from the age of 16,” says Kolja Müller. “The entire population takes part in the culture prizes.” 50 years ago, it was Europe’s first children’s museum to come into being. The exhibition “Enquired: Frankfurt and the NS” has been running since the beginning of December 2021 and manages to explain the NS era to children.
Gesser has been with us since her student days. “As a student, I did an internship in 1989 and got stuck,” she says and laughs. As a freelancer, she accompanied holiday camps “with around 80 children every day all day” and then applied for a vacancy. “Children have changed and not changed since then,” she says. “They are still curious, inquisitive and love to learn. Today the deadline pressure is higher for them, the (un)social media put them under great responsibility and the overall pace is much faster.”
Susanne Gesser and her team love working at the Young Museum. “We have such a rich children’s culture with many origins. It’s incredibly exciting to bring them together and into contact with the city so that they can identify with it.”