The supervisory board of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg has resolved, at its 5 August 2025 meeting, to lodge an appeal with the Kammergericht against portions of the Berlin Regional Court’s ruling in the Patricia Schlesinger affair. It argues a duty to avert financial damage to taxpayers and to the rbb, and seeks a ruling that Schlesinger be personally liable for decisions concerning bonus payments and an ARD allowance. In addition, the board is pursuing damages connected to the discontinued Digitales Medienhaus project, aiming to recover more than €12.9 million plus interest. The Landgericht had separated this aspect from the rest of the proceedings. The DMH project was terminated at the end of 2022.

As a man of means and measured tastes, I cannot pretend this is simply bureaucratic trivia. It is, in its own theatrical fashion, a test of who fears the register of the public purse more: the plebeian taxpayer with his chipped coins or the august institution that pretends to cradle the nation’s cultural life. The board’s posture—protect the public’s wallet, seek personal accountability for a former chief, and chase down every euro sunk into a vanity project—reads like a blueprint for governance in a slightly less decadent republic. And mark you: the pursuit of personal liability for bonus payments and an ARD allowance is, on the surface, a neat ritual of accountability. Beneath the ritual, it is a display of power—the assertion that the guardians of public broadcasting are not merely ceremonial custodians, but active claimants on responsibility, even when the deeds in question belong to a bygone era.

Then there is the DMH chapter, a tale that could have been written as a cautionary parable for any modern empire. A project terminated in 2022 still haunts the ledgers with a price tag of nearly €13 million, plus interest, as if the past insists on courting the future with unpaid bills. To those who flutter at the mere spectacle of such numbers, I say: welcome to governance in a world where prestige projects outlive the people who author them and where the public purse, like a capricious gallery, keeps its receipts. The board’s insistence on recovering those costs is not merely prudence; it is a declaration that there is a line between ambition and audacity, and that line must be policed with cash registers and court rulings until the bills stop coming.

In the end, I observe this with the seasoned amusement of someone who has spent a lifetime watching empires balance on the edge of a gilded ledge. Let the Kammergericht decide where liability truly lies, let the interest accrue if that is what keeps the accounts honest, and let the rbb learn, as all great institutions must, that money is the language in which accountability is most precisely spoken. If this little drama proves anything, it is that even in a society that pretends to elevate culture above commerce, the ledger is the true monarch, and its whims are rarely charitable.