August 2nd, 2012 Hilmar Hoffmann being interviewed by Rolf van Dick

Hilmar Hoffmann was born in Bremen in 1925, attended secondary school in Oberhausen. Being only 26 years old, he founded the municipal adult education center in Oberhausen and in 1954 he organized the first international short film festival in the city. Since 1970 he was head of the department of culture in Frankfurt, a seat that he held for 20 years. There he facilitated the municipal cinema, the district libraries and the possibility for participation at the Theater Frankfurt. He was initiator of the “Museumsufer”, and taught film theory, as well as cultural and educational policy at the universities in Bochum, Frankfurt, Marburg, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. For almost 10 years, until 2001, he was president of the Goethe institutes, headed the Lesen Foundation in Mainz for five years and until 2011 he was chairman of the governing board of the German Film Institute/German Film Museum and chairman of the program advisory board of RTL and Hit Radio FFH. Hilmar Hoffmann received numerous distinctions, including the Federal Cross of Merit and the Hessian Order of Merit as well as several honorary doctorates. In the interview with Rolf van Dick he talks about his personal leadership style, about responsibility, about good and bad leadership in general and about the topic of values. He talks about his encounter with Willy Brandt and Roman Herzog, Walter Wallmann and Petra Roth and about the importance of culture.