Success Quote by Johannes Rau

A German statesman praising creativity isn’t just paying lip service to artists; he’s making an argument about what a country owes itself before it starts counting the receipts. Rau’s phrasing - “prepare the ground” - is deliberately agricultural and civic at once: creativity isn’t a quirky personality trait, it’s a crop. It needs policy, institutions, education, time, and a tolerance for experimentation. In a political register, that’s code for long-term investment, the kind that rarely produces immediate, campaign-ready results.

The second sentence stages a careful rhetorical turn. Rau acknowledges the inevitable demand for measurable payoff - “Euros and Cents” - but he reduces money to one possible after-effect, not the point. That specificity is doing work: he doesn’t say “prosperity” or “growth,” he names the small change, the blunt arithmetic of budget debates. Then he performs a subtle moral judo move: economic success won’t “reduce my joy.” The line concedes the market’s legitimacy without granting it sovereignty. Profit is allowed in the room, but it doesn’t get to rewrite the story of why creativity matters.

Contextually, this fits a late-20th/early-2000s European moment when governments were trying to reconcile cultural funding with the emerging “creative industries” logic. Rau is pre-empting suspicion from both sides: from fiscal hawks who want culture to justify itself, and from cultural workers who fear being turned into a branding strategy. The intent is to defend an ecosystem - and to insist that dignity, imagination, and public purpose can coexist with, but shouldn’t be subordinated to, the spreadsheet.