Alfred Schachtzabel, the former department director, Bernhard Ankermann, and Herman Baumann, whose concept of ‘cultural province’ shaped the ex-hibition’s organisation into regions (see figures 3.13–3.14; see also Krieger, 1974, pp. 119–122).⁶ The exhibitions remained largely untouched until 1941, when the Museum closed due to the Second World War and the increasing danger from air raids.

Already in 1934, the Museum started to prepare the collections in case of war, differentiating the entire collection into ‘irreplaceable’ (unersetzliche) objects (immediate evacuation in case of war), ‘especially valuable’ objects (besonders wertvoll) (to be safely stored), and ‘remaining’ objects (‘left to their fate’, as phrased by Gerd Höpfner) (Höpfner, 1992, p. 157). During the Second World War, the Ethnological Museum set up, as did many other museums in Berlin, the relocation (Auslagerungen) of the collections to the Museum’s cellar, as well as to other spaces considered secure in Berlin and all over Germany.⁷ From 1942 till 1946, as the museum database manager Boris Gliesmann told me, ‘we can only speculate where the objects were, as they were pushed wildly all over Germany, depending on where the front was’.⁸ The Africa collections were mainly stored in Berlin’s museum cellars, in Wiesbaden, in a castle in Celle, and in a castle in Schräbsdorf. After the war, from the 1950s on, the objects slowly returned, but were moved to Dahlem.⁹ On the grounds of the collection’s lack of ‘completeness’ after the war, Kurt Krieger opened the exhibition *African Art*, despite his dissatisfaction with the exhibition’s focus on ‘art’ (Krieger, 1974, p. 123). The exhibition consisted of an installation in a high-ceilinged, white cube setting with regional organisation. The exhibition lasted from 1957 until 1971, (see figure 3.18–3.19). Shortly after the exhibition opened, Kurt Krieger insisted that the future goals of the Museum für Völkerkunde would be to make the collections accessible in exhibitions of the region’s cultural histories, rejecting the concept of ‘exotic art’ (Krieger, 1963, p. 248). As a result of war damage, the original museum building in the centre of Berlin was demolished in 1961 (see figures 3.15–3.17). Wils Ebert and Fritz Bornemann planned a new museum complex in Dahlem. The Museum für Völkerkunde opened its different permanent exhibitions and new storage spaces in stages from 1970 on.

Three years after the museum’s official vernissage in 1970, paralleling the opening in stages of the Humboldt Forum (*Eröffnung in Etappen*), Kurt Krieger opened a new permanent exhibition dedicated to ‘Africa’ (see figures 3.20–3.21). Presented without a title, and thus suggesting a generalist view on ‘Africa’ via its material culture, the exhibition was organised in ‘typical geographical and cultural regions’, problematically making a distinction between ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Africa.¹⁰ The exhibition aimed ‘to show the cultural property of the population of each region [...] in its entirety and not to
<figure><img src="image_61.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.13 Exhibition title unidentified ('Africa collections'), Benin room (1926-WWII), Museum für Völkerkunde, Königgrätzer Straße, curated by Alfred Schachtzabel, Bernhard Ankermann, Herman Baumann, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified
<figure><img src="image_62.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.14 Exhibition title unidentified ('Africa collections'), Cameroon Grasslands room (1926-WWII), Museum für Völkerkunde, Königgrätzer Straße, curated by Alfred Schachtzabel, Bernhard Ankermann, Herman Baumann, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified
<figure><img src="image_63.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.15 Main entrance of the former Museum für Völkerkunde, Stresemannstraße 110, corner Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 6a, 25 March 1949, F Rep. 290 Nr. 0000920, Landesarchiv Berlin, photographer: Willy Feige
<figure><img src="image_64.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.16 Museum für Völkerkunde, undated, atrium with damaged glass ceiling, 25 March 1949, F Rep. 290 Nr. 0000923, Landesarchiv Berlin, photographer Willy Feige
<figure><img src="image_65.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3.17 Demolishing the Museum für Völkerkunde, 1961, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_67.png" /><figcaption>Figures 3.18–3.19 African Art (Afrikanische Kunst) (1957–1971), Museum für Völkerkunde, Dahlem, curated by Kurt Krieger, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_68.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_69.png" /><figcaption>Figures 3.20–3.21 Museum für Völkerkunde, April 1972, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Reinhard Friedrich</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_70.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.22 'Introduction room' (Einführungsraum), permanent exhibition, Africa department (1973–1999), Museum für Völkerkunde, Dahlem, curated by Kurt Krieger, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Reinhard Friedrich
<figure><img src="image_71.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.23 View of 'Sahara', 'North Africa', permanent exhibition, Africa department (1973–1999), Museum für Völkerkunde, Dahlem, curated by Kurt Krieger, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Reinhard Friedrich
<figure><img src="image_72.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.24 View of ‘Grassland Cameroon’, permanent exhibition, Africa department (1973–1999), Museum für Völkerkunde, Dahlem, curated by Kurt Krieger, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Reinhard Friedrich
rip it apart in single, incoherent pieces, such as with the unilateral separation of art' (Krieger, 1974, p. 123).¹¹ The focus on the use of material culture was reflected by large maps, wall-sized black-and-white photos of representatives of different cultural groups, as well as showcases integrating large numbers of objects (1,361), equally following a regional organisation (see figures 3.22-3.24). The exhibition would last for twenty-six years and thus constitutes the most permanent exhibition of the department's twentieth-century history (1973-1999).

## Looting looted art? The histories of the Leipzig repatriation

In 1973, after completing an approximate inventory, the curator of African collections and then museum director Kurt Krieger estimated war losses in relation to the Africa collection. The loss was estimated at approximately 50 per cent, with an original inventory of 66,953 objects, 36,656 objects lost in the war, and 30,297 objects remaining in Berlin's storage spaces (Krieger, 1973, p. 129).

This estimated amount changed drastically, when, in 1990, it was publicly revealed that Leipzig's Museum für Völkerkunde had kept 45,000 of the Ethnological Museum's objects as a state secret, with significant numbers of objects associated with the African continent. How many objects were actually lost due to wartime relocation remains unclear to date. No systematic inventory of Berlin's collections has been done yet. In his personal notes, Boris Gliesmann made the following calculation, in which he added different numbers of objects to identify the number lost through the war. Repatriation from Leipzig (18,627 objects), repatriation from Celle (30,500 objects), repatriation from Wiesbaden (2,000 objects), objects stored in Berlin (1,000), unnumbered objects (1,688): in all, there are 53,815 objects, which would mean a war loss of approximately 12,000 objects.¹² This confirms estimations by the curator Hans-Joachim Koloss of around 10,000 objects (Radosuboff, 2021, p. 10). After the revelation, it was decided to return the objects to Berlin (Feest, 1991; Höpfner, 1992). The Leipzig Hall (*Leipzighalle*), a storage room, was constructed to house and store the objects immediately. The objects were then inventoried and assigned to the Museum's different departments, and stored in different locations in Berlin (see figures 3.28-3.30).¹³

What had happened to the collection was only slowly reconstructed – a reconstruction that has not necessarily come to an end. Some questions remain unanswered. The collections in question were presumably first relocated from Berlin to Schräbsdorf, a town located in Lower Silesia in today's Poland. Given the region's occupation by the Red Army in 1945–1946, it is
likely those collections that were taken as war booty to Leningrad, and possibly to other places in the Soviet Union. In 1975, the GDR government was approached by the Soviet Union to receive the collection. The anthropologist Philipp Schorch describes how the GDR government accepted this 'return' on German territory, 'thus metamorphosing from victory trophy over Nazi Germany to material symbol and marker of friendship between brother states in order to stabilize the Cold War' (Schorch, 2018, p. 177). With 44,561 ethnographic objects packed in 610 boxes, the transport from 1977 to 1979 to Leipzig turned out to be extremely complicated. It had taken two years to unpack und repack several hundred boxes and large and small packages in Leningrad, which were delivered in twelve truckloads to Leipzig.¹⁴ What complicated the mission, however, was the fact that it was a clandestine transport, which museum staff in Berlin recounted as a 'cloak-and-dagger operation' (eine Nacht-und-Nebel-Aktion).¹⁵ The objects were installed in a temporary exhibition space in Leipzig, which served – as objects were covered up and the exhibition space closed – as a secret storage space.¹⁶

Up to the present, museum staff grapple with the remnants and consequences of these histories of relocation, theft, and looting on a daily basis, often referred to as the collection's 'odyssey' (Haas, 2002, p. 21). The storage manager of the Africa collections, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, took the Leipzig repatriation as an occasion to reorder the entire Africa museum storages and to separate the collections into 'East Africa', located in the Museum's cellar, and 'West Africa', located on the same building's top floor. Whereas chapter five is dedicated to this history of the making of a new storage system, the following concentrates on the inventory and digitisation of the collection after the Leipzig repatriation. In the Africa department's case, the remaining objects to be inventoried laid stored in banana boxes (*Bananenkisten*) on top of the storage facility cupboards. In a conversation with museum staff, one storage manager remarked that, 'it is difficult to work if you know that it is impossible to do the job. Inventorying 30,000 objects in a few years all alone, this is completely impossible'.¹⁷

It is the Africa curator Hans-Joachim Koloss who accompanied the Leipzig repatriation, which might be one of the reasons why he only inaugurated 'his' permanent exhibition in 1999, despite the fact that he had already taken up the post in 1985 (following Kurt Krieger). *Africa: Art and Culture* was exhibited in a light-flooded space, with objects arranged in glass and metal-framed display cases, partly in a cultural or regional organisation ('Makonde in Mozambique'; 'Cameroon Grasslands'), and partly in a thematic organisation ('primitivism'; 'Elements of Design in African Art') (1999-2005) (see figures 3.25-3.26).
<figure><img src="image_73.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_74.png" /><figcaption>Figures 3.25–3.26 Africa: Art and Culture (Afrika. Kunst und Kultur) (1999–2005), Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Dahlem, curated by Hans-Joachim Koloss, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_75.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.27 Construction of the so-called Leipzigalle, autumn 1990, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Dietrich Graf
<figure><img src="image_76.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3.28 Press conference in the ‘Leipzighalle’ of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dahlem, undated, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Dietrich Graf</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_77.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.29 Outside the Hohenschönhausen hall, used as interim storage, 7 December 1992, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Dietrich Graf
<figure><img src="image_78.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.30 Inside the Hohenschönhausen hall used as interim storage, 7 December 1992, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Dietrich Graf
After Leipzig: The history of the collection's inventory and digitisation (1990–2000s)

Due to the arrival of these tens of thousands of objects, the digitisation of the collections in the Ethnological Museum started rather early at the beginning of the 1990s, compared to other museums in Berlin (see figure 3.31). The Africa department in particular occupied a pioneering role in the collection's digital documentation. This was not only because it was 'recorded positively',¹⁸ meaning that everything that was on-site was recorded, in contrast to documenting everything listed in the books, including lost objects. It mainly concerned the digitisation process, which was to serve as a 'pilot project for the immature GOS programme',¹⁹ the Museum's still-to-be-installed database, which was later (1998/1999) transferred to the Museum's current database, MuseumPlus. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff had been unsatisfied with the inventory of the Leipzig objects. He characterised the process as 'insufficient' and 'rough' (*grob*).²⁰ He subsequently developed a 'pilot project' within the Museum (Radosuboff, 2019, p. 32). Klaus Helfrich, then museum director, put him in charge of the digitisation process, in a context in which, as Hans-Joachim Radosuboff framed it, everyone reacted to the new PCs 'as if the Black Death had just broken out'.²¹

Boris Gliesmann described the transfer from this old documentation system GOS in 2003 to MuseumPlus as a 'milestone' in his career and the Museum's history. ²² The process of transfer to a new database was monitored and developed together with a working group of the SMB. Boris Gliesmann accompanied this digitisation process and decided to take over Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's foundation (*Grundstock*) of subject groups (*Sachgruppen*), even though it had been designed for the collections from the African continent. For Boris Gliesmann, 'the vocabulary worked for about 70 or 80 per cent of the museum's collections: all collections have arrows, calabash, spears, cooking pots'. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's attempt to order the Leipzig repatriation collections thus ultimately became formalised, generalised, and inscribed in the Museum's database.

Using MuseumPlus as the reference database didn't translate into a uniform and systematic digitisation process in the Museum. The process can rather be described as fragmentary, selective, and subjective. The digitisation process was selective, because it was mainly through external research projects that the collection was digitised, such as a European project on the inventory of musical instruments²³ or a research project on the Africa collection's archival files.²⁴ The digitisation was fragmentary, because the objects had been digitised at different times and with different technical support and expertise. Not all the objects were integrated in the database. Those
<figure><img src="image_79.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3.31 Inventory of 'Leipzig Repatriation', ca. 1990–1992, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified</figcaption></figure>
that were digitised varied greatly in their detail, some missing photographs, measurements, or descriptions. The digitisation was subjective, because the collections' capture (*Erfassung*) and the detail of the indexation (*Erschließung*) depended on the personal engagement and interest of each regional department's employees. Put differently and somewhat provocatively, the objects which the museum staff considered important were privileged in their inventory. As a result, some parts of the Museum's collections were almost entirely available via the database while other parts of the collections were absent.²⁵

Boris Gliesmann's personal effort consisted in transforming the database – which he referred to as the 'documentation system' – into a handy working tool. The most important change from GOS to MuseumPlus, he argued, was from a 'hierarchical' to a 'relational' documentation system. Research on the objects could start from different points of departure, depending on the researcher's interest – the object, the person, the region, the material, etc. All of the data was related and included information on the transactions linked to the collections: the restoration and condition reports (*Zustandsprotokoll*), the loan procedures, the location management (*Standortverwaltung*). Establishing these relations from 2004 on had been 'manual work, work of sweat and tears' (*Schweißarbeit*). It consisted of cleaning the data (*Bereinigung*), erasing doubles, and checking the spelling of people and things. 'We had three or four Adolf Bastians [the museum's founder] in the system, and we needed to merge the information into one single data set.'

Conversing with Boris Gliesmann in 2016, a transfer of MuseumPlus to a new database management system, Rich Internet Application (RIA), was envisioned to be accomplished in 2019.²⁶ The entity of the SMB were part of this process in order to develop the new database 'in conversation with the different museums'. In several workshops on the different aspects of the database – 'persons/cooperate bodies' (*Personen/Körperschaften*), 'loans' (*Leihverkehr*), etc. – they developed the core structure of the database together. Whereas there was a wish within the working group to keep the database 'neutral' to be of use for all museums, the particularity of the Ethnological Museum's database, with its 'ethnic groups' (*Ethnien*), would transform into population groups (*Bevölkerungsgruppe*) and faith or religious community (*Glaubensgemeinschaft*). The structural changes within the organisational documentation mode have not been accessible to those outside it. The publicly accessible database, *SMB Digital*, only shows a fraction of the existing digitised collections and of the available information. Despite the relative immobility of the physical collections in Dahlem, not only has their digitisation gone through several generations of technology but also the larger organisational frameworks and responsibilities have shifted significantly between the end of the 1990s and today.
Shifting structures, shifting collections: The Ethnological Museum,
the Humboldt Forum, and the Forschungscampus (1999–2021)

In ethnological museums, it is regional departments that continue to pre-
dominate the museum's internal organisation. Ordered geographically, the
respective collections are, in turn, managed and directed by curators. In 1963,
the Africa curator Kurt Krieger recalled the coming into being and function-
ing of the departments within the larger Museum für Völkerkunde.

At the beginning of this century (1904/1905), the mass of the collections
made it necessary to divide them into independent departments, which
since then have led a distinct life of their own, albeit in a changing ad-
ministrative composition. Each of these eight departments [...] is a closed
whole within the wider framework of the Museum für Völkerkunde.
(Krieger, 1963, p. 245)²⁷

Until 1999, the different ‘closed wholes’ – the departments – worked as
comparatively separate entities alongside one another in a ‘very decentral-
ised’ manner, as the former Africa curator Peter Junge described it.²⁸ The de-
partment’s curator was provided with a storage manager, one to two restor-
ers, and a secretary, who together guaranteed the departments’ autonomous
functioning. In 1999, the museum’s director Klaus Helfrich (1985–2000) sug-
gested a structural reform. The reform, also publicly visible because of the
museum’s name change from Museum für Völkerkunde to Ethnologisches
Museum, consisted of a reshuffling of the internal structure to break with
the powerful curatorial authority over the collections. Helfrich, museum
staff reported, had perceived it as ‘impossible’ to direct the Museum with
such powerful curators. He dissolved the different regional departments
(Abteilungen) and suggested an organisation around the new departments
of ‘Direction’, ‘Collections’, ‘Restoration’, ‘Communication’, ‘Centralised
Services’, and ‘Science and Research’.²⁹ The curators’ status changed from
that of director of an autonomous study collection (Abteilungsleiter) to that
of a managerial position in a scientific area within the ‘Research and Science’
department (Fachreferatsleiter). Some curators perceived the consequences
of the reform as a ‘downgrade’ and as a ‘dismempowerment’. In practice, some
refused to accept the newly imposed hierarchies.³⁰ In particular, curators
lamented the loss of each department’s secretary, as it is ‘so much more con-
venient to arrive at work and the coffee is waiting for you on your desk. And
to say: “Please write this down.” And it’s a done job’.³¹

In 2000, Viola König replaced Klaus Helfrich as the new director. Some
curators expected her to withdraw Helfrich's reform, which she refused to
do. Viola König rather arrived with the mission to develop a concept for the Humboldt Forum, to be realised together with the new Africa curator Peter Junge.

Despite the long envisioned move of the Ethnological Museum's collections to the Humboldt Forum, no structural decision had been taken about the relationship between the Ethnological Museum and the Humboldt Forum when I arrived in the Museum in 2013. At the time, no official representative of the Humboldt Forum was yet in place, but rather, different people took on this role on different occasions, while other potential candidates decided not to do so. In the Museum, the protagonists linking the Museum with the Humboldt Forum consisted first of its director Viola König and her team.³² The Swiss cultural manager Martin Heller was commissioned in 2010 to lay out a concept for the 'Agora' - the Humboldt Forum's programme - as well as several temporary exhibition spaces. He was also named the Humboldt Lab Dahlem's artistic director (2012-2015). The Humboldt Lab Dahlem, equipped with 4,125 million euros by the Federal Cultural Heritage Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes), had been set up to 'provide impulses for the exhibition planning [...] for the future Humboldt Forum' (Humboldt Lab Project Archive-Humboldt-Forum, 2015). Finally, Hermann Parzinger, president of the SPK, had taken on the role of speaking in the name of the Humboldt Forum in public.³³ The director of the SMB, Michael Eissenhauer (since 2008), however, stayed in the background of debates related to the Humboldt Forum. When the conservative politician Monika Grütters took office as the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in 2013, she adopted the Humboldt Forum as her central political project. In a grand coalition of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Monika Grütters aimed to make the Humboldt Forum 'a house out of one mold' (ein Haus aus einem Guss) and the 'nation's business card' (Visitenkarte der Nation). This would include organisation building and deciding on central recruitments (Richter & Abel, 2017; Mangold & Timm, 2018). In what follows, I chronicle the central developments concerning the Ethnological Museum and the Humboldt Forum - most of which were accompanied by controversies.

Monika Grütters was invested in building the Humboldt Forum as an independent organisation. Her first important intervention in the Humboldt Forum's organisational structure was to nominate the founding directorship (Gründungsintendanz) in April 2015. The founding directorship would be the first official representatives of the Humboldt Forum employed to develop its 'common vision', bringing together the Humboldt Forum's different players, consisting since early 2015 of the Site Museum (Museum des
Ortes), Humboldt University, the 'non-European' collections, and, in place of the Central Library, an exhibition about Berlin.³⁴ The directorship consisted of Hermann Parzinger, representing the SPK; the art historian Horst Bredekamp, representing the Humboldt University; and Neil MacGregor. The nomination of Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, was celebrated as a diplomatic coup by the press, as 'Chancellor Merkel's preferred candidate' (dpa, 2015). This positioning justified that he took the lead in what was often referred to as 'the triumvirate' (dpa, 2015). The Ethnological Museum's exhibition plans were in their final stage at the time of the founding directorship's nomination. Neil MacGregor's intervention in the exhibition plans were pronounced³⁵ and logistically supported and financially realised by the company Humboldt Forum Kultur GmbH (2016–2018), a firm created explicitly for the purpose. In December 2017, the founding directorship was replaced when the organisational and administrative structure of the Humboldt Forum was introduced.³⁶ Monika Grütters created and appointed two further leadership positions: the director of collections (Sammlungsdirektor), merging the directorship of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, and the general director (Generalintendant). Both described as 'managers' rather than 'creatives' in the press, the recruitments were internal – the new director of collections, Lars-Christian Koch, was formerly curator and interim director at the Ethnological Museum; the general director, Hartmut Dorgerloh, was the former director of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens. Their recruitment was interpreted as an emergency solution to the Humboldt Forum's organisational constellation, which was repeatedly characterised by museum staff and the press as 'lacking in transparency', 'hierarchical', or 'paralysed' (Häntzschel, 2017a; 2017b; 2018a).

The Humboldt Forum was not going to become a museum as conventionally understood. As Monika Grütters stated in 2017, 'we don't want to do museum work, but rather use the items from the collections as a point of departure to work interdisciplinarily'.³⁷ Despite the central position attributed to the 'non-European collections' and recurrent comparison with other grand national organisations such as the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the British Museum, or the Centre Pompidou (Parzinger, 2011, pp. 6–7), the Humboldt Forum's concept and organisation were arguably different from museum organisations, notably in relation to budget distribution. In Paris, the restructuration of the museum landscape related to ethnological collections implied the inventory, digitisation, restoration, and new storage of its collections.³⁸ In Berlin, resources were only marginally devoted to the museums involved but rather to the Humboldt Forum itself. The building's overall construction costs were originally planned to amount to 480 million euros, and were continually adjusted, for example
to 595 million euros in 2015, and were finally predicted at a total sum of 680 million euros in 2021 (Bundesregierung, 2019, p. 2; Schönball, 2019; APA, 2021). Additional resources were distributed to the programming, exhibition, and event sector of the Forum, with an estimated yearly budget of 50 million euros (Fahrun, 2016). ³⁹

In Dahlem, the Museum closed in January 2017. The last exhibition of the Africa department to be presented in Dahlem before the Museum's closure was *Art from Africa*, a black-cube exhibition using brightly lit pedestals and showcases to present the objects according to their attributed status as 'art' (2005-2016, curated by Peter Junge with Paola Ivanov). ⁴⁰ *Art from Africa* was organised in four different categories: 'Art History', 'Figural Plastic', 'Performance', and 'Design'. Contrasting a geographical partition, this organisation emphasised its ambition to align itself with Western art history. The exhibition was controversial. For the exhibition's critics, the exhibition evoked references to Africa as 'the dark continent', bringing up associations of the primitive and the savage (Dean, 2010, p. 83; von Bose, 2016).

In 2013-2015, the Museum's official plan was to move the collections to an external storage system in Berlin's Friedrichshagen suburb by 2017, located some twenty-five kilometres from the Humboldt Forum. The site was described as providing ideal storage conditions, conservation conditions, and, importantly, enough space to host the collections. However, as museum staff stated in 2013, the SPK didn't seem to have engaged in seriously planning Friedrichshagen. The time, staff, and financial resources that were needed for the construction and move of the collections were not only unknown to museum staff, but the necessary planning didn't seem to be a priority to the SPK at the time. At a debate in the Berlin parliament in December 2013, the SPK's president, Hermann Parzinger, provided only vague answers with regard to questions concerning the future of the museum complex in Dahlem. As his answers suggested, the research, storage, and conservation of the collections were shaped by a lack of general planning, but substantially, by a lack of financial planning (Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin, 2013b, pp. 32-37). Information on these precise aspects of museum work were difficult to obtain during my stay at the Museum, and also afterwards. To my knowledge, official publications on the matter don't exist, and the information presented here is based on the accounts of those working in the Museum.

In 2017, the plan to move the collections to Friedrichshagen was abandoned. Its financing had not been secured. Museum staff had long lived with doubts about whether the move would actually take place, and finally the plans concerning Friedrichshagen were officially suspended. Instead, the idea of a 'research campus' (*Forschungscampus*) was suggested. This would entail the collections mostly staying in Dahlem, and a cooperation with the
<figure><img src="image_80.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_81.png" /><figcaption>3.32–3.33 Art from Africa (‘Kunst aus Afrika’) (1999–2017), Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, curated by Peter Junge with Paola Ivanov, Dahlem, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Claudia Obrocki</figcaption></figure>
Freie Universität, the museum’s neighbour, would be set up. The research collections would be distributed across the entire Museum, including in the former exhibition halls (Ossowski, 2017). In July 2019, the results of a ‘potential assessment’ (*Potenzialanalyse*) were published by an architectural firm and partly made public, announcing the anthropologist Alexis von Poser as the Museum’s deputy director at the same time (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2019). As with plans announced for Friedrichshagen, however, the future of the project, and thus of the collection, remained uncertain, because the financial realisation was not guaranteed. In 2021, the research campus has its own sub-website as part of the SMB’s website and is described as ‘a new kind of research and presentation location emerging under the name of the Forschungscampus Dahlem’.⁴¹ In the Humboldt Forum’s shadow, the collection’s fate remains uncertain.

Conclusion

Working through colonial collections articulates in this chapter in my desire to understand how the collection formed and circulated. To research these histories, this chapter makes an argument for ethnography. Given the difficulties to trace internal work processes and the shifts and turns of things via written documentation, the chapter also builds on accounts of people who have worked in the Museum, indicating not only where to find and identify archival sources and literature but also how to document the employees’ own histories of engagement with the collections.

The stories that gradually appear when opening boxes and folders when starting to talk to people show a profoundly instable and changing collection story. These were shaped first and foremost by the collection's constitution in colonial times. With the overwhelming quantity of objects that arrived in Berlin, the predominant question, which resonates to this day, has been, very practically: how and where to store them? What to do with all these objects, of which the large majority remains inaccessible in museum storage? And finally, with which legitimacy can they be stored here in Berlin? The history starts in the nineteenth century with a museum building in the city's centre, only a few kilometres from today's Humboldt Forum, which was already too small to house the collections at the Museum's opening in 1873. Moving towards Berlin's periphery, the First World War interrupted the ambitious plans to build a larger museum complex in Dahlem. Collections were, between the two World Wars, divided between the city's centre and Dahlem. Collections were relocated all over Germany, for their protection, before and during the Second World War. A new museum building opened
from 1970 on in Berlin-Dahlem, extending the historical buildings. The objects being repatriated from the former GDR disrupted the existing museum structures. The collection's arrival in Dahlem incited the making of new museum storage spaces, quick digitisation, and new inventory systems. After an internal restructuring in the 1990s, the move of the museum's exhibitions to the Humboldt Forum focused the debate once more on the question of periphery and centre. These histories show how profoundly the collections were touched by the central political regimes and developments of the twentieth century, affecting their movement significantly.
## Notes

1. The photographs stored in the Africa photo department consist mainly of donations from the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. Many of these are photo albums from individuals and their travels.

2. At the time of writing, what exists of the exhibition history is inventoried and scanned, and a list documenting the exhibition history of the Africa department exists. The hierarchy of museum histories, however, is reflected in a major recent research and digitisation project, in which archival files up until 1947 are digitised to be publicly accessible, but anything after this period is not documented, 'Digitalisierung des historischen Archivs im Ethnologischen Museum - 1830-1947', https://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/ethnologisches-museum/sammelnforschen/bibliothek-und-archiv.html, consulted 2 February 2019

3. Königgrätzer Straße was renamed Stresemannstraße in 1930.

4. My translation from the German: 'In 1907 sollte das Gebäude in der Königgrätzer Straße polizeilich geschlossen werden, falls nicht sofort Gänge und Treppe so weit geräumt wurden, dass wenigstens zwei Leute aneinander vorbeikommen konnten.'

5. The distinction of four continents was based on conversations with the directors of the museum's departments for Near Eastern and Indian collections (*Vorderasiatisch und Indisch*), East Asia, Africa and Oceania, and the Americas. These departments were founded after the death of the museum director Bastian in 1905.

6. Baumann claimed that particular cultures could be associated with particular geographical regions. He was convinced that environment, culture, and particular groups formed entities, which could be distinguished one from the other.

7. The storage places consisted of the cellar of the Museum in Prinz-Albrecht-Straße and the Königgrätzer Straße, the Flakturm Zoo and the Flakbunker Hohenschönhausen in Berlin. See a graphic and map of the different museum buildings and storage spaces during the Second World War in Berlin and Germany in Eichhorn, Grabowski, and Vanja 2005:129-131. For an overview of the history of the Museum from 1933-1945, see Schindlbeck (2013).

8. Meeting with Boris Gliesmann, 21 December 2015, my translation from the German: 'Die Sammlungen wurden wild durch's Land geschoben, je nachdem, wo die Front war.'

9. The stamps in the inventory book 'Zurück aus W', 'Zurück aus C' (Back from W, Back from C), indicate the objects' trajectories as they slowly returned to Berlin (see chapter four for more detail on inventory processes).

10. Exhibition texts of the exhibition, from the archive of the Ethnological Museum. The exhibition only showed exhibits from what was depicted as 'Northern and Western Africa'.

11. From the German: 'Es wird also versucht, den Kulturbesitz der Bevölkerung jeder Region - soweit museal darstellbar - in seiner Gesamtheit zu zeigen und nicht in einzelne, zusammenhanglose Teile zu zerreißen, z.B. durch die einseitige Herauslösung der Kunst. [...] Das Ziel ist es, dem Besucher einen Überblick und einen gewissen Einblick in die Vielfalt der nord- und westafrikanschen Kulturen zu vermitteln und damit zum Verständnis der heutigen Situation der Afrikaner beizutragen, die ohne Kenntnis ihrer vielfach och lebendigen traditionellen Lebensweise für uns kaum begreiflich ist' (Krieger, 1974, p. 123).

12. Meeting with Boris Gliesmann, 21 December 2015

13. The Leipzigalle served as a storage room for exhibition furniture at the time of my research.

14. Figures stem from Philipp Schorch's article, which also lists 727 wooden boxes, 505 large packages, and 293 individual packages that were repacked in Leningrad.

15. Conversation with Boris Gliesmann, 21 December 2015.
16. Little information on the repatriation is available. It is mentioned and discussed in publications authored by curators and staff of the Ethnological Museum themselves, such as in Höpfner (1992); Sanner and Bolz (1999, pp. 45-49); Bolz (2003, p. 200); Haas (2002), or from external commentators and researchers such as Feest (1991); Schade (1991); Schorch (2018).

17. Field notes from 7 November 2014. The storage manager was thinking in particular of a deadline at that time. This time frame would consist of exactly three years until the collections would have to move to the external storage spaces in Friedrichshagen in 2017 after the museum's closure, still scheduled as such in 2014.

18. Interview with Boris Gliesmann, 21 December 2015.

19. Quotation from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's diaries for 1995, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1995/afro_jahr1995.html, consulted 20 December 2017.

20. Quotation from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's diaries for 1995, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1995/afro_jahr1995.html, consulted December 2017.

21. http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1995/afro_jahr1995.html, consulted December 2017; interview with Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, 7 January 2015.

22. The quotations in the next three paragraphs related to Boris Gliesmann stem from field-notes of a training session with Boris Gliesmann, 24 October 2013.

23. The project Musical Instrument Museums Online was financed by the European Commission and ran from 2009 till 2011. The project's aim was to create a large database of public collections of musical instruments, http://www.mimo-international.com/MIMO/accueil-ermes.aspx, consulted 2 October 2017.

24. In the database, short summaries of each archival file were available, thanks to a research project that had inventoried all the files from the Africa department from 1873 until 1919. The archives were documented on microfilm. The research project, funded by the Volkswagen-Stiftung, was led by Christine Stelzig, whose PhD dissertation resulted from this research, see Stelzig and Röhm (2000); Stelzig (2004).

25. This observation is confirmed by the digitisation strategy of the SPK (Digitalisierungsstrategie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz - inhaltliche Prioritäten der Einrichtungen der SPK 2011-2015), released in 2010 (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2010). The strategy doesn't suggest a systematic and general approach, but rather a strategy of 'priorities' and 'foci'.

26. Interview with Boris Gliesmann, 8 November 2016.

27. Translated from the German: 'Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts machte die Masse der gesammelten Bestände die Aufteilung in selbstständige Abteilungen notwendig, die seither ein ausgeprägtes Eigenleben, wenn auch in wechselnder verwaltungstechnischer Zusammensetzung, geführt haben. Jede einzelne dieser acht Abteilungen, de im folgenden in ihrer heutigen Form dargestellt sind, ist ein geschlossen Ganzes innerhalb des weiteren Rahmens des Museums für Völkerkunde.'

28. Interview with Peter Junge, 19 January 2021.

29. The two minor departments of Visual Anthropology and Music Ethnology existed as separate departments.

30. The quotations stem from interviews with the former storage manager, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff (7 January 2015), and a conversation and an interview with the former Africa curator, Peter Junge (8 September 2017, 19 January 2021).

31. Interview with Peter Junge, 19 January 2021.

32. During my fieldwork at the Museum (2013-2015), the *Konzeptgruppe* (concept group) consisted of the museum's director, Viola König, and Peter Junge, co-curator for the African collections (replaced by Monika Zessnik at his retirement in late 2014), and Markus Schindlbeck, curator for the Oceanic collections. The concept group was responsible for reporting and communicating the museum's developments to the SPK and the SMB.

33. That Hermann Parzinger adopted this role is testified, for example, by the publications he authored in its name (Flierl & Parzinger, 2009; Parzinger, 2011)
34. Paul Spies, former director of the Amsterdam Museum, was responsible for the Berlin exhibition for the Humboldt Forum and became the director of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum from September 2015 (Brockschmidt, 2015; City Museum Foundation). Gorch Pieken artistically directed the Humboldt University exhibition from April 2018 on, temporarily employed to create the first exhibition for the Humboldt Forum's opening (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2018).

35. About one-third of the plans for the Ethnological Museum and Museum for Asian Art changed: permanent exhibitions were transformed into temporary ones, allowing Humboldt Forum Kultur GmbH to release funds, exercise control, and provide expertise (Häntzschel, 2017b; 2018a). The company, with its newly recruited staff, would integrate the future owner and operator of the *Schloss*, the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss (Humboldt Forum in Berlin's City Palace Foundation), in early 2019.

36. It consisted of a leadership system of 'four pillars' plus the directorate (*Generalintendanz*): 'Administration', 'Collections' (including the Museum of Site [Museum des Ortes], an exhibition dedicated to the history of the Schloss' site), 'Humboldt Academy' ('education'), and 'Programming' (responsibility of the Humboldt Forum's *Intendant*, director, in cooperation with region of Berlin) (Zawatka-Gerlach, 2017).

37. Translated from the German: 'Wir möchten nicht museal arbeiten, die Sammlungsgegenstände sollen vielmehr der Anlass für eine interdisziplinäre Herangehensweise sein' (quoted in Häntzschel (2017b)).

38. See, for example, Nicoletta Tiziana Beltrame's ethnography of the process (Beltrame, 2012; 2015).

39. In 2018, it was communicated that 350 people would be temporarily employed until the Humboldt Forum's opening (Kuhn, 2018a). These posts would, however, be made permanent on 1 January 2019, when the subsidiary Humboldt Forum Kultur GmbH was integrated into the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss. In contrast, it was communicated that forty additional temporary recruitments were devoted to the museums (Ethnological Museum and Museum for Asian Art), mostly corresponding to the immediate need to restore and prepare objects for the move to the Forum (Kuhn, 2018a).

40. Behind the *Art from Africa* exhibition, other singled-out rooms and smaller exhibitions followed, including a room on *Africa in Berlin*, a section on *Bamum: Tradition and Innovation in the Cameroun Grassland*, and a permanent exhibition on Benin, entitled *Benin: History of a Western Kingdom*, which all opened in 2009.

41. 'What is the Forschungscampus Dahlem?', https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/dahlem/forschungscampus-dahlem/what-is-the-forschungscampuss-dahlem/, consulted 25 November 2021.
<figure><img src="image_82.png" /></figure>
# Troubling epistemologies: On the endurance of colonial discrimination

During my first days in the Museum in October 2013, I visited Boris Gliesmann’s office. He was responsible for the Museum’s database, MuseumPlus. I wanted to do research on a particular object, III C 14966, a ‘Luba’ stool. I worked with Boris Gliesmann because Paola Ivanov, one of the two curators of the Museum’s Africa collections, had charged me with provenance research for the Humboldt Forum. She intended to research the provenance of a specific group of objects produced by groups identified as ‘Luba’ or objects identified as ‘Luba-ised’, and she asked me to join a study she had initiated with the museum apprentice (*Volontärin*) Verena Rodatus.¹ Paola Ivanov suggested that I was to focus on a group of objects gifted to the Museum in 1902 by the colonial officer Werner von Grawert. Some of these objects now belong to the Museum’s most valuable objects and are part of its acclaimed masterpieces. I was particularly interested in a wooden stool because it had been attributed to a specific group of authors, the ‘Buli workshop’ – in contrast to an overwhelming majority of objects in the collection, whose producers were undocumented and remain anonymous. As to the location of the Buli workshop, the stool had thus most probably been produced in what was then the Congo Free State, the Belgian king Leopold II’s private colony, today’s Democratic Republic of Congo. Paola Ivanov described that the Luba and related peoples ‘regarded [the objects] as the most important objectivisation of the power of kings and chiefs’, embodying ‘the ancestors and the royalty represented by them’ (Junge, Ivanov, & Ethnologisches Museum, 2005, p. 91).²
In Boris Gliesmann’s office, several old exhibition catalogues, books, and historical files lay on different tables, ready to be worked on. Books were aligned on the wall on wooden shelves, next to historical photographs. Unlike other offices in the Museum, Boris Gliesmann’s was rather dark and had a dusty, historical feel to it. Boris Gliesmann and I installed ourselves in front of the computer screen together. The research started by entering the precise object number. An interface with different tabs opened.³

The grey, sterile interface of the database suggested objectivity, order, and the uniformity of knowledge. It alluded to completeness. The look of the digital gave the impression of an almost ahistorical neutrality. The different categories seemed to be self-evident, such as the word ‘inventory’, which comes from the Latin word of ‘to find’ or ‘to come upon’. Inventory was, however, the creation rather than the stumbling upon of a certain reality.

What I could observe on-screen were the accumulated results of manifold processes of naming. The processes of naming are at the core of the process of differentiating, and are never innocent, or neutral. Inventory enables groups and categories to be formed and order to be created, which, in turn, include some, but exclude others. As Bowker and Star argue,

[e]ach standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing – indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous – not bad, but dangerous (Bowker & Star, 1999a, pp. 5–6).

During the period of its foundation, institutionalisation, and professionalisation in the nineteenth century, anthropological category work was an exemplification of this danger: the ideologies that ground these categories were based on the production of differences underlying the colonial project. I refer to what results from these differentiation processes as ‘colonial differences’.⁴ These names and categorisation standards still form the core and base of the Museum’s knowledge infrastructure: its database. To work within the grid means to engage with the Museum’s fundamental epistemologies.

The database was part of the Museum’s *knowledge* infrastructure insofar as it helped museum staff to access, administer, and order the Museum’s collections. The infrastructure thus enabled the inscription and administration of knowledge assembled around the objects and so enabled their maintenance and care. At the same time, the infrastructure itself needed to be maintained, to, as Jörg Niewöhner argues, make invisible the social and ethical priorities and decisions that underlie its constructions and developments (Niewöhner, 2014, pp. 343–344). Infrastructure work is characterised
by invisibility. Database work in particular is invisible when it comes to who
is involved, as well as how the daily work of entering, cleaning, and con-
trolling data is accomplished (Nadim, 2016). By describing processes of how
knowledge is produced with and via the museum's database, this chapter
attempts to render these processes and people tangible.

This chapter departs from what can be deciphered from this flat, flicker-
ing screen. It works through the genealogies of inventorying and catalogu-
ing processes in the Museum and subsequently discusses the ways in which
colonial pasts and presents relate. By working through the process of prove-
nance research on this particular object, the chapter is concerned with what
constitutes the Museum's most fundamental knowledge production: the
practices of naming, cataloguing, and classifying collections. It scrutinises
how remnants from the colonial past reappear within the Museum's infra-
structures and how museum staff relate to them today. How are past ways
of conceiving, imagining, and classifying cultures reflected in current ways
of working with the collections? Where and how do museum staff identify
problems, where do conflicts between past and present arise, and how do
museum staff grapple with them? I return to the question of agency within
an organisation built on colonial grounds: is it even possible to work outside
of categories of colonial difference, and if so, what are the strategies?

I engage with these questions via the analysis of my own process of ac-
quainting myself with the database via the research on a particular object. As
I remark on the dependence on and trust in the Museum's historical sources,
I start imagining the objects' digital counterpart as their avatar. Transformed
through the accumulation and removal of data, the avatar delves into the
database's restricted grid. This figure of thought helps to underline the

<figure><img src="image_83.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4.1 Screenshot
of the database
entry for III C 14966,
Ethnologisches
Museum, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin</figcaption></figure>
interdependence of historical and contemporary processes of inventory-
ing, ultimately pointing to the difficulty of troubling the museum's colonial
epistemologies. The ethnography reveals how the Museum's practices of
ordering and classifying allow categories of colonial difference and stereo-
types to persist - practices that I describe as *discrimination* in their effect of
recognising and marking something as different and distinct. The chapter
demonstrates how historical taxonomies are maintained and continue to be
privileged in the definition and interpretation of the Museum's collections.
These historical taxonomies and epistemologies coincide with the founda-
tion of anthropology as a discipline, which worked in complicity with co-
lonial ways of conceiving the world. The database sorts and reflects how
the Ethnological Museum produces knowledge, but also determines it itself.
This chapter tackles these grounds of knowledge production in the Museum,
showing how people grapple with the very names, words, and orders that
define the collections. I discuss how, why, and when these epistemologies
get challenged but resist.

Navigating the database

Knowing how to manipulate the database was a premise for doing research
in the Museum. As we sat together in front of the screen, Boris Gliesmann
explained that, for any research, three important sources were to be consult-
ed – the object, the person, and the historical files from the archive. We had
started with the consultation of the object, III C 14966. As Boris Gliesmann
referred to the stool as III C 14966, I use this ethnographic term exclusively
here (and not vernacular names), also because I am interested in deciphering
its position within the museum's regime and orders. He navigated quickly
and securely in the database. It became obvious that navigating the data-
base was not self-explanatory and required a detailed knowledge and trained
practice of its different functions. Boris Gliesmann made parts of it readable
to me, but the links, relations, and associations behind each object were not
easy to trace. While he already discussed details concerning the object, I was
still busy accurately writing down key combinations and 'translations' for

<figure><img src="image_84.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4.2 Screenshots from MuseumPlus: 'Burning head' and 'Pot with a lid, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin</figcaption></figure>
different symbols, such as what he called ‘pot with a lid’, which refers to a link to the archive, or the ‘burning head’, referring to the search functions for images (see figure 4.2).

Boris Gliesmann was responsible for the process of the digitisa-
tion and documentation of the collection by himself. He occupied a qua-
si-monopolistic position when it came to the control, monitoring but also
understanding the database’s functioning. He had co-developed the da-
tabase MuseumPlus. Located in the Museum’s department ‘collections’
(Sammlungen), Boris Gliesmann’s position was referred to as ‘museologist’
(Museologe).⁵ He preferred to call himself a ‘documentalist’ (Dokumentar).
This designation highlighted his attempts to ‘enrich’ (anreichern) the data-
base with more information, ‘documenting’ it, extracting this information
mainly from sources within the Museum’s archives and online research. To
my surprise, when I asked him about his everyday work, which, from an
outsider’s position like mine, could have been perceived as rather boring,
he stated that it was ‘extremely varied’. He described his role as being at
the ‘interface’ (Schnittstelle), occupying a ‘pivotal position’ between differ-
ent departments, such as the collections, the conservation services, and the
administration, as well as between regional departments of the Museum.
He was one of the few people, he argued, who could get a comprehensive
understanding of the Museum. Even though Boris Gliesmann was constant-
ly working with different departments and switching interlocutors – ‘in one
day, it can happen that I have to switch from Africa to Oceania, from 1850 to
1979’ – he wasn’t part of a team, but could be considered the node between
different teams and individuals. Boris Gliesmann was in his forties and had
spent most of his career in the Museum. After an education as a museologist
in Berlin, he started to work in the Ethnological Museum in 1998.⁶ A loner,
he mainly worked by himself, with a discreet passion, not dusty like his
office at all.

The interdependence of historical inventories and current digitisation

When we started looking into III C 14966, Boris Gliesmann explained that all research included going back to the historical documentation. The information in the database was based on the historical inventory, which Boris Gliesmann described as the ‘database in a book’.⁷ The direct parallel established between the physical paper and digital counterpart mirrored his description of the data set representing an ‘index card on-screen’ (Karteikarte). The process of digitisation had consisted in transferring the historical
information, if available, to the digital system. When III C 14966 arrived in the Museum, it was first recorded in the inventory (Erwerbsbücher), within the bundle in which it arrived. Then, the objects were separated regionally and were recorded one by one (Einzelobjekterfassung) in the 'main catalogue' (Hauptkatalog).⁸ Around 1900, objects arrived in their thousands in the Museum. I could imagine the difficulty of a consistent and efficient inventory when Boris Gliesmann explained that, to inventory a bundle of two thousand objects at once, which was not improbable at the time, the Museum might need between five and ten years. The process included the risk of losing sight of which object belonged to the bundle and breaking the chronology. As Boris Gliesmann highlighted, 'in the best case' in addition to this two-step inventory process, an object card for each object was created and has remained as historical documentation to this day. The cards included measurements of the objects, descriptions of their usage and significance, sometimes even some drawings and bibliography. However, in the case of the Africa collections, the object cards as well as the photographs linked to the collections were destroyed by fire when the museum building was bombed during the Second World War.⁹ The only source that remained and is still used today are reproductions of the original negatives of the inventory, printed on sheets of A4 paper and bound as a book.¹⁰

This source, or rather, its scan in the database, is what we went back to. The list resembled a listing of birthdates: once attributed a name and a number, the thing irrevocably mutated from what it used to be into a museum object. The description as a condensed characterisation of the object situated the object in a Western museum setting. As part of the list, the object was converted into a constitutive part of the Museum and became part of a whole - the collection - with the number 14966.

As we scrutinised the inventory together, Boris Gliesmann stated, 'That's it. The whole documentation that we inscribe for the object now departs from the physical collection itself.' This diverged from other regional collections in the Museum, which relied on the 'original documentation'. As the inventory showed, the particular object 14966 was filed among a group of objects that had been given to the Museum by Werner von Grawert. On the left of the scan was the object number, the bundle of objects donated by von Grawert as a 'gift', starting with the object 14963. A reference to the entry book was given ('1555/02'), as well as to the collection date, 1902. III C 14966 was described as 'Chair, carried by two carved figures (man and woman)', '55cm high', 'Urua'.¹¹ In this case, the last word referred to a geographical indication of the historical region called 'Urua', located on the west side of Lake Tanganyika. Almost disappearing, one could also see 'v. Sydow' just next to the description, which referred to an early publication
<figure><img src="image_85.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4.3 A scan of the inventory book on the page including III C 14966, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_86.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4.4 The entry for the object III C 14966, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin</figcaption></figure>
by the art historian and anthropologist Eckart von Sydow (von Sydow, 1923).¹² The ‘Berlin’ stamp above the object’s number indicated that the object had stayed in Berlin during and after the war. The ‘Berlin’ stamp differed from objects stamped ‘Back from C’, indicating Celle (collecting point), and ‘Back from L’, indicating Leipzig. These stamps reveal the history of war booty and relocation of the collection during and after the Second World War. As far as the Africa collections are concerned, the only original sources that remained were this singular entry in the catalogue and the object itself. What I could see on the screen was, however, much more than that. The database indicated and was supposed to incorporate, flattened in singular tabs, the ways in which museum staff wrote, exhibited, and thought about III C 14966, and how this single line from the inventory catalogue had been interpreted and worked with since the stool’s arrival in the Museum. Less visible was that the database was based on and carried along the historical inventory’s modes of denominating and structuring culture.

Thinking with the object's digital avatar

To think about these relations between past and present knowledge infra-
structures – the inventory books, the naming and categorisation processes,
the database – I started to imagine the object’s digital counterpart on-screen
as its ‘digital avatar’. I first came across the notion in Nicoletta Tiziana
Beltrame’s research on the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. The object’s
entry in the database was an avatar in the sense that it could be regarded
as ‘a variant phrase or version of a continuing basic entity’ (Beltrame, 2015,
p. 114).¹³ Expanding Boris Gliesmann’s understanding of the object’s digital
presence as ‘index cards on screens’, the basic entity seemed to consist of
the physical object and its historical inventory. These elements were con-
stitutive of the object’s existence within the Museum. One element hardly
functioned without the other.

After spending more time in ethnological museums, I realised that cura-
tors usually privileged the interaction with the collection via their database
entries, and not in museum storage spaces or exhibition spaces. Interacting
with the objects took place via its digital counterpart. The experience of
encounter was limited to switching between boxes and tabs, an experience
neither sensorially engaging nor visually stimulating. If available, the ob-
ject was represented by a photograph, usually taken frontally, with a black,
white, or grey background, sometimes bordered by measurement instru-
ments. The avatar could be accessed via keywords, which constituted the
grid it was made of, such as ‘material’, the ‘collector’, and the ‘geographical
reference'. Boris Gliesmann thus described the database as 'relational', a database 'where everything is linked'. I pictured how the different kinds of materialities related and linked through the avatar. The avatar allowed the digital object to be lifted off its two-dimensional screen and to render it three-dimensional, to see it as a figure evolving through the adding and taking away of data.

A colleague at the university objected when I mentioned the concept of the avatar to her: avatars, as she had come across them, functioned as digital incorporations of *people*, not *objects*.¹⁴ But we didn't know *who* or *what* the museum collections consisted of. What kind of encounters did we have when working with the collection? For me, the avatar highlighted that we were possibly working with beings and subjects, and it underlined the collection's potential subjecthood and problematised taken-for-granted ontologies in the museum (Salmond, 2012).

## Colonial epistemologies and trust

Boris Gliesmann considered the comparison of the inventory books' scan and the database the crucial entry point to, first, double-check if the historical information had been documented correctly in the database. Second, it was important to understand, in case something had changed, why and how those changes had taken place. What this gesture ultimately showed was the trust invested in the historical sources, clearly structuring the object's definition and interpretation. This trust was visually encouraged by the smooth digital surface of the database, a surface constituted of a particular taxonomy. Understood in Harold Garfinkel's terms (2011 [1963]), trust is an emotion that emerges from a sense of shared reality, nurtured over time. Based on the inventory, the ways in which the object was interpreted and understood at its arrival was passed on, carried along, and further stabilised and sublimed throughout its museum and exhibition career. What was trusted, then, was the object's first recording, which coincided with several developments: the institutionalisation of an anthropology now considered problematic and 'anti-humanist' (Zimmerman, 2001); the heyday of German colonialism; and the early days of the Museum, during which chaos reigned due to the arrival of thousands of objects from, among other localities, these very colonies (Zimmerman, 2001, pp. 190-191; Penny, 2002, pp. 163-215). The Museum's taxonomy, mirrored in the database, incorporated these particular conditions. Trust is an 'often-unquestioned background whisper of well-being', only surfacing and brought to deliberation when actions or events doubt it (Broch-Due & Ystanes, 2016, pp. 1-2).
Unravelling the taxonomy meant to infuse suspicion in the familiar grid, ultimately questioning the legitimacy and thus acclaimed superiority of Western science based on colonial grounds.

## Taxonomy and the endurance of colonial discrimination

The Museum's database reflected the museum orders. Past and present practices of naming and categorising are condensed in each particular database entry – the avatar – which figured and was read by museum staff as a compressed characterisation of the object. The avatar, ideally, is supposed to indicate the accumulated knowledge of a particular object. In what follows, I will analyse III C 14966 as a constellation of categories that compose it, scrutinising the categories one by one. This analysis reveals how colonial imaginations – which accompanied processes and practices of ordering – were inscribed in present infrastructures and how they prevailed through these infrastructures. Specifically, it shows how the database reproduced colonial conceptions of binary difference – of ‘us’ and ‘them’, reflected in understandings of culture, time, and space – and how these differences shaped and defined the object’s digital counterpart in its essence.

## The category ‘collection’: Reproducing colonial binaries with the ‘ethnological’ and ‘Africa’

The first category in the database defined the object's affiliation to a 'collection', in this case 'EM-Afrika'. The database MuseumPlus was used in all museums governed by the SPK. An indication of a particular museum – the Ethnological Museum – and a particular collection within the Museum – 'Africa' – was necessary to locate the object. This particular indication thus situated the object within an even more important range of collections, namely Berlin's SMB. Which collections the objects had been attributed to – between the Museum for Islamic Art, the Museum for Asian Art, the Museum for Decorative Arts, the Ethnological Museum, and many more – defined the objects' primary identity. This primary identity – as 'Ethnological', 'Islamic', 'Egyptian', 'Greek', etc. – was accompanied by particular value regimes and the making of differences. Long before the Museum's opening, its founder, Adolf Bastian, excluded Europe and Asia from being the subject of 'ethnology', and thus from the Museum. He permitted only Asia's *Naturvölker* and, for Europe, 'some exceptions, which fit into a very small cupboard' to be part of his Museum's collections. Asia and Europe, he claimed, were to be
treated ‘separately’ from the other continents and, importantly, through the
discipline of ‘history’, rather than ‘ethnology’ (Bastian, 1872, p. ix). These or-
derings are thus the result of making difference through distinction, defining
‘ethnology’ and its museum as devoted to a particular kind of cultural alterity.
This kind of distinction confirms colonial dichotomies of nature and culture,
culture and art, civilised and primitive. The ethnological as ‘the Other to art
museums’ is neither an art museum, a historical museum, or a decorative
arts museum (Bangma, 2013, p. 63).

The categorisation as ‘EM-Afrika’ in the database extends the perpet-
uation of differences between ‘European’, ‘Asian’, and the ‘other’ to con-
ceptions of ‘Africa’. Differentiating processes through categorisation within
‘Africa’ become evident in deciphering the object number itself – III C 14966.
After the book inventory was compiled, the ‘III C’ was added and indicat-
ed an approximate geographical ascription of the object. The ‘III’ refers to
the ‘Africa’ collection, compared to other continents such as ‘Asia’ (‘I’) or
‘America’ (‘IV’). In the Museum, Africa itself had been divided into regions,
represented by letters. The objects were categorised as originating from
East Africa (III E), West Africa (III C), North Africa (III B), and north-east

<figure><img src="image_87.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4.5 Map of Africa
with division into different
sub-categories, with national
borders from 2004 (Stelzig,
2004, p. 391)</figcaption></figure>
Africa (III A), as well as South Africa (III D) (Stelzig, 2004, pp. 45–46). The initial division of the continent first took place in 1865 and was later corrected. As the former Africa curator and museum director Kurt Krieger noted in 1973, even though the introduction of the categories had somehow facilitated some work processes, it brought ‘above all some substantial difficulties, because the regions had been selected too arbitrarily, so that overlaps couldn’t be avoided’ (Krieger, 1973, p. 105).¹⁵

That these categorisations are consequential becomes especially evident for III C 14966. The object was marked as III C (West Africa). The stool was identified as originating in ‘Urua’, a historical region situated today in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Geographically speaking, this region was at the threshold of East and West Africa. Precise information on where the object had been produced was lacking, but it was likely that the object had been acquired in German East Africa.¹⁶ That III C 14966 was marked as stemming from West Africa, however, was probably influenced by underlying contemporary collecting conventions and aesthetic value regimes: since around 1900, objects from collections of ‘ethnology’ identified and valued as ‘art’ were mainly associated with West Africa. ‘Art’ in European conventions was synonymous with anthropomorphic and figurative elements, such as what the Luba-ised objects represented (Nooter Roberts & Roberts, 1996, p. 31; Schildkrout & Keim, 1998). Contemporary Western aesthetic values contributed to the Luba-ised objects’ early prominence in Western museums: when III C 14966 arrived in the Museum, the department’s director, Felix von Luschan, succeeded in persuading Werner von Grawert to change the object’s status from a loan to a gift. This change of status was probably motivated by the fact that von Luschan described the delivery as containing ‘beautiful monuments of African art’,¹⁷ an exceptional categorisation for African artefacts at the time. Promising an exhibition with the newly acquired pieces, Felix von Luschan offered a reward of a thousand marks to acquire more of those ‘carved art pieces’.¹⁸ Attributing this object a ‘III E’ would have contrasted with stereotypical ideas of eastern Africa, a region that was predominantly Muslim, and thus, in conventional conceptions of this region, not representing objects with anthropomorphic features. The categorisation of III C 14966 thus shows how the categorisation system as III C or, conversely, not as III E, discreetly introduced and cemented hierarchies between different objects and within the collection: the regional categorisation perpetuated specific colonial ideas about ‘Africa’ and added symbolic value to certain objects (III C), whereas other objects were devalorised via their association with eastern Africa.¹⁹

Apart from the opposition of East versus West Africa, another division was drawn between what was depicted as ‘North Africa’ and the rest of the
continent. This division appeared in the organisation of the departments. In the 1990s, the North Africa collections had been integrated into what used to be called the 'Islamic Orient' department (*Islamischer Orient*), which now bears the title 'North Africa, Western and Central Asia'. There was a rumour in the Museum that the reorganisation of the collections depicted as 'III' was the fruit of a personal conflict within the department. Whatever the case, the reorganisation validated and reified common images of the African continent. Stereotypical representations divide the continent into a predominantly Muslim northern part and what is sometimes problematically depicted as 'sub-Saharan Africa', or the racialised term of *Schwarzafrika* (Black Africa). These divisions result from the colonial imagination of Africa as consisting of a 'White' north, to which European colonial powers granted a certain degree of culture and history, opposed to a southern part, to which the West denied any history and culture (Arndt, 2004; Machnik, 2004; Arndt, 2012, pp. 95-96).²⁰ This demarcation was legitimised by racial theories, which originated from or were supported by contemporary anthropology. The division additionally presupposes two distinct regional entities that suggest homogeneity in general and religious homogeneity in particular: the 'North Africa' collections were integrated into the Museum's 'Islamic' collections.²¹ Not only does this classification deny the religious multiplicity within the different, associated regions, as well as the diversity of the collections that are part of the collection. It also contrasts the 'Islamic' north with the rest of the continent, implicitly suggesting an absence of Islam and its long histories on the rest of the continent.

In practical terms, the museum staff had problems drawing clear boundaries between the different regions and thus departments: 'No one managed to determine where sub-Saharan Africa ends', the storage manager Hans-Joachim Radosuboff wrote in his diary in 1998. For him, III B, North Africa, was part of the collection 'Islamic Orient'. The clear division between north and south was challenged, however, by what he depicts as 'mixed regions' (*Mischregionen*) such as III A (north-east Africa) and the 'Tuaregs' associated with III C (West Africa). These are just two of the manifold examples that raised doubts, according to Hans-Joachim Radosuboff.²²

III C 14966's avatar constituted a whole that was simultaneously part of many parts. Its primary identity as being labelled as 'EM-Afrika' (Ethnological Museum-Africa) included a multiplicity of differentiating processes. These processes were historically situated in colonial and anthropological knowledge production and could be retraced by deciphering the category's coming into being in the Museum's history. These categories and the inherent hierarchies were solidified by their continuous reproduction via the object's digital avatar.
## ‘Geographical reference’, Luba as ‘ethnic group’ and colonial continuations

Similar to what I describe with regard to the category ‘collection’, the category of ‘geographical reference’ (*geografischer Bezug*) facilitated the continued use of anthropological concepts shaped by colonial modes of thinking. Intended to provide precise territorial indications, the category of ‘geographical reference’ (*Geografischer Bezug*) sustained colonial notions of temporality and culture. Subsumed under ‘geographical reference’, the subcategories ‘Country’ (*Land*), ‘Region’, and ‘Ethnic Group’ (*Ethnie*) compound historical, geographical, and cultural entities. One needed to deal with ‘inaccuracy’, as Boris Gliesmann designated, when disentangling these different levels. The database dehistoricised contemporary and historical contexts, and finally omitted the most dominant political context of the time of the object’s acquisition, namely the colonial governance of the ‘Congo Free State’, King Leopold II’s private colony.²³ The ‘country’ was indicated as ‘Demokratische Republik Kongo’ (Democratic Republic of the Congo; henceforth, DRC), indicating a particular national constellation, only in place since 1997. The ‘region’ ‘Urua’ referred to a historical entity on the west of Lake Tanganyika, now located in the DRC region of Katanga. Leaving both ‘Urua’ and ‘DRC’ without particular dates or denominations trapped them in what has been famously expressed by Johannes Fabian as an ‘ethnographic present’, denying both historicity to those who had produced the objects in question, as well as contemporaneity to those currently living in the DRC (Fabian, 2014).

Equally part of the ‘geographical reference’, ‘Luba’ was referenced in the category *Ethnie*, which can be translated as ‘ethnic group’. The attribution of names to societies in the context of European colonialism has been subject to critique: such names were ideologically accompanied by theories of social evolutionism and historical progress, and sometimes complicit with colonial governance. Similar to the notion of ‘tribe’, which ‘is now commonly considered an ethnographic, rather than an analytical, term’, attributions of ‘ethnicity’ continue to be contested (Sneath, 2016; see also Arndt and Hornscheid, 2004; Arndt, 2011). Scholars in anthropology have argued that ‘ethnicity’ and ‘tribe’ can be designated as colonial inventions, part of what the anthropologist Peter Pels called an ‘ontology of spatial discreteness’. Pels argues that this ontology

derives from the imaginary geography of colonial anthropology characterised by the presupposition that human diversity has to be represented in terms of discrete ethnic units that normally occupy equally discrete territories – an imagination based in the cultural presuppositions
underlying modern nation-states (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Stolcke 1995). (Pels, 2008, p. 283)

These colonial imaginations were closely entangled with and reflected by museum orderings in the metropoles. The Africa department's curator, Paola Ivanov, for instance, defined the collections as 'material fiction', stating that 'the objects acquired in the nineteenth and early twentieth century can generally be seen as part of the European colonial appropriation of Africa, and the spatial, economic and political restructuring of the continent' (Ivanov, 2005, p. 42). The collections were used to map, research, commodify, and govern populations within the colony, a politics in which the adoption of culture zones as 'artistic regions' is complicit (Fabian, 1998; Schildkrout & Keim, 1998; Bennett et al., 2017). Sarah Van Beurden argues that stylistic analysis in Western museums and academia helped to solidify and naturalise the invented categories and identities. Despite the fact that artistic styles often exceeded colonial borders, which was partly acknowledged by scholars, they were nevertheless understood as unquestionable cultural units. These 'zones' were often named after dominant ethnic groups identified and imposed by the colonial power (Van Beurden, 2013, p. 478; see also Kasfir, 1984). The mapping of 'cultures' and 'artistic styles or regions' continues to be prominently used.²⁴

With reference to III C 14966, the origins of the attribution ‘Luba’ pre-date colonial governance, but were fixed within the colonial context. Mary Nooter Roberts describes Luba people as ‘a wash of myriad clan and lineage groupings that were more or less consolidated as a kingdom from approximately the seventeenth to late nineteenth century’ (Nooter Roberts, 1998, p. 60). It was, however, not until the colonial period in the late nineteenth century that peoples referred to themselves homogeneously as ‘Luba’, when Arab traders and European explorers and travellers started to name them that way. As Pierre Petit notes, “‘Luba” is a most ambiguous category that may refer to five thousand or five million people, depending upon its particular, situationally defined application’ (quoted in Nooter Roberts & Roberts, 1996, p. 20). Based on the historical reputation of the old Kingdom of Luba and the myths of the precolonial Luba ‘empire’, the ‘Luba’ were problematically described as a ‘supertribe’ during the colonial period, as Crawford Young shows. Associated with important intellectual capacities and economic success, notably by Western expatriates, ‘Luba’ were sometimes called the ‘Europeans of Africa’; comparisons sometimes going so far that their physical features were said to resemble those of Europeans (Young quoted in Roberts & Petit, 1996, p. 212). Those connotations had consequences for who decided to call themselves ‘Luba’. Concerning artistic productions, stylistic devices
considered ‘Luba’ were judged as a ‘label of quality’, leading to what has been referred to as ‘Luba-ised’ styles, such as those of the Tabwa and Hemba peoples (Roberts & Petit, 1996, p. 236). Despite the vague definitions and colonial consolidation, the term continues to be prominently used, within and outside the museum context, including by people who identify as Luba today. This renders its use, or the search for alternatives, ever more complex.

## Categories as ‘historically situated artefacts’

The database’s different categories can be understood as ‘historically situated artefacts’, as defined by Bowker and Star (Bowker & Star, 1999b, p. 278). The ‘historically situated’ in this case concerned the categories’ particular genesis in and through colonial systems of governance, reproducing categories of difference that underlie them. As ‘artefacts’, the Museum’s processes of categorising III C 14966 materialised in the inscriptions of classifications and orderings and in the solidification of temporal conceptions and cultural entities.

The categories could be seen as the avatar’s skeleton, parts of the body from which its being emerged. The categories and orderings predefined the avatar. They were consequential for how III C 14966 was understood, perceived, and valued. At the same time, contemporary anthropological imaginings such as of ‘ethnic groups’ continued to be confirmed by the Museum’s knowledge infrastructure and were reflected in the avatar’s structure. Finally, the avatar formed the prerequisite for how information gathered about the object could and would enter the database for present and future research. Conceiving the categories as the avatar’s skeleton, the image of the avatar showed how the object’s understanding and definition was limited by the database’s grid to organise information. The avatar’s room for manoeuvre to develop and grow was thus clearly delimited, a delimitation historically shaped and disciplined.

One was caught in colonial epistemologies through the everyday use of the database. The kind of difference this use entailed appeared to me as a continuation of discriminatory practices. I use ‘discriminating’ in the sense that it distinguishes different entities from one another, charged, however, with particular value regimes and hierarchies that rely on convictions of Western superiority and colonial modes of ordering the world. The database not only inscribed past conceptualisations of difference via its present structure. It also provided a limited framework in which present and future (provenance) research would be integrated.
As such, the avatar was not a mere representation of IIIC 14966, a simple accumulation of data. Rather, the object's digital embodiment determined the object's reception, documentation, further production of knowledge, and ultimately, use.

## Manoeuvring within limited infrastructures

Museum staff, and curators in particular, were aware of the problems and historical genealogy of the Museum's database. Attempts to circumvent and challenge the categories and their limitations exist and continue to be invented in the Museum. The idea of an avatar emphasises that it could develop a life of its own beyond the Museum's constraints: avatars, when defined as virtual counterparts of the human being, can be understood as 'fantasies come to life, individual chances to step outside of one's usual self, to transcend the boundaries of one's own identity' (Khatib, 2007, p. 70). The object's avatar offered opportunities to think about the museum object outside of the museum's powerful frameworks, troubling categories, and contested names. The avatar thus foregrounds how the digital allows the potential disruption of the museum's given epistemologies. It opened possibilities for new interpretations and understandings of the object itself a priori.

So far, this chapter demonstrated how the object's avatar comes into being, and how it is composed. Departing from the historically shaped categories of the Museum's database, the remaining paragraphs of the chapter elaborates the question of what kind of transformation, or reproduction, of the avatar's identity was de facto taking place within the given framework. Two attempts to change started to be used with regard to the database when I was working in the Museum: the adding of categories and the erasure and replacement of names considered derogatory.

The adding of categories could concern the multiplication of categories that already existed, such as adding another 'geographical reference' to III C 14966, indicating the colonial political context 'Congo Free State'. One method for challenging historical epistemologies was the introduction of the subcategory 'historical depiction' (*historische Bezeichnung*) as part of the same category 'geographical reference'. When I worked at the Museum, the category was notably used to indicate historical descriptions of locations and places. The subcategory helped to nuance and complexify the object's digital presence and to avoid confounding temporalities, such as indicated in the analysis of the 'geographical reference'. The adding of sections in the database allowed for more space to record research results: whereas in my time at the Museum, the only option to report particular research
trajectories was the ‘Notes’ field in the database, in 2016, a category devoted to ‘provenance’ was added to the database.²⁵

In 2018, Boris Gliesmann explained during a discussion on the first draft of this chapter that the category of ‘historical depiction’ was also more frequently used to engage in a ‘transfer of categories’ (*Kategorieüberführung*), in which depictions considered derogatory (*abwertend*) and offensive (*anstößig*) were replaced by depictions considered more neutral.²⁶ One of these categories, he explained, was his favourite: ‘magic’ (*Zauber*).

‘Magic’, ‘charm’, ‘holy substance’ [*Zauber, Magie, heilige Substanz*], these are the categories we are now pushing into the subfield of ‘historical depiction’. One method we pursue is to transform all of the ‘magic things’ [*Zaubersachen*] into ‘medicine things’ [*Medizinsachen*].

This was, for example, the case for a research and exhibition project in Tanzania, which featured one important object formerly depicted as ‘magic bag’ (*Zaubersack*) that the curators renamed as a ‘bag with objects used in the practice of medicine’ (*Beutel mit medizinischen Objekten*) (Reyels, Ivanov, & Weber-Sinn, 2018, pp. 84, 202).

> If you type anything with magic, or anything with witchcraft into the search machine, there are several hundred things which appear. ‘Fetish device’ [*Fetischgerät*]; ‘miraculous impact’ [*wundertätige Wirkung*]; ‘amulet against malicious witchcraft’ [*Amulett gegen bösartige Hexerei*]; ‘hunt charm’ [*Jagdzauber*]; ‘something that has the power to make rain’ [*die Kraft, Regen zu machen*].

Boris Gliesmann explained that it was not only difficult to replace these names with others considered more appropriate. The numerous depictions related to ‘magic’ were difficult to identify and find if your aim was to change these depictions, systematically, among so many other thousands of objects.

> I hear the curators say: ‘Oh, this is a colonial use of language to depict this object, it was only used to depreciate [*abwerten*] those from who it was collected!’ I know the debates and of course, we are working on it. But pragmatically, it is difficult to tackle them, it needs a lot of time, thought, research, and expertise. And also, we cannot record the discussions in the database!
Similar problems arose with the category of *Ethnie*, which Boris Gliesmann depicted as the next ‘construction site’ (*Baustelle*) he was dealing with, in particular in relation to the Africa department.

There are so many ethnic groups in Africa, more than 300 in the Congo collections alone I believe! ‘Hottentots’ [*Hottentotten*] are just one example, but there are so many more. We cannot continue to use some of these depictions, as they are ‘malicious’ [*bösartig*]. We have different categories which we use, such as ‘external designation’ [*Fremdbezeichnung*] or ‘ethnic subgroup’ [*Ethnie Untergruppe*], but all of them carry their own problems.

The attention devoted to the Ethnological Museum and its collection in the context of the Humboldt Forum heightened the pressure concerning data work, both in its quality and quantity. Boris Gliesmann explained:

> The Humboldt Forum has an enormous number of requests concerning the collections, and of course, in particular concerning objects which might have a problematic provenance, or a particular role. People are queuing up like at the doctor’s for these kinds of data! And sometimes, the names considered problematic are communicated to the public, when there are specific demands on objects. Then, people turn up and complain that the Museum hasn’t overcome its obsolete spirit [*altzeitlichen Geist überwunden*].

Another side effect of the preparations concerning the Humboldt Forum exhibitions was that activity around the database had grown significantly. Objects needed to enter the data system to be communicated to the exhibition designers. I smiled in surprise when Boris Gliesmann said that ‘the work has accelerated, which is actually *not so good*’. He recounted how there were approximately five hundred new entries per week, with sixty people having access to the database.²⁷ However, for documenting the collections, Boris Gliesmann explained, one needed time, accuracy, and care. He took on the role of what he framed as ‘data police’.

> I adopt the role of a traffic policeman. I take care that no one crosses the street when it’s red and that pedestrians and cyclists have their rights, too. And that no one rides their bikes on the sidewalk, you know?

As an example, he pointed to the useful, but dangerous function of copy and paste within the database. One could copy data sets, indicating which
categories, such as the material or the location, should be repeated for the following object. This could be useful, such as when it came to the inventory of the manifold weapons in a collection. Some curators, as he noticed, just pressed the ‘yes’ button to duplicate categories and produced a lot of ‘nonsense’ by not examining the details of the objects. More data entries turned into more training, more data control, more ‘traffic policing’ for him. ‘I see the mistakes immediately. There are gaps, discrepancies, questionable assignments.’

In view of the pressure to document and inventory as many objects as possible, the risks of naming didn’t only appear with reference to object depictions considered offensive. At a workshop with museum staff, Boris Gliesmann described the slippery terrain in which one navigates when labelling objects.²⁸ Boris Gliesmann characterised the database’s category ‘notion’ as the object’s ‘business card’ (*Visitenkarte*). It needed to be as precise as possible, ideally deduced directly from the collection’s historical documentation. He gave ‘wooden bowl’ as an example. A wooden bowl could simply be described as a ‘container’ (*Behälter*) or a ‘vessel’ (*Gefäß*) but would lose meaning through either of these terms. By not being precise enough, one risked, he warned, turning a religious or spiritual object into a profane one. This would erase all meaning from it. As a lot of the collections were unknown to museum staff, one needed to be especially careful. With a single careless entry in the database, spirits could literally be deleted, taken away from the object and silenced. The avatars were reproduced, steadily, but deformed, recalling the situation evoked by Goethe’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, in which an army of avatars created disorder, instead of its desired contrary.

Additionally, the database was not a sufficient tool to record the information available. The Museum’s present and emerging knowledge could not be accurately reflected in its documentation systems. Even the new field of ‘provenance’ was judged insufficient by museum staff: it didn’t leave the opportunity to integrate the complex itineraries, agents, and questions that accompany provenance research, or the debates and discussions that accompany it.²⁹ With the transfer from MuseumPlus to the new database management system RIA, Boris Gliesmann aimed at creating more spaces within the database where free text could be added. He hoped to ‘take the chance to break open gridlocked pathways, to rethink the system, to realise new requirements and wishes. [...] The system needs to become more flexible [*beweglicher*]’.³⁰ This allowed for, in theory, the chance to transcend the rigid grids and templates imposed by the database’s framework, but the pragmatic outcome was uncertain at the time of the conversation.
‘It would be nice to have a system in how we document the collections, but we don’t have one’, Boris Gliesmann stated. The different attempts to circumvent the database’s limitations and shortcomings were thus judged necessary, but insufficient, and sometimes even problematic, by museum staff, notably because of this lack of system. The current practices of making data stood as a continuation of the Museum inventory’s history, as subjective, fragmentary, and selective. Some names considered racist or derogatory were changed, while other names were kept in their historical version. As an example, Boris Gliesmann said that ‘sandal’ (*Sandale*) didn’t constitute a problem, but ‘shoes of broads’, a derogatory term for women (*Weiberschuhe*) did; ‘magic figure’ (*Zauberfigur*) was changed, but ‘magician’ (*Zauberer*) wasn’t.

Characteristic of infrastructure work, the process of making data – the transfer from historical to digital inventory, the addition, erasure, and adjustment of information – became unmarked through the database’s functioning. The information entered in the database was not systematically referenced;³¹ object descriptions were made without source; some categories changed with time, others didn’t. Inconsistencies, spelling mistakes, synonyms for similar objects, inaccuracies flourished. Defects and bugs appeared, reshaping the avatar to unexpected, and sometimes, undiscovered ends. Once entered in the database, the data was objectified, confirmed by Boris Gliesmann’s image of the ‘index card on-screen’ and the avatar’s ordered surface. Despite the database being rather scattered, the progressively naturalised data was used in the museum context, cited, and passed on. Infrequently, I came across visible traces of doubt in the database – such as question marks after dates or names of people – which, however, shape the coming into being of its data. Layers of time, people, and their work overlapped, without being clearly traceable on the seemingly neutral screen. As the database smoothed doubts, it maintained trust in the data’s accuracy.

The lack of system spanned the different activities to counter the database’s drawbacks and was reflected by Boris Gliesmann’s claim to have situated himself ‘at the periphery’ of the Humboldt Forum developments. That the collection’s inventory, digitisation, and documentation was not defined as a priority, but rather treated as ‘peripheral’, was significant. The lack of resources devoted to collection management, as well as the restricted access policy, implied a particular understanding of the Museum’s role and mission. This understanding of the Museum’s role prioritised representation over the museum’s other task, neglecting research, collection care, and management (see also chapter four).
Conclusion

The deconstruction of different categories and imaginations in past and present knowledge infrastructures shows how their unstable, provisory, and fragile character was continually solidified, materialised, and perpetuated within the database, and, more broadly speaking, the Museum's infrastructure. Whereas my interlocutors struggled with these categories and names stemming from colonial thought, they nevertheless form the differentiating and discriminatory grid and order which organised the Museum. The ethnography reveals how those knowledge systems persisted and how deeply the epistemological practices were engrained in the museum's everyday – both in the past and today.

The avatar as a metaphor for the object's digital counterpart illustrates the interdependence of its historical genealogy and the object's current definition and interpretation, and emphasises how the database's grid's determines the knowledge produced within the Museum. Disciplined, the avatar emerged and was defined by the Museum's historical inventory and sources, which served as the primary reference point for how III C 14066 was understood, perceived, and valued, and how it could exist within the Museum. The different categories constituted the avatar's limbs, defining its condition and form. Similar to human's digital counterpart, 'emojis' are not merely representations of bodies but forms of embodiment' (Boellstorff, 2011, p. 504). The avatar doesn't only include material ('object, inventory documents') and immaterial elements ('categories'), but also integrates practices, and processes ('naming', 'cleaning', 'enriching'). The avatar assembles and links these materialities and practices, which emerge in close relation to the museum's particular ecology. The avatar thus contrasted with the objectified character of the inventory, questioning the naturalising process of objectifying itself. Just as the material object might have changed status, form, and substance during its life within and beyond the Museum (see chapter seven), the avatar was equally yet differently multiple, instable, and mutable. However, the avatar could only dwell within the Museum's particular ecology, and was defined by the grids, frames, and work procedures of the Museum's knowledge infrastructure. Beyond being a vessel incorporating data, however, the avatar determines how this data is perceived, managed, and worked with. The avatar thus manoeuvres within particular boundaries, boundaries which were both challenged and confirmed by the museum staff through their daily work. The different attempts to extend the avatar, to adapt its form to today's anthropological understandings of culture and to respond to expectations raised by critical museum and heritage studies proved difficult to achieve, in an infrastructure shaped by colonial
thought. Possessing limiting and liberating capacities, the avatar is characterised by both enabling and detaining processes.

Using the avatar as a figure to picture the object's digital counterpart not only shows the continuities of historical categories and practices. Apart from restrictions, the figure allowed me to conceive the avatar's potential to reinvent and transcend these very categories. Conventionally, avatars are understood as a 'digital you'. Khatib describes them as 'a type of transcendental alterity which is both created and controlled by the self' (Khatib, 2007, p. 70; my emphasis). The virtual manifestation of the object, however, opened the possibility to extend the right to create, shape, and compose itself to multiple and diverse authors. The call for 'multiperspectivity' has been voiced frequently in relationship to ethnological collections, and has been a constitutive part of the Humboldt Forum's concept and communication strategy (von Bose, 2017b, pp. 415-416). In contrast to the practical difficulty of having access to the *material* collections themselves, the *digital* offered the potential to liberate the avatar from its constraints in order to attend to a more diverse multivocality.

The potential of the object's digital counterpart to become 'otherwise' lay beyond the adding of categories, a process which can be interpreted as extending colonial logics of ordering itself. Other ways of administering and ordering collections digitally were possible in the attempt to attend to multivocality, and ultimately, to repatriate, or, in more humble terms, to 'e-patriate' knowledge (Boast & Enote 2013). Examples existed, and one of them had been developed within the Ethnological Museum itself (Scholz, 2017). Fundamental in these alternative database systems has been the attempt to take into account different ways of organising and naming fields of knowledge, with the aim of establishing a base for collaborative relationships. This concerns, for example, the attempt to introduce a general flexibility and multiplicity, instead of a rigidity and singularity, in the denomination of objects, the restricted access to particular objects which were not made to be viewed and used by all (Geismar & Mohns, 2011). It includes to work with images instead of text in order not to privilege one language over another when formalising object-related attributes (Scholz, 2017) or to incorporate other data, such as audio, to contribute to linguistic revitalisation efforts (Glass, Berman, & Hatoum, 2017; see also Srinivasan et al., 2010). Other measures consist in suggestions for facilitating access, such as by the digitisation and release of the museum's complete inventory catalogues and information on the objects (Sarr & Savoy, 2018). To my knowledge, no European ethnological museum has published their entire inventory, but calls to do so have gained recent public and academic attention (Öffnet die Inventare!, 2019).³²
Inviting doubts and contradictions, some of which the research itself allowed, stood in for what Walther Mignolo has framed as ‘epistemic disobedience’ in his call for decoloniality (Mignolo, 2011, p. 9). Extending the database’s grid with sub-categories didn’t allow for these doubts to flourish and for disobedience to take place, revealing the endurance and persistence of the infrastructure’s coloniality. The avatar still offered the possibility to imagine the database’s subversive potential. Put differently, rethinking the digital storing of collections offers the means to transcend and challenge the museum’s knowledge infrastructures and epistemologies, and thus to redefine the collections themselves.
## Notes

1. In November 2013, I joined Verena Rodatus in the research on the object group. Rodatus was the museum apprentice (*Volontärin*) in the Africa department and Humboldt Lab Dahlem from May 2013.

2. My translation from the German.

3. If not indicated otherwise, the quotations and observations stem from field notes of the training session with Boris Gliesmann, 24 October 2013.

4. For the constitution of an 'anthropological difference' in relation to colonialism, and in particular in relation to visual culture, see Leeb (2016).

5. The department was created in 1998 after a general reform of the museum's structure, which oversaw the administration of collections. On Gliesmann's public LinkedIn profile, he described his tasks as collection and archive management, programme administration, documentation system (database), data management (editing and correction), as well as project management (data recording, digitisation, online presentation), https://de.linkedin.com/in/boris-gliesmann-64503638, consulted 13 September 2017.

6. Boris Gliesmann studied museology at the Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft in West Berlin, a novelty at the time. A particular education for museology had only been offered in the GDR, not in West Germany.

7. The inventory book within the Museum started in 1880 and stopped in 2003. Since 2003, the inventory has only been done online in the database. Before 1880, it was the entry books (*Eingangsbücher*) of Berlin's cabinet of curiosities (*Kunstkammer*) that served to document the object entries.

8. This two-stage process is not always the case, and in a lot of museums, Gliesmann explains, the digital main catalogue is the same as the entry catalogue.

9. During the Second World War, all the specific index cards (*Karteikarten*), as well as the photographs linked to and of the objects, were hidden away in a spot considered particularly safe by the contemporary Africa curator. When the building in Königsgrätzer Straße was bombed, all those documents were destroyed. The detailed information about each object disappeared and had not been recorded elsewhere.

10. In other departments of the Museum, those cards still exist. However, the inventory books were photographed on microfilm in the 1940s and the negatives were stored elsewhere. Those microfilms were discovered only recently and by accident. For the Africa department, in contrast to other regional departments, all of these catalogues have been scanned and are accessible by museum employees. The inventory book that covered the collection entries until 1880 was deemed destroyed during the war, but was found in 1994 by accident: a researcher in the East Asia department found photocopies of the inventory book in the bin and alerted the department's curator.

11. My translation from the German: 'Stuhl, von 2 geschnitzten Figuren (Mann und Frau) getragen'.

12. Boris Gliesmann didn't know what the capital N indicated, email of 11 February 2019.

13. The definition of an avatar, following the *Merriam-Webster* online dictionary: (1) the incarnation of a Hindu deity (such as Vishnu), (2a) an incarnation in human form, (2b) an embodiment (as of a concept or philosophy) often in a person, (3) a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity, (4) an electronic image that represents and is manipulated by a computer user in a virtual space (as in a computer game or an online shopping site) and that interacts with other objects in the space, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary avatar, consulted 30 September 2017.

14. Discussion with Tahani Nadim of an earlier version of this text.
15. See the original phrasing in German: 'Die Neuerung brachte in der Folgezeit neben einigen Arbeitserleichterungen auch erhebliche Schwierigkeiten mit sich, da die Regionen zu willkürlich gewählt waren, so dass sich Überschneidungen nicht immer vermeiden ließen' (Krieger & Koch, 1973, p. 105).

16. The object was given to the Museum by the colonial officer Werner von Grawert based in German East Africa, who had reportedly not travelled outside the colony.

17. '... schönen Denkmäler afrikanischer Kunst', E 1494/02.

18. E 1555/1902; E 1494/1902.

19. This asymmetry and hierarchy between East and West is confirmed in the Africa department's history and in the history of Western museums more generally speaking. Few exhibitions and little research have been devoted to East Africa compared to West Africa, reflected, for example, in the curators' expertise in the department, which clearly concentrated on West Africa.

20. For more discussion of racist terminology in the German language, see Arndt and Ofuate-Alazard (2011); on the concepts of *Schwarzafrika* and *Schwarzer Kontinent*, see Arndt et al. (2004, pp. 204-208).

21. Despite the denomination of the department as 'North Africa, West and Central Asia', the depiction of the department begins with the classification as 'Islamic': 'The origins of the Islamic collection of today's Ethnologisches Museum can be dated back to the non-European holdings of the royal cabinets of art (Kunstkammer), which evidently contained individual items from Islamic countries from about 1830 onwards',

https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/ethnologisches-museum/collection-research/about-the-collection.html, consulted 12 February 2019.

22. Quotations from Radosuboff's diary entry for 2 January 1998, formerly accessible online, which he sent to me.

23. After the Berlin Conference in 1884/1885, King Leopold II of Belgium was allowed by other Western powers to take charge of the territory that today is approximately synonymous with the DRC. From 1885 to 1908, he was the sovereign of the corporate state known as the Congo Free State, which he privately controlled through the non-governmental association Internationale Africaine. In contrast to propaganda about 'civilising' the region, Leopold's reign was eventually and internationally dismissed as an infamous barbarity. Public and diplomatic pressure led to the annexation of the colony to the Belgian state by 1908, when it became known as the Belgian Congo. The formation of the Belgian Congo involved the annexation of the former German-governed states of Burundi and Rwanda.

24. Numerous exhibitions of African art use the mapping of different cultural groups. Examples include Junge, Ivanov, and Ethnologisches Museum (2005); LaGamma (2012, p. xiii); Chapuis, Fine, and Ivanov (2017).

25. Interview with Boris Gliesmann, 8 November 2016.

26. Notes from a conversation with Boris Gliesmann, 16 April 2018.

27. Gliesmann explained the situation to his colleagues at a workshop, 4 November 2013.

28. This workshop took place on 4 November 2013. Boris Gliesmann initiated the workshop himself. At the time, curators and other staff were not necessarily familiar with the database, but expertise was needed because of the museum's preparation for the Humboldt Forum. He aimed to ensure 'correct data entry'.

29. Internal workshop at the Ethnological Museum with museum staff, 9 November 2017.

30. Interview with Boris Gliesmann, 8 November 2016.

31. Each entry was authored by a particular person and amendments would be marked (for example, 'amendments made by B. Gliesmann on a specific date'). It was not clear, however, what exactly had been amended.

32. Whereas some museums, such as Paris's Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, make their entire collections available online, they usually only give access to particular, and limited, information on the objects.
CHAPTER FIVE

Managing plethora:
Caring for colonial collections

The Museum’s staff entrance was situated within the courtyard. A sign indi-
cating ‘registration’ (*Anmeldung*) was written in capital letters on the big glass
door. Once you entered, you found yourself in a controlled area. On your left,
three to four men, sealed off behind glass, looked down at you: the security
guards’ room was elevated in such a way that you needed to reach up to get
a list, on which you would need to fill in your name, affiliation, and the time
of your arrival. When you left, you signed out the same way. Security staff
frequently commented on late arrivals and absences, clearly indicating that
they observed one’s behaviour and work routine. In exchange for the list, slid
under the window, you received your keys.

With my keys, I had access to the museum storage.¹ When the key man-
ager handed them to me, I could see who had made use of the keys to access
the museum storage in the last ten years. The list was short, and I knew al-
most all the names – access to what has been described as the ‘continuous-
ly throbbing heart of a museological collection’ has been highly restricted
(Griesser-Stermscheg, 2012, p. 81).² Walking into the Museum’s East Africa
storage, located in the cellar, I felt as if this was as far as one could get in
entering the Museum’s backstage. A former air-raid shelter, the storage
closed with an impressive and heavy metal door: the air was charged and
heavy, noises muted, random interactions with other people were unlikely,
and one was alone. The overwhelming number of objects seemed to conceal
uncountable stories, and despite the order, it felt almost impossible to ori-
entate oneself, to get an overview. A particular sense of discovery, similar to
exploring one’s grandparents’ attic and thus of adventure came together with
a feeling of risk, the fear of breaking things, or of disarranging the seemingly
neat order.

As Mirjam Brusius and Kavitha Singh framed it, ‘museum collections are,
like archives, simultaneously the outcome of historical processes and the very
condition for the production of historical knowledge’ (Brusius & Singh, 2017,
p. 7). The curator Paola Ivanov repeatedly described the historical context
we were dealing with as one of ‘collecting mania’ (Sammelwut) (Ivanov, 2005, p. 43). This frenzy would have lasting consequences for how the work of conserving and storing was organised in the Ethnological Museum. In the museum storage, the colonial collecting frenzy materialised, and the politics of the Ethnological Museum collection’s constitutions became graspable. A museum curator stated in conversation about the Museum’s collections and the difficulties of doing research with them that

[i]f we are honest, we don’t know anything about what we have here. The musealisation is an end in itself [*ein Zweck an sich*]. The whole story consisted in appropriation. The Museum put the objects in storage, for the objects to be there, with a pseudo-label, and that’s what constitutes all the knowledge. And this plethora develops agency [*Agency der Unmenge*]! The sheer mass of objects is stifling. I think that the collection is so stifling – it’s crushing us! It’s even preventing us from recording the collection.³

This chapter focuses on how museum staff handled this abundance of collections in the Museum. It focuses on one historic moment and one person’s narrative, that of storage manager Hans-Joachim Radosuboff.⁴ After the fall of the Wall, the ethnological museum in Leipzig repatriated approximately 45,000 objects, war booty, to the Ethnological Museum (see chapter two). How does the managing and ordering of collections articulate in a context of scarce resources? How does this responsibility for the collection articulate in the Museum’s everyday – collections handed down from the past with the mission to keep it for future generations?

Through Radosuboff’s narrative of his own twenty-year-long career in the department, the chapter addresses the imbalance of resources – financial, personnel – and of attention attributed to the caring and managing of the results of colonial collecting. The chapter thus depicts the Museum as a space fragmented by hierarchies. Between different tasks and obligations, the Museum is organised along practices understood as mundane, which can be summed up as ‘care’, versus practices associated with the ‘representation’ of the Museum.

## Collection neglect past and present

In a personal conversation in 2018, one museum curator commented on why the situation of the museum storage was ‘symptomatic’ of what characterised, in the curator’s view, the Humboldt Forum’s general attitude: it was
‘representation’ that took a place of pride, instead of what was understood as ‘substantial’ museum work.⁵

The museum storage is symptomatic of what generally happens in the Humboldt Forum. Since it is not possible to profile the Forum with the museum storages, there is absolutely no investment. The situation in the museum storage is devastating and it is getting worse and worse. For me, working on a research project, this is a disaster. Only the *minimum* requirements are met. Currently, apart from objects for the Humboldt Forum, the objects considered at risk are taken out: ‘at risk’ means those objects which might become subject to restitution claims in the next few years. The rest of the objects will be covered for an indefinite amount of time under plastic tarpaulins. If insects come and devour the collections, this will hardly be noticed! If the collections are closed off, we do not have any control of what is happening in there.

The organisational prioritisation of ‘representation’ over conservation and storage was confirmed and went public with an article in 2019 entitled ‘Contaminated, Corroded, Flooded’ (‘Verseucht, zerfressen, überflutet’). The journalist Jörg Häntzschel described the conditions of museum storage in German ethnological museums, and particularly in Berlin, as ‘administrative emergencies’. Referring to the museum storage’s current operation as ‘passive de-collecting’, he criticised what he understood as a lack of transparency concerning the state of conservation of the collections, which are ‘to say the least, not ideal’ and even ‘catastrophic’ (Häntzschel, 2019).

The neglect of the care of collections in favour of what museum staff framed as ‘representation’ had a history in the Ethnological Museum. In the context of debates on the Humboldt Forum, the museum storage’s poor condition was used to argue for the collection’s move to the city centre. In 2010, when the plans for the Humboldt Forum were put at risk, the museum director Viola König argued that

[t]he storage space’s conditions don’t correspond in any way to the collections’ requirements [...] In the summer it is too hot in the uninsulated building, whereas in the winter, there is condensation running down the walls. (*Die Welt am Sonntag*, 13 June 2010 quoted in König and Scholz, 2012, p. 76)

In an article published at approximately the same time in the national newspaper *Süddeutsche Zeitung*, similar statements were made:
Bad news arrives on the director’s desk every day. In addition to fire protection, the air conditioning and electrical engineering are partly in a miserable state. ‘We could only bear the situation because we knew that it was not long until the collection’s move’ says König, who still pleads for a relocation of the collections from Dahlem to Mitte. (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 June 2010, quoted in König and Scholz, 2012, p. 76)

In 2013–2015, during my time at the Museum, conditions had hardly changed for the better. The Africa collections were housed in a building originally constructed to show exhibitions.⁶ The rooms were thus not suited for storing objects: the floor was made out of wood and the windows were big. With no air conditioning, the museum storage rooms were exposed to marked temperature fluctuations, going up to 35°C in the summer. Not only were these temperatures difficult to endure in terms of working conditions, but they also risked damaging the objects, such as causing cracks in wooden objects. In contrast to the museum storage’s situation, the exhibition spaces were entirely air-conditioned. Probably, museum staff sometimes joked, this was to pretend that everything worked professionally in the Museum. ‘What is most absurd in this context is that the objects have to be transported in so-called “climate boxes” [Klimakisten]’, museum staff explained to me.⁷ Alerted by the damage caused by fire to the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in 2004 and the collapse of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne in 2009, checks on the buildings’ capacity to host the collection were carried out. If a fire broke out, ‘better save yourself, don’t even try to rescue the objects’, members of museum staff stated. The building would simply collapse. Even though the consequent measures – the evacuation of the collections – were supposed to be realised immediately, they hadn’t taken place yet. Staff concluded that the Museum’s concerns were rather about ‘representation than about the objects’.⁸ At the time of writing, the West Africa storages are closed for an indefinite amount of time, as fire protection is not secured.

The lack of planning, funding, and personnel (concerning the collections) was incomprehensible to some of the people working in the Museum. ‘It is not as if the Humboldt Forum is a particularly new idea’, one member of staff claimed. The discrepancy between what was spent on the Humboldt Forum⁹ and external curatorial projects¹⁰ in contrast to the collections’ care was just too significant in museum staff’s eyes. ‘It is not only the museum’s task to do new and costly exhibitions. The museum is also there to conserve!’ another employee stated, referring to the ICOM definition of the museum’s multiple roles (ICOM 2007).¹¹

In the local news programme *Abendschau*, broadcast on 23 August 1990, the director of Leipzig’s Museum für Völkerkunde, Lothar Stein, showed
himself relieved to know that ‘the objects returned finally to where they
rightfully belong’. The journalist, joking, shot back – ‘Ah, to Africa or Asia?’
to which Stein responded, ‘No, this is another issue. Many conferences have
been devoted to this topic. In Dahlem, the objects can finally be treated
appropriately from the point of view of restoration’ (Abendschau, 1990).¹²

Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, responsible for the Africa storage from 1991 until 2012, was the one dealing with this precise ‘point of view of restoration’ the museum director Lothar Stein alludes to – inventorying, reorganising, cleaning, and moving objects within and between old and new storage spaces. In what follows, I depart from the particular: the history of Hans-Joachim Radosuboff and the ‘object love’ (Macdonald, 2002, p. 65), devotion, and passion that accompanied his work at the Museum. Countering the organisation-al neglect individually, this history not only pays homage to his achievements. It underlines the impact of individuals and their agency in the Museum’s history, opposing anonymised understandings of what constitutes the Museum.

The making of the East Africa storage

When visiting and working in the East Africa storage, one constantly stum-
bled on Hans-Joachim Radosuboff’s traces. The cupboards were organised
by topic, and similar objects were neatly arranged next to each other.
Opening the cupboards, taking out the objects to properly look at them, I
imagined hearing Hans-Joachim Radosuboff’s successor sigh as I had heard
so many times before: once something was taken out, it was not always
easy to reconstruct the complicated hanging system that Hans-Joachim
Radosuboff and his assistant, Jürgen Tröster, had put in place. Beautifully
installed, the objects would not touch each other; they were draped and ar-
ranged behind glass following what Hans-Joachim Radosuboff called ‘move-
ment and aesthetics’. Jürgen Tröster contributed to these particular hanging
systems significantly insofar as he had previously worked for the prominent
German porcelain manufacturer Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur and had
installed their displays at fairs (Verkaufsmessenausstatter).

When I contacted Hans-Joachim Radosuboff to do an interview, he
replied enthusiastically. He was happy to report on his ‘85,000 children’,¹³
referring to the approximate number of objects in the Africa collection. We
met in January 2015. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff had been retired for over
two years, and he still knew the collections by heart. He had prepared well
for the interview and had reread the diary that he had kept from 1991 to
2002. His speech was accurate and detailed, spiced with funny details.¹⁴ He
came to visit the Museum, ‘not so much for the Museum as for the people’.
With a likeable Berlin accent, he was always ready for repartee. He greeted everyone and quickly made appointments for a chat when we encountered museum staff during our tour. We installed ourselves in the office just next to the West Africa storage. Immediately after we sat down, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff started his narrative.

Hans-Joachim Radosuboff (HJR): I arrived here out of the blue in 1991. If you look at my CV, I am not an expert. I didn't have anything to do with Africa.

Margareta von Oswald (MO): What did you do?

HJR: I was a craftsman. At one point, I learned how to be a mason and then, for many years, I worked as a craftsman in manual sectors, in technical areas. My last job before coming here was at the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum), as a guard, in the guardhouse. There was a notice that the Museum für Völkerkunde was looking for a storage keeper. And I applied and it worked. And then I walked in here as we did today. The only difference was that it was somehow much less chaotic, but still, much more chaotic than it is now [laughs]. And Mr Koloss [Hans-Joachim Koloss, the Africa curator at the time] who employed me, he picked me out of 128 applications. This was the time when the Wall just had come down. One and a half years after. Anyone applied for anything. Do you understand? Koloss gave me a few brief explanations. When I started to ask interested questions, he was suddenly gone. That's how it was! In that sense, he was not an instructor! And after a few questions and a few gruff answers I told myself: 'OK, you have to do your own thing.' And very quickly, I understood why I got the job here. After a short time of working in the Museum, the door swung open, two of my colleagues stood there with these huge carts, filled with objects from Leipzig. 'Achim, your first objects are here!' So, and then of course, I had to help myself - unpacking and disinsectising and such. And then, the hall here was filled with another 25,000 objects.

When the objects arrived in Berlin, the Museum was confronted with an exceptional situation. As put by Christian Feest in 1991, '[n]o sane museum ever acquires 45,000 objects in a single stroke' (Feest, 1991, p. 32). Of the objects acquired, 25,000 belonged to the Africa collections. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff was most directly and immediately confronted with this situation (see figures 5.1 and 5.2).
<figure><img src="image_88.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_89.png" /></figure>

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 Photographs of 'emergency cupboards' (Notregale) as interim storage for the collections, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Hans-Joachim Radosuboff
When I arrived at the Museum, I had a *lot* of ideas in a short period of time. But then I realised, that every single idea I have, I need to keep up 65,000 times. Do you understand? If I don't keep this particular idea, I create more disorder than anything else.

In his diaries, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff wrote: 'Only the humble question remains: "Where to put things?" It certainly doesn't fit in a hat-box.'¹⁵ He found a timely solution. Given that the museum's air-raid shelter in the cellar was out of use due to the end of the Cold War, he decided to reuse it as storage space. To have clearly distinct entities in the two different storage spaces – one located in the building's cellar, the other one under the same building's roof – Hans-Joachim Radosuboff separated the regional collections within the Africa collection. He dedicated one space to the East Africa collections and the other to the rest of the Africa collections, which consisted mainly of objects from West Africa and today is commonly referred to as the West Africa storage.

When the 25,000 objects arrived, I started to get an idea of the amount and the kind of work that I was going to be confronted with. Mr Koloss said to me: 'Well, this will keep you occupied for approximately four years, won't it?' [Hans-Joachim Radosuboff looks at me, and laughs out loud.] As I said, I didn't have much of an idea of what I was doing. I also had no one to talk to. I was what you call an autodidact. However, I knew that in four years, I could never deal with this amount of objects [laughs again]. I had a little bit of experience already and if I did my job correctly, I knew that I could only do twenty-five objects a week. At the most! That's one hundred objects per month, and then we have to consider vacation and sick leave. This added up to about one thousand objects a year. I had twenty-seven years left, there are 25,000 objects. So then, I said to my boss, Koloss, everything would work out: by the time I retired, he would have his two study collections. This information blew him away! Koloss was a Cameroon fan and of course he wanted to see and process everything that concerned Cameroon right away. And this is how I got him to get help. Koloss organised assistants to support me.

And I said to myself: 'OK, the East Africa collection holds approximately as many objects as what has been returned from Leipzig as repatriations.' One didn't have any measure in terms of physical mass. An object could be a pearl or a drum. Still, I knew that the quantity of inventory numbers from the East Africa collection was about 25,000, and thus,
the number of objects that were returned. So I said to myself: ‘We need to get a whole region out of here. If not, we’ll have a mess again.’ And this turned out to be East Africa.

As a non-professional, I had a dream: I wanted to create a study collection, where you can see possibly everything, but were you do not need to touch anything and where no object touches another object. This was the most important rule. And then there was the question – what motivates the object’s arrangement? Well, I said to myself, by topic: It’s organised a bit like a thesaurus.

MO: And how did you assign the objects to each category?

HR: I actually created a thesaurus. When I added objects, they appeared immediately in the database, but only as a list of names. I then I assigned certain functions to those objects, and functional groups appeared. [...] As a result, one could say that this museum’s database’s Mama, the Ur-Mama (‘great-mother’), comes from me.

The Leipzig repatriation incited the Museum to start the collection’s digitisation earlier than other SMB museums. The collections from Leipzig were all inventoried when they arrived. However, as Hans-Joachim Radosuboff explained, it was done in a rough way.

If an object came back from Leipzig which was made out of wood, they would just write ‘piece of wood’. Then, the object was assigned a Leipzig number [*Leipzignummer*] and that’s it. For me, that was an insufficient procedure.

As a reaction, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff expanded the Museum’s current database GOS and started to define notions (*Sachbegriff*) and subject groups (*Sachgruppen*), departing from the collections themselves. In the old storage system, the objects had already been sorted by subject groups. This meant that the different regions represented in the collection were mixed up (see chapter four for details of the geographical division of objects). Hans-Joachim Radosuboff thus had to go through all the cupboards in the old storage system as well as through all the war repatriations, to first identify objects marked ‘III E’, designating East Africa. He then physically laid out the objects according to his self-defined subject group in the museum’s hallways and prepared cupboards for those objects in the basement. Jürgen Tröster, his assistant, then sorted the objects into the cupboards.
In the cupboards, the objects were arranged by subject group, such as ‘masks’ or ‘dress’, and then, within those thematic cupboards, by region, for example, ‘Tanzania’ (see figures 5.3 and 5.4).

In addition to expanding GOS as a database, a system that would be taken over by the entire Museum at the end of the 1990s, he created another thesaurus at home to acquaint himself further with the collections. He said that he didn’t know anything about the collections, of terms ‘of which I don’t even know if it’s a river, a country, a region, or an ethnic group’. A database would help to orientate himself in the thousands of objects. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff designed an *Ethniendatenbank*, a database of ethnic groups, based on the works of international and German anthropologists William J. Waterman Roome, Herrmann Baumann, George Peter Murdock, and Walter Hirschberg. He kept and continued this database during his entire career, but it never entered the museum system. The database of ethnic groups, he admitted disappointedly, was conspicuously ignored in the Museum.¹⁶ Despite the inventory and database work, it was still difficult to find his way around in the collections, as he noted in his 1994 diary:

> I want to mention it once more. It's not easy for someone like me to identify where the objects come from, as I have just started to get a feeling for the appearance of an object. The old collection with its narrow shelves stuffed up to the farthest corner was roughly sorted according to subject groups. But that was also the only comprehensible order that existed in this storage. The object catalogues as well as the fragmentary index cards are sorted by sequence numbers. This didn't say anything about the origin and locations of the objects. A 1,000m² storage area with several hundred cupboards of approximately eighty metres of shelves, stuffed with war repatriations. Here I had to do the trick of bringing all East Africa objects together, according to subject groups. If I were to overlook some, there would be problems later in the East Africa study collection because of too narrow space calculation.¹⁷

The challenges inherent in creating systematised ordering structures – imposing names, establishing hierarchies, creating meaning – became evident when I addressed the topic directly. He explained the genealogy of the different categories, listed on the East Africa storage plan – ranging from ‘toys’ to ‘dancing tools’ (*Tanzgeräte*) to ‘extrasensory’ (*übersinnlich*).

MO: Could you explain how the ascription in functional groups worked exactly?
Studiensammlung Ostafrika

<figure><img src="image_90.png" /></figure>

Konsult und Ausführung: Hans-J. Radosuboff & Jürgen Tötsler 1993-2000 (mit Unterzeichnungen)

Figure 5.3 Map of the East Africa storage, designed by Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1993/afro_jahr1993.html, consulted 20 December 2017, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

<figure><img src="image_91.png" /></figure>

Figure 5.4 Hans-Joachim Radosuboff in his office, as 'Proud administrator of the study collections, with two connected computers', 1995, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1995/afro_jahr1995.html, consulted 20 December 2017, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Hans-Joachim Radosuboff
HJR: That resulted first from what was there as a collection. For example, there is hunting [Jagd]. You can add hunting to livelihood [Lebensunterhalt]. There is active hunting, when you shoot with bow and arrow. And there is passive hunting. But at one point, I dropped passive hunting because anyway, passive hunting consists in traps. So it becomes 'active hunting' and 'traps'. Then we went on. The 'traps' group consists of forty or fifty traps. This is confusing. When you have more than ten terms in a group, you create a subdivision: traps for small animals, traps for big animals.

And so it went on and on. No one wanted to talk with me about this the-
saurus. There was no one here to discuss with me, they all dodged when
the topic came up [...] So I consulted dictionaries or experts. For example,
'What is the difference between medicine [Medizin] and drug [Arznei]?''
Well, I talked to my dentist. Actually, I talked to different people all the
time. And later on, when this information was needed for MuseumPlus,
every one, constantly, had demands. And they mocked me, in particular
for those 'magical objects'. Just to explain to you. For me, 'magic' was not
an obvious category. If someone has a crucifix hanging on the wall, it's
religion for me. When an African in Cameroon has got his object of faith in
his hut - what does that mean to me? Is it 'magic' [Magie] or 'bewitchment'
[Zauberei] or what-do-I-know? But this is an unfair perspective [ungerecht]!
Why would a crucifix be 'religion' and the Cameroonian object be 'magic'
or 'bewitchment'? So, for me, this whole area was simply extrasensory
[übersinnlich]. Why? It is something that my senses cannot perceive, so
for me it's 'extrasensory'. Later on, it became 'spiritual' [laughs]. This is
how such things emerged. With this expression, without being unfair, this
African spiritual object could be on equal terms with a European spiritual
object. This is how I thought about those issues.

MO: And how did you associate objects with functions? There exists so
little detail about most of the objects...

HJR: Yes, but when you're here for ten, fifteen years, then you know
how to assign what. What comes up sometimes, for example, is that
an axe is a tool but might also have a magical purpose. One can make
cross-references in the database: 'see also'. So that works as well.

MO: But in that case, you put the axe in a cupboard for tools?

HJR: Yes, exactly.
MO: So, you have created a hierarchy concerning the assignment?

HJR: Right.

MO: You have to, I guess.

HJR: Yes, you do. As I said, there are about 65,000 objects in the collection. You have to keep track, not only physically but also mentally. If they come and say that they want to have an exhibition about hairdressers, you need to be able to go to the cupboards with 'body hygiene'.

In 1999, parts of Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's dream to create a functioning study collection, at least for East Africa, were realised. In his account of this time on his website, he recalled the situation in detail.

Today, I can add up. A full-time and a part-time position have jointly set up a study collection of 16,500 objects in five and a half years and entered them into the PC with all relevant information. Since there was no experience for such an undertaking, we had to create a concept (learning by doing) and sometimes adapt completed works to new experiences.¹⁸

The East Africa storage can be framed as a personal success within an organisational framework that would not prioritise care of collections. As Hans-Joachim Radosuboff described, it was thanks to his personal commitment to the collections and his determined will to realise the storage that he was able to accomplish the task. In his narrative, he continuously described his efforts as 'autodidactic', with little support from either the curator or other museum staff in the Museum. This narrative of 'learning by doing' is repeatedly confirmed by committed employees in different departments within the Museum - in which knowledge gained through experience and time in the Museum is not documented nor passed on for and to future generations of museum employees. Both Africa museum storages are generally speaking referred to as comparably well organised, but the East Africa storage in particular is described as standing out in the museum's different storages.

## 'Object love' to circumvent neglect

The work of inventorying, ordering, and classifying didn't stop with the process of finishing the East Africa department. Until he left in 2012, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff continued working on the organisation of the
West Africa department. Since then, his successors have been in charge of the inventory job, which has not been accomplished to date. This is testified to by the different accounts of the number of objects that are part of the Africa collection. The official number communicated to the public is a collection of 75,000 objects.¹⁹ In 2014, the curator Peter Junge talked about 42,000 to 45,000 objects already inventoried in the database, with approximately 30,000 still to be done.²⁰ However, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff would talk of his ‘85,000 children’, then referring to ‘65,000 objects’ to be dealt with. In a meeting with Boris Gliesmann, the database manager, we added up the different accounts and protocols for the department’s war repatriations (Leipzig, Wiesbaden, Berlin, Celle). The calculation amounted to 53,815 objects, with a loss due to war of approximately 12,000 objects.²¹ The number of objects is not only imprecise because of the absence of an overview of the collection, but is further distorted by an inconsistent inventory system, which has not been agreed on and has been realised differently and unsystematically in the different departments, depending on the individuals responsible for the inventory. The precise number of objects can thus not be determined.²²

Whereas, on the organisational level, the constant lack of resources devoted to collection care can be framed as a history of neglect, on an individual level, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff expressed ‘object love’. Object love, as used by Sharon Macdonald in the context of curatorial work, translates into a general commitment to the collection, a feeling of responsibility, honour, and the need to care for the objects (Macdonald, 2002, p. 65; see also Geoghegan & Hess, 2015). Radosuboff attested to his particular relation to the objects through his personalised narrative and choice of metaphors and words. He referred to the objects as ‘my children’, or framed it as his duty ‘to protect’ the collections. In 1996, he commented on the leaking roof, stating that ‘Sometimes, something swashed in the storage which would burden my soul.’ To counteract ‘lakes of water’ causing damage, he was forced to install internal gutters, which drained into buckets that he needed to empty daily. Keeping the storage tidy, organised, and neat was, for him, a ‘matter of honour’ (Ehrensache) (see figures 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7 for care practices and solutions within the storage).

Care for the object also translated in a diversity of sometimes improvised practices. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff always had a pen and paper lying beside his bed. ‘Sometimes I would wake up at 4 a.m. and would say to myself: “Ah, this is how I am going to do it!” And I would write it down immediately.’ When walking around in storage, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff pointed to the different techniques he had invented to store the objects safely. In the context of what he described as a lack of budget, ‘I needed to
<figure><img src="image_92.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.5 Protecting objects from the leaking roof, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Hans-Joachim Radosuboff</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_93.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.6 The installation of internal gutters, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Hans-Joachim Radosuboff</figcaption></figure>
have a lot of energy and ideas!' One prominent example was the placing of yoghurt cups in the cupboards, which I had repeatedly come across while working in storage. The cups had been filled with camphor, a chemical solid that had historically been used as a pesticide. Hans-Joachim Radosuboff had put camphor in every single cupboard to protect the objects from what the museum staff described as infestation (*Befall*), an invasion of insects in a particular group of objects.

It was always the question: How do I protect the objects best? Because there was the story about the insects. A danger for the Museum, it was said. And there was always so much drama around this topic, because I had taken over the tradition from colleagues of putting a spoon of camphor in the cupboards. Maybe you can still notice it, when you open the cupboard doors, there's maybe still a bit of a smell of menthol. I mean, I felt it was successful, I did have very little infestation! But it was very much disliked by my colleagues. Well, it's true, the smell, camphor, is an insult to the nose. But then people said it was harmful. But come on, this stuff is part of baby lotion!

<figure><img src="image_94.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.7 Buckets of dirty water that needed to be emptied daily, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Hans-Joachim Radosuboff</figcaption></figure>
Whereas the use of camphor was controversial in the Museum, as Radosuboff acknowledged himself, he pointed to further procedures for protecting the objects in the context of scarce resources. After lengthy negotiations, he had managed to convince the curator Hans-Joachim Koloss that new storage cupboards were needed. When he received them, however, they had no fittings or shelves. So that he could install the objects, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff asked all his friends to give him old cardboard tubes and clothes hangers from the dry-cleaner. He pushed his colleague, a wine drinker, to never throw away the cork. Wedges made out of cork would avoid putting objects directly on the shelves and would stabilise them.

The list of his solutions and inventions continued. As an entire part of the Museum's histories and presents, those stories and names, if mentioned at all, usually disappear into the footnotes of those doing archival work or fieldwork in the Museum. Radosuboff's career and narrative stand in for the many untold histories of personal passion, engagement, and effort that shape the making of these organisations profoundly.

## Conclusion

‘A treasure too big is no treasure no more.’ Hans-Joachim Radosuboff opened his diary with this observation, pronounced in 1991 at the time of the press conference on the Leipzig repatriations by Gerd Höpfner, then curator of South East Asia collections.²³ Dealing with the ‘treasure’ over the course of his entire career, Radosuboff embodies both the pleasures and difficulties of what the responsibility of keeping a collection entails from a practical point of view. The chapter thus devoted attention to the objects’ museum life and what it means to ‘be kept’ in the museum storage, an aspect hardly taken into account when talking about museum objects, although this life concerns the greater part of the collections (as opposed to being exhibited) and the lion’s share of their lifespan.

Working through colonial legacies articulates here as an individual attempt to reckon, in very practical terms, with the ambitious project of collecting the world. His story stands in for the many untold stories about museum life and careers, which remain undocumented and unrecognised. In this chapter, I decided to let Radosuboff’s narrative stand on its own to give room to his personality and life. Radosuboff’s personal narrative reveals how managing shortage (lack of budget, resources, and knowledge) results in improvisation, and how it leaves its personal marks in the organisation’s structure and materiality.
## Notes

1. I received the keys once my research stipend had been confirmed.

2. My translation from the German: 'das kontinuierlich pochende Herzstück einer musealen Sammlung'.

3. Field notes from 27 November 2013, with the demand not to be quoted directly.

4. If not otherwise indicated, all quotations from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff have been translated and translated from an interview I conducted with him on 7 January 2014. Other interlocutors are quoted anonymously here.

5. Field notes from the conversation between the curator and me, 25 April 2018.

6. In conversations with both storage managers from the Africa department, they could not tell me why this was the case, email from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, 23 August 2018, and conversation with current storage manager, 17 July 2019.

7. Field notes from 27 November 2013.

8. Field notes from 27 November 2013 and 21 March 2014.

9. See the introduction for details.

10. The critique concerned, for example, the Humboldt Lab Dahlem, which received more than 4 million euros for its projects between 2012 and 2015.

11. Field notes 6 November 2014.

12. My translation from the German: 'Das ist eine andere Frage, da sind schon ganze Konferenzen abgehalten worden zu dieser Frage. In Dahlem können die Objekte restauratorisch angemessen behandelt werden.'

13. Quotation from an email exchange with Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, 11 August 2014.

14. Since then, he has printed his memoirs (including photographs), bound them as books, and deposited the diaries in the museum library under the title 'Museographie', in several volumes. The books are consultable in the museum's library. The accounts here are based on his website, which was accessible at http://www.radosuboff.de/starttage/indexMi.html, and consulted on 20 December 2017, but which he has since deleted.

15. Quotation from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's 1991 diaries, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1991/afro_jahr1991.html, consulted 20 December 2017.

16. Phone conversation with Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, 8 October 2019.

17. Quotation from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's 1994 diaries, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1994/afro_jahr1994.html, consulted 20 December 2017.

18. http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1999/afro_jahr1999.html, consulted 20 December 2017.

19. https://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/ethnologisches-museum/sammlern-forschen/sammlung.html, consulted 25 February 2019.

20. Field notes from a guided tour with the curator, 20 November 2014.

21. Meeting with Boris Gliesmann, 21 December 2015.

22. This is exemplified when it comes to the inventory of object bundles. What to do and how to categorise object bundles that consist of several parts, such as a quiver with arrows? This question was addressed to Boris Gliesmann during a museum workshop with staff. Even though Boris Gliesmann insisted on describing an object bundle as one object consisting of several parts (one object number), other museum employees suggested inventorying every single object (several object numbers), while others suggested categorising the object parts with 'a, b, c, ...' (one object with parts a, b, c, ...). Field notes from a workshop with Boris Gliesmann, 4 November 2013.

23. Quotation from Hans-Joachim Radosuboff's 1991 diaries, http://www.radosuboff.de/em/1991/afro_jahr1991.html, consulted 20 December 2017.
Researching provenance:
The politics of writing history

I only realised how little the Museum knew about its own collections when I started working there. ‘This museum focused on collecting, but little research has been done’, the then Africa curator Peter Junge stated during a conversation.¹ In the Africa department alone, out of the 80,200 objects identified, only 54,000 were inventoried in the database, which the Museum’s data base manager Boris Gliesmann reported in 2019.² ‘No time’ was allocated to engagement in research about the collections.³

Provenance research has always figured as one of the museum curators’
prominent tasks. Provenance is commonly understood as the reconstruc-
tion of the former use and significance of an object, as well as identifying
the chain of ownership related to the object (Förster, 2019, pp. 80–81). As
soon as provenance research reveals that processes within the chain of
ownership raise ethical or moral doubts, however, it can be politically con-
sequential, as it can lead to claims for restitution. In the context of mount-
ing critique against the Humboldt Forum, provenance research gained ad-
ditional political signification. The focus shifted towards the objects’ modes
of acquisition and the contextualisation within colonial modes of govern-
ance in light of claims for ‘the disclosure of ownership’ (No Humboldt 21!,
2013), relating provenance to restitution.

Throughout my fieldwork in the Museum, ‘provenance research’ became a key term in the Ethnological Museum’s engagement with its colonial histories. Whereas ‘restitution’ was still a concept used mainly by to activists between 2013 and 2015, the commitment to provenance research had been repeatedly communicated by SPK representatives as well as by Monika Grütters, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media: in 2015, she stated that the SPK collections shouldn’t own collections ‘unlawfully acquired’ (*unrechtmäßig erworben*), research on provenance was to be ‘made transparent’ (Deutscher Bundestag, 2015, pp. 2–3). Provenance research became the prerequisite for objects to be displayed and, ultimately, to be kept in the collections.⁴ This concerned approximately seven thousand
objects from the Ethnological Museum, with almost 1,500 objects from the Africa department.⁵ The museum's data base manager Boris Gliesmann considered the 'simple documentation' of the objects to be exhibited in the Humboldt Forum as an 'ambitious goal to achieve'.⁶ He estimated that only 10 per cent of the entire collection was 'well documented' (*dokumentiert*) (2016). Proving rightful acquisition, in addition, aimed even higher and was, at the time, a responsibility carried on the shoulders of the then present museum staff alone.⁷

In the midst of activist claims, political promises, and structural limitations imposed by the lack of staff and time, this chapter takes a step back and scrutinises how provenance research unfolded in the Museum. How did the attempt to document object histories articulate? What did the process of research reveal about the politics of producing knowledge and writing histories?

The chapter departs from a provenance research project initiated by Paola Ivanov. She asked me to join the project that she had been working on with the museum apprentice Verena Rodatus. A precursor to disclosing the museum's colonial entanglements (Ivanov, 2005; Ivanov, 2007), Paola Ivanov's worked on the new permanent exhibition for the Humboldt Forum. The exhibition was planned to prominently address the collection's colonial provenance, and the research was to ground her approach. The research focused on objects produced by a group referred to as 'Luba', located in today's Democratic Republic of Congo (see chapter four); these objects were part of the Africa department's most exhibited and valuable pieces. Paola Ivanov's research hypothesis departed from the observation that the distance between the objects' assumed location of production and of acquisition was important. Paola Ivanov suggested that the circulation of objects, people, and ideas must have taken place before the objects were sent from German East Africa to Berlin. Accompanied by Boris Gliesmann, the database manager, we found out more about the provenance of one particular object, IIIC 14966. This stool, commonly described as a 'caryatid stool' in the Museum, was supposedly produced in the workshop of the Master of Buli. It entered the Museum as a gift by the German military officer Werner von Grawert in 1902 as part of a group of objects. This chapter follows the research journey throughout the Museum - its archive, library, and networks of experts.

In this chapter, I elaborate on a prominent paradox of provenance research of colonial collections. The unravelling and production of a provenance for each object is a prerequisite to situate the Museum's embedding in and dependence on colonial systems of governance. Provenance research also creates value; it produces further knowledge about the object. This value ultimately served the organisation that possesses the object. The access to,
exchange and ownership of knowledge about the collections continued to be centralised in the Ethnological Museum itself. Many research projects, including in the Ethnological Museum, have modified the conditions of knowledge production about collection provenance ever since. However, if the conditions of knowledge production remain as they were at the time, provenance research risks contributing to the structural inequity between the Global North and the Global South, beyond questions related to ownership.

## Of presences and absences in the Museum's archive

This is my favourite thing to do, the documentation of the collection. In other words: the documentation of the collectors! The people. To enrich the database with information on them, this is my passion, my playground. But it is extremely time consuming!

During our initial training session, Boris Gliesmann told me how he approached ‘the documentation of collections’. Boris Gliesmann’s priority was to identify people individually, to give them a profile, a character, a face. He was engaged in the lengthy process of humanising the collection – and objectifying the human. The process consisted of pinning down key information, such as researching birthdates or locations. Practically speaking, the research comprised the consultation, transcription, and analysis of the Museum’s historical files, information that was subsequently expanded by bibliographical and online research. Boris Gliesmann’s approach also pointed to a seemingly natural mechanism omnipresent in provenance research in ethnological collections: for lack of other kinds of indications, the object is above all defined by the person who had *collected* it, not the person who had *produced*, *owned*, or *used* it.

Boris Gliesmann distinguished between a ‘collector’ (*Sammler*) and a ‘transferer’ (*Veräußerer*). For him, a collector was not a gallerist with commercial intentions, nor ‘Miss Erna from Steglitz’ (a district in Berlin) who gives three objects to the Museum. His understanding of a collector was someone who went on expeditions, someone usually employed by the colonial system. It implied understandings of the collection as disciplined, and possibly ‘complete’, reflecting scientific conventions of collecting in the nineteenth century, suggested by the Museum’s ‘Instructions for Ethnographic Observing and Collecting’ (von Luschan, 1904; Ankermann & von Luschan, 1914).

The provenance research was thus shaped by the presence of particular sources – produced within, for, and in dialogue with the colony – contrasted
by the significant absence of local subjects, their voices, and perspectives. To retrace the object's trajectory meant identifying sources retracing the coloniser's trajectories. Then, in the case of III C 14966, this primarily translated as understanding the trajectories and life of Werner von Grawert. Here, we departed from basic information provided in the database. Werner von Grawert (1867-1918) had been colonial commander of the town of Ujiji in 1898/1899. Ujiji was then located in the administrative district on Lake Tanganyika, now part of western Tanzania. Known for the fact that Henry Morton Stanley 'discovered' Dr Livingstone there in 1871, Ujiji had been a trading hub in the region since the 1820s (Roberts, 2013, p. 203; Sheriff, 1987). Von Grawert then moved to become colonial commander of 'Station Usumbara' (from 1898 to 1902 and from 1904 to 1907), a town now located in the northeast of Tanzaniza. Several historical files (*Akte*) in relation to Werner von Grawert exist.⁸ In contrast to the historical inventory, which is available as scans, the historical records are only accessible physically and stored in the Museum's archive.⁹

## Archival encounters

We changed location from Boris Gliesmann's office, walking through the labyrinth of the Museum to reach the archive, still located within the Museum. This was exceptional then and is currently changing, because most museum archives had been transferred to the SMB's Central Archive.¹⁰ The transfer to the Central Archive, some museum staff hoped, would finally put the files in 'ideal' standard conservation conditions. ¹¹

When I looked around, I saw that the archive had been a cosy workplace for some of the Museum's employees once: even though not in use any more, personal items, such as a radio and ashtrays were lying around. It was obvious that people had worked in and with the archive intensively, taking their time. Some museum staff described the conditions in the archive as 'dilettante' (*dilettantisch*), as unprofessional and amateurish: the files were stored in wooden cupboards, with significant air and light exposure because of the old wooden windows.¹² The archive was located in two rooms, roughly separated by chronological order. The majority of 'old' files (up to 1947) were stored in one room with five different cupboards, which reflected four continents as well as 'museum history'. The absence of 'Europe' as a continent, and thus a particular cupboard, exemplified the historical self-understanding of the Museum as being about 'others' (see a series of photographs of the archive in the visual introduction, images 5-12).
As Boris Gliesmann highlighted, III C 14966 was collected during ‘Prussian rule’, which implied, in his understanding, an accurate documentation of the Museum’s activities. In 1906, responsibility for documenting the collection’s traffic and growth had been transferred to the regional departments, which thereby gained in power and independence.¹³ Whereas this shift of responsibility didn’t change the accuracy of the documentation at the time, the documentation became fragmentary after the Second World War. The systematic approach was replaced by the curator’s individual responsibility to document their own work, and thus depended on personality and will. Even though physically separated, the collections of objects and historical files reflected each other. The files related to III C 14966 were recorded and bundled chronologically as well as regionally: like the collection inventory, the system followed the same two-step sequence (inventory followed by regional attribution; see chapter four).

Several archival files were registered under von Grawert’s name, of which some were directly linked to the objects.¹⁴ Boris Gliesmann helped read the files’ content. Through his reading, not only was the writing made easier to decipher thanks to his trained eye, he also explained and disentangled the colonial and administrative apparatus behind the delivery. He located the different people who signed the reports and letters in the colony (Dares Salaam), as well as in Berlin, rendering the process more comprehensible. Boris Gliesmann knew and imagined the people. His anecdotes about the Museum’s employees in Berlin, illustrating their personal characteristics, were followed by detailed accounts of the colonial administrative system in German East Africa. By spending several years of his life within the archive, Boris Gliesmann seemed to navigate the archive via a kind of cartography of objects, people, networks, and processes. ‘Sometimes, it’s like a crime novel here!’ Boris Gliesmann liked to exclaim.¹⁵ When I learned to work with the archival files myself, I realised how some people’s shape appeared more clearly, and others less so. The form and style of the handwriting,¹⁶ the choice of words, the order of paragraphs made me project the person’s characteristics (‘sloppy’, ‘condescending’, ‘neat’). It was a trigger for the imagination during a lengthy and tedious work process. It also provoked emotional reactions, more or less welcome. Sometimes I giggled when encountering the people’s eccentricities. Or I remained in shock or disgust when coming across traces or even detailed descriptions of colonial violence.¹⁷

The file linked to Werner von Grawert contained drafts of letters from Felix von Luschan to the collector, as well as a report on the arrival of the objects, object lists, and calculations of transportation costs. Werner von Grawert’s letters to the Museum were not documented in the file. III C 14966 had been part of an important shipment of 108 objects that arrived in Berlin
in 1902 and 1903, but no information about the object's circulation and mode of acquisition on-site was identifiable.¹⁸ With few results on the object's circulation, we reached out to external experts and secondary literature.

The research in yet another of the museum's locations – the library, with its primary and secondary sources – also led to insufficient evidence. Within the research team, we consulted primary sources in the library to find traces of von Grawert, such as the German *Kolonialblatt*, which reported on missions in the colonies, that were archived in the library. Given that no reports on any mission were available, we assumed that von Grawert didn't travel westwards, which is where the objects that had entered the collections had probably been produced. The information available on Werner von Grawert in relation to our research request was thus minimal, even though several letters existed. We still didn't know where the object had been acquired and how.

Reading the archive along the grain

These research results echo Arlette Farge's descriptions of what defines archi-
val research, namely as 'forever incomplete' (Farge, 2013, p. 55). The archives
were incomplete in relation to local voices in particular. This absence pointed
to the denial of the locals' agency, presence, and even existence, as well as the
omission of the function, production, or transaction of III C 14966. By con-
trast, reading the archive along the grain (Stoler, 2009), what *was* document-
ed were traces of a colonial apparatus of extracting the material culture from
the colonies; this process was logistically sophisticated and financially well
equipped. The (minimal) documentation of shipping, transport costs, and
the department director's appraisal and request for more objects show the
entanglement of colonialism with museums and academia. This documen-
tation reflects the contemporary department director Felix von Luschan's
ambitions to 'systematically' collect 'to raise an inventory, as it were, of the
complete cultural heritage' (Ankermann & von Luschan, 1914, p. 9).¹⁹

To complement these fragments, we reached out to experts in different
universities and museums. We asked whether they were aware of archival
traces that mentioned the circulation of objects in the region (German East
Africa and Congo Free State), and in particular, whether they were aware of
any, possibly violent, transactions. Whereas all researchers – historians and
anthropologists alike – approved Paola Ivanov’s hypothesis that the objects
may have circulated via Swahili trade caravans or as diplomatic gifts or tro-
phies, none of them had come across specific sources that could confirm it.²⁰
On the circulation of ideas, peoples, and things

The first hypothesis we worked on concerned the circulation of the object
itself. We were looking for traces that could prove that people had trans-
ported and exchanged objects at the time, both locals and colonisers. The
objects could have been acquired by sale, barter, confiscation, or looting,
all common forms of acquisition, but we were particularly interested in
how the trade was organised around Lake Tanganyika and the functioning
of local markets. Paola Ivanov argued that the object might have reached
German East Africa through widespread caravans and slave traders. This
would imply that the object might already have had the status of commodi-
ty then. Research had shown that a market of ‘ethnographica’ was emerging
at the time in the same region (Schildkrout & Keim, 1998). Allan Roberts,
professor at University of California, Los Angeles, extended the hypothesis
by raising the possibility that objects could have been used as diplomatic
gifts. He pointed to the prominent figure of the slave trader Tippo Tip, who
might have been involved in such diplomatic exchanges.²¹ Another possi-
bility was the objects’ movement via European colonial officials and trade
or exchange among European colonial staff and ‘explorers’. The curator and
anthropologist Barbara Plankensteiner quotes the German ‘explorer’ Hans
Meyer, who complemented his ‘travel collection’ with collections or indi-
vidual pieces by European residents (1998, p. 120). Other than the circula-
tion of the object via Europeans, another option is circulation by those who
produced the objects, as well as the circulation of ideas. A prerequisite for all
of these kinds of circulations was the pronounced caravan and slave trade
in the region. Artists could wander from place to place and produce objects
wherever they happened to be. Victims of the slave trade from Congo were
transported long distances to achieve higher prices, mainly to Tanzania.
Allan Roberts argues that slaves continued to produce objects in different
places and that religious practices and aesthetic forms from Congo circulat-
ed supra-regionally, citing the Tabwa as an example. The central position of
and admiration for the Kingdom of Luba in the region encouraged the cir-
culation of ideas and adoption of their style. The royal aesthetics, expressed
through body art, sculpture, and performance, were highly regarded and
embraced by immediate neighbours, as well as more distant societies, such
as in Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi. These practices spread because of hi-
erarchical relationships and by force, but also through what Roberts depicts
as ‘prestige through association’ (Roberts, 2013, p. 201).

The finding of any source could lead to great excitement, which could
subsequently be dampened just as quickly. The finding of a drawing was such
a case, which Julien Volper, keeper at the Royal Museum for Central Africa,
referred to in a conversation. Julien Volper had researched the circulation of a Luba mask. He had come across an early drawing by V. L. Cameron from 1877, in which a child is carrying an object on the right-hand side of the image (Volper, 2010, p. 13). In discussion of the image with Pierre Petit, a professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels and an expert in Luba culture, he advised approaching the validity of colonial imagery with great caution. Drawings especially, he warned, were often the product of colonial imaginations and risked having little to do with local realities – a risk made all the more probable by the fact that the drawing was by Daniel Oliver and not the book's author.²²

<figure><img src="image_95.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6.1 Image of a slave caravan, with the caption 'Slave-Gang', taken from V. L. Cameron, Across Africa (1877) (Cameron & Oliver, 1877, p. 357)</figcaption></figure>

## Research results: Speculation and fragmentation

External secondary sources and experts further confirmed Paola Ivanov's hypothesis on the circulation of people, things, and ideas in the region. Nevertheless, the results remained speculative as a result of insufficient evidence. The scant particular traces of how the object might have been acquired were diffuse in time and space (Cameron & Oliver, 1877; Meyer, 1913 in Plankensteiner, 1998). Direct evidence in relation to III C 14966 didn't exist. Whereas the research is summarised in a short paragraph here, virtually and physically, it ranged widely: in the attempt to reconstruct and understand past relationships, new relationships were constructed in the present, and people and things linked and were reshuffled in different ways. The research involved the bringing together of sources that were spatially spread and materially diverse, locating them in their historicity. We physically and virtually moved through offices, computer screens, the archive, the library. These movements enabled different encounters with the available materials:
historical documents in their fragility; scans of the historical inventory, flattened on screens; digitally assembled information; printed scans of historical originals, which turned into ‘originals’ themselves via the stamps and notes added to them. The time-consuming research process left us with archive transcriptions, a collection of publications, and email correspondence with external experts. We manoeuvred within the boundaries of the restricted sources and resources that the Museum provided. The diversity of data was linked through the database. Through the transfer of the physical to the virtual, or from one digital source to another, the museum’s temporalities, spaces, and materials were assembled and blurred into a virtual whole, the data base entry of IIIC 14966.

## Unequal access to sources

The Ethnological Museum’s collections and archives remained largely inaccessible to outsiders. This complicates any form of knowledge production from the Museum’s outsides to take place. The Museum’s public database was exemplary. Of the approximately 495,000 data sets that have been inventoried in the Ethnological Museum, only 71,500 data sets were accessible online in 2019.²³ What was published online, what was not, and why, was not traceable on the website. In conversation, Boris Gliesmann confirmed that the database had a showcase character, focusing on the Museum’s ‘masterpieces’. This meant, in turn, that users – be they academics, curators, artists, activists – were victims of the Museum’s priorities, as well as its understanding and definition of what was considered ‘presentable’ or not.

When one typed IIIC 14966 on the SMB's digital platform, the provided information was minimal (see figure 4.1 in chapter four for a screenshot of the database's surface for comparison). The 'collector', the 'producer', and the different regional and cultural classifications were indicated. Date and mode of acquisition of the stool were lacking. As for all entries, the information was only available in German. Whereas the archives were freely accessible on location,²⁴ access to the Museum's complete database and thus its collections were reserved to museum staff. Functioning as gatekeepers, the museum curators were responsible for – among an overwhelming amount of other tasks – responding to requests addressed at the Museum. The fact that the curators' names and contacts were not identifiable on the Museum's website further restricted access. An updated inventory catalogue, or a simple listing of the Museum's current collection, didn't exist.²⁵ Access to the collection thus remained reserved to those who had the financial, linguistic, and symbolic capital to access it from *within* the Museum.
Inequity in the production of knowledge

Analysing this *process* of provenance research shows an *inequity* concerning where and how knowledge about the object was and could be produced. In other words, conditions for producing knowledge depend on where the resources (financial, personnel) and sources (library, archives, collections) are concentrated. In view of the lack of or limited access to both collections and archives, the disparity of access doesn't only show a *difference* and *asymmetry*, but an *inequality*, even *injustice*. Pointing to unequal distribution here, I don't aim to question the validity of expertise in Western institutions nor to reduce their position to their geographical location solely. Rather, I want to indicate the ongoing disparity of who is consulted, who is given a voice, who is given access, and thus the right and opportunity to write these histories and to own the resulting knowledge. In the conventional paths of provenance research I was involved in, this concentration of knowledge within the Museum was encouraged because there was no attempt to complement the analysis of established European, colonial sources located in museums and universities and the consultation of 'experts' in these same organisations.²⁶

The dissemination, accessibility, and sustainability of provenance research results were further challenged by the insufficiency of the Museum's database system to record the available information: concerning the research on III C 14966, the research ultimately resulted in a paper folder, securely stored in the curator's office. Initiating the research translated thus into monopolising and basically owning the research and its results, involuntarily or not. Through this lack of systematic documentation, the curator's role was thus further valorised as centralising the knowledge on the collections. The Museum's power and authority has thus been conspicuously upheld – with the Museum keeping and owning the collections, as well as centralising and controlling the knowledge produced around them. This unequal distribution and concentration of knowledge further raised questions of sustainability and about the transfer and documentation *within* the Museum. In a context with more project-based funded provenance research, there was the risk of losing knowledge with the departure of staff. Knowledge transfer seemed urgent in the current digital context, as the documentation of email exchanges seemed all the more difficult and ever more dependent on the curator's personality and stance towards the issue. Transcending this access policy was thus especially possible for 'insiders' – curators and researchers acknowledged for their museum research. Any kind of 'outsider', and notably those unable to speak German and decode the Museum's mechanisms, faced important restrictions.
## The invention of masters

Provenance research on museum collections, within and beyond museum's archives, is often a frustrating endeavour, as the preceding sections show. Sources are scarce, and documentation is scattered. IIIC 14966 is an exceptional object with regards to provenance insofar as art historians and anthropologists identified a 'producer' for this and similar objects, the 'Buli workshop'. Generally speaking, those who are the origin of and have produced the objects in ethnological collections remain anonymous. Implicit in the lack of the contemporary documenting of producers, and individuals more generally speaking, was a denial of individual creativity in societies considered localised, collective, nature-bound, and isolated as cultural entities by colonial governance and complicit knowledge production.

IIIC 14966 belonged to a group of objects, to which the Belgian anthropologist Frans M. Olbrechts had attributed a particular author since the 1930s, the 'master of the long-faced style', also known as the 'Buli Master'. The 'Buli' style is characterised by what has been described as outsized long hands and faces, also depicted as 'Disneyesque' by the prominent British anthropologist William Fagg (quoted in de Grunne, 2011). The Buli Master was named after the village where two sculptures were acquired (Vogel, 1980, p. 133; Nooter Roberts, 1998, p. 61). Olbrechts is acknowledged as the founder of the method of morphological analysis when it comes to collections of African origin. His method consisted of stylistic criticism and comparison, identifying the artistic styles of different objects kept in Western museums. This retrospective identification and attribution of 'masters', 'workshops', or simply 'artists' continues to be used extensively and increasingly.²⁷

## The paradoxes of naming

The fabrication of provenance by inventing an object's maker, the 'artist', have paradoxical consequences. Mary Nooter Roberts describes these politics of naming as 'both an appropriation of identity and an imposition of it. To withhold a person's identity may be a form of protection or of subjugation. To impose a name may be a form of repression or of elevation' (Nooter Roberts, 1998, p. 56). This paradox of naming was reflected in the reception history of III C 14966.

Challenging the alleged anonymity of African artists and showing an interest in the artist's style and characteristics reflects a political standpoint. It testifies to the contemporary attempt to counter colonial epistemologies, to write African art history, and to recognise individual creativity and artistic
genius within African cultures. Olbrechts built his thinking on the anthro-
pologist Franz Boas's concept of culture areas and his conviction of racial
equality, a conviction that rejected evolutionist theories dominant at the
time. Paired with art historical methods aimed at identifying artist's 'hands'
(Giovanni Morelli, nineteenth century), this theoretical background allowed
for the recognition of individual artists in the study of groups and societies
that had long been denied individual authorship and style by Western aca-
demia. Predecessors of stylistic classification, such as Eckart von Sydow, had
already worked with III C 14966 (von Sydow, 1923). That 'von Sydow' was
prominently marked in the object's first historical inventory highlighted the
importance of the shift of perception concerning African artefacts, as well as
the object's continuous recognition as 'art' (Petridis, 2001, p. 123). The Buli
Master was the first individual artist to be retroactively assigned to a group of
African objects, followed by the invention of a number other 'masters', such
as the Master of the Cascade Headdress or the Warua Master, all proposed
by Western scholars, dealers, and collectors (Nooter Roberts, 1998, p. 61).

The reassessment of ‘anonymous’ to authored and singular pieces of art,
however, has contributed to the transformation of the museum’s collection
to ‘another exceptional resource of the colony’ (Van Beurden, 2013, p. 483).
Objects identified as ‘Buli’, and III C 14966 in particular, have been out-
standing examples of processes of value production interlinking museum,
market, and academia. In its more than hundred years in the Museum in
Berlin, III C 14966 has been exhibited in museums and private institutions
in Europe (Paris in 1964, Maastricht in 1991, Paris in 1993, and Brussels in
2001), the United States (New York in 1990), and South America (Rio de
Janeiro in 2004, Santiago in 2013).²⁸ Publications and the Museum’s pho-
to archives show how the object’s exhibition and international publication
history have continuously confirmed its exceptional reception, which had
started with its denomination as ‘art’ upon its arrival in the Museum in 1902
by Felix von Luschan.²⁹

Fabricating provenance, producing value

The subsequent symbolic value encouraged the object's commodification
and translated into financial value. The perceived rarity, both of the object
and of the occasion to acquire such an object, is reflected in the record prices
that objects associated with 'Buli' reached on the auction market. In 1979,
one object was sold for £249,000 (Sotheby's, 1979); in 2010, a similar stool
fetched 5.4 million euros at auction (Sotheby's, 2010a; 2010b).
Disputes over ‘Buli’ have been ongoing. They concern the particularity of the artistic identity (is it one artist, a workshop, a generation?), but also which object is considered ‘Buli’ or not, and thus exceptionally valuable or not.³⁰ The number of ‘Buli’ objects has continuously risen from twelve objects identified by Frans M. Olbrechts in the 1930s to twenty-nine under scrutiny in 2011.³¹ As the stakes are high, the agents involved in these disputes are diverse. The ‘Buli’ stool sold in 2010 exemplifies the interrelated process of value production, as the auction house not only published a glossy catalogue and released a video praising the object but also entrusted the catalogue entry to François Neyt, professor emeritus in anthropology at Université catholique de Louvain and acclaimed expert in Luba societies. By reason of his academic reputation, he thus automatically authenticated and valued the piece (Neyt, 2010). In Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, the market felt rather absent, notably in contrast to my fieldwork in museums in Paris and Brussels, trade capitals of what dealers continue to call *arts primitifs*. Still, the Ethnological Museum was not exempt from these dynamics. In 2001, III C 14966 went on loan to be exhibited in a bank in the major exhibition *Masterhands* in Brussels, co-organised by the dealer and collector Bernard de Grunne, himself in possession of a Buli sculpture (de Grunne & Bassani, 2001). The disputes about the identity of ‘Buli’ are also ongoing, because naming as a practice is valuable in itself: the acknowledgement of an individual author accentuates the absence of an identified individual – an absence, Sarah Van Beurden argues, that was subsequently occupied by either the collector, scholar, or dealer who had ‘discovered’ the master or the museum in charge of keeping it (Van Beurden, 2013, p. 483).

Assigning an individual artist to III C 14966 contradicts Luba definitions of authorship. The attribution reveals, on the contrary, a modern Western understanding about the status of art. Mary Nooter Roberts, in her fieldwork about the Luba in the then Republic of Zaire, never came across court historians who mentioned individual artists (Nooter Roberts, 1998, p. 56). She demonstrates that, during the conception and production of a sculpture, the Luba's concept of remembrance was at play, which integrated several people and spirits. In contrast to the individual artist, Nooter Roberts refers to how Luba artists participate in a 'transpersonal identity', 'the phenomenon whereby artists become subsumed by the larger network of relationships – both social and spiritual – of which they are part' (Nooter Roberts, 1998, p. 67). As James Clifford noted, the Western understanding of individual artistry cannot simply be imposed upon non-Western cultures, as definitions of originality, authenticity, and authorship differ. He stated that "‘culture” and “art” can no longer be simply extended to non-Western peoples and things.
They can at worst be imposed, at best translated – both historically and politically contingent operations' (Clifford, 1988, p. 236).

Understanding the naming of Buli as such a form of imposition, these processes of producing provenance can be considered in terms of *appropriation*. As Benoît de L'Estoile has argued, 'colonial relations, often stamped by domination and violence, are however more aptly characterised by a multifarious process of appropriation than by the sheer negation of the colonised' (de L'Estoile, 2008, p. 268). Whereas naming can be interpreted as an attempt to repair and engage in the nuanced and complex character of colonial relations, the appropriation seems also to result here in a second expropriation, as the symbolic and financial value generated ultimately continue to serve Western institutions.

## Conclusion

Provenance research is slow and limited; it risks resulting in no further answers to the questions addressed, but rather, more questions raised. If defined conventionally as retracing the chains of ownership, the results of our research on III C 14966 could be summarised as follows. We assumed that the stool had been acquired by the colonial officer Werner von Grawert in either Ujiji or Usumbara in German East Africa, where he had been stationed. As the object had presumably been produced in or around Buli, a village in the then Congo Free State, it must have travelled long distances to reach German East Africa. The objects might have reached the trade centres of Ujiji or Usumbara via the prominent caravan or slave trade, as diplomatic gifts or as commodities. A specific group of objects, including III C 14966, had been separated out of a group of 108 objects that had been shipped from Dar es Salaam to Berlin. A selection of these objects had been, since their arrival in the Museum in 1902, hailed as 'art' by Felix von Luschan, the Africa department's director at the time. With regard to III C 14966's itineraries after arriving in Berlin, it has held a special status because of a stylistic resemblance with other objects, a style that had been associated with 'the master of Buli' since the 1930s. Whereas the association with a 'master' confirmed and generalised the object's status as 'art', the attribution of a singular artist contradicted conceptions of 'Luba' authorship, who understand the artist as partaking in a 'transpersonal identity' (Nooter Roberts, 1998).

Provenance research discloses collection and museum histories. It points to absences and presences in the archive, which reflect who and what has been given attention and power in the museum's past – and who has been neglected, silenced, excluded. This chapter not only looked at what
can be found, or not found, as part of provenance research, but focused on
research in process. Unravelling research processes shows how provenance
research risks, despite its good intentions, to stabilise historically established
asymmetries of power; reflected in how knowledge is produced and shared.

Provenance research creates value. Beyond IIIC 14966's particular history of appreciation, knowing through which hands the object passed, which places it travelled, and where it was shown fed back into the object's financial and symbolic value. The organisation continued to know its collection better, but also profited by profiling itself publicly of doing so. The openly accessible documentation of the collection - its online database - served representative rather than research purposes. The internal museum infrastructures were insufficient to record research results and to document and transfer the knowledge sustainably. As the histories were accessed, researched, written, and shared among Western organisations, the research sustained the hierarchies of knowledge production and thus inequities between the Global North and South - especially because most knowledge produced within the Museum remained there.

It is thus not only the laying open of the histories that count. Whom
does the research, gained knowledge and subsequent value serve? In order
to go beyond mechanisms of further appropriation, it is the way in which
scholars research, document, share, and disseminate the knowledge they
produce within museums that requires further attention. Recent academic
and political projects - including in the Ethnological Museum - demonstrate
this ambition; ambitions hindered so far, however, by the lack of a structural
rethinking and support.³²
## Notes

1. I was allowed to be present at the conversation between the two Africa curators, Paola Ivanov and Peter Junge, and the researcher Friedrich von Bose, 31 October 2013.

2. In February 2019, the account was the following: III A 5,700 (out of which 3,650 were indexed); III C 45,600 objects identified (out of which 26,700 were indexed); III D 7,450 objects identified (out of which 4,315 were indexed); III E 21,900 objects identified (out of which 19,330 were indexed). Additionally, there were 2,500 objects without object numbers, as well as some permanent loans, objects not owned by the Museum (Fremdbesitz), historical documents (Zeitdokument), and numbers of so-called duplicates (Dublettennummern), email from Boris Gliesmann, 11 February 2019.

3. Conversation with museum staff, 26 November 2013, and during a tour of the depot, 1 November 2013 (see also von Oswald & Rodatus, 2017, p. 214).

4. The objects to be displayed were prioritised in the ongoing research on provenance in the Museum. In the responses to the 'little request' (kleine Anfrage) of the Green politician Claudia Hermann, the city's mayor gave assurances that the objects' provenance was to be researched 'in depth' as well as exhibited in 'several exhibitions'; see Claudia Hermann, 'Kleine Anfrage', 28 June 2013 (Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin, 2013a). This claim was reinforced in January 2015 by Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters (Deutscher Bundestag, 2015, pp. 2–3). In 2018, as a reaction to Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr's 'restitution report', Hartmut Dorgerloh confirmed that 'looted art must always be returned' (Hunt, Thomas, & Dorgerloh, 2018).

5. The precise figures communicated by Gliesmann consisted of 6,840 objects for the entire Museum and 1,457 for the Africa collection (email 11 February 2019). This number contradicts the number communicated by the director of collections Lars-Christian Koch in 2018. Koch claimed that the number of objects on display in the Humboldt Forum from the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art would be twenty thousand, doubling the number of objects that had been displayed in Dahlem, with ten thousand objects on display from the Ethnological Museum and two thousand objects from the Museum for Asian Art (Kuhn, 2018b). A year later, Gliesmann confirmed that nine thousand objects from both the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art were officially to be exhibited in the Humboldt Forum (email 15 January 2020).

6. 'Documented', for him, meant the identification and subsequent integration of the related (internal and museum) historical sources in the database, as well as situating the object in the current state of the art of the literature. Interview with Boris Gliesmann, 8 November 2016.

7. This concerns only the period of my research period in the Museum, 2013–2015. With the foundation of the Humboldt Forum Kultur GmbH in 2015, more staff were employed, also to support curators. Since November 2019, there are four permanent researchers with permanent contracts, who are responsible for provenance research, with two researchers – Kristin Weber-Sinn and Julia Binter – being responsible for the African collections alone.

8. E 1555/1902; E 1494/1902.

9. In the long run, this will change, as the Museum will scan and make publicly available all of its archival files up to 1947. See also note 45.

10. Only the archive of the Museum für Vor-und Frühgeschichte was still accessible on site, but, as I was told, disposed of more staff than the Ethnological Museum to look after it.

11. Still undefined at the time, the definite move of the archive to the Central Archive has now been planned. It is accompanied by the cleaning and digitisation of what are understood as the archive's historical files (up to 1947), with the aim of making them accessible online in 2021, https://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/ethnologisches-museum/sammeln-forschen/bibliothek-und-archiv.html, consulted 2
February 2019. At the same time, this entailed that the files were only accessible as mi-
crofiche at the Central Archive and that the physical files would be kept afterwards in a
'silent archive' (*stilles Archiv*), protecting them from any further damage through physical
interaction.

12. See for example field notes from 22 July 2014.

13. Field notes from discussion with Boris Gliesmann in response to a first draft of the chapter, 16 April 2018.

14. E 1555/1902; E 1494/1902.

15. Boris Gliesmann, field notes from 23 February 2015.

16. A lot of the letters were written by anonymous museum staff as copies of original letters or dictated. Still, exceptions in individuals' handwriting existed.

17. One letter stayed in my memory: the department's director, Felix von Luschan, ironically commented on an offer to the Museum to buy several objects, in red. His depictions of the prices as 'exorbitant' and exclamations indicating 'Aha! I knew that already!', describing the person as the 'great Unknown' literally made me laugh (E 1078/1900). Paola Ivanov and Kristin Weber-Sinn, on the contrary, depicted their encounter with archival files linked to colonial wars as causing 'shock and anger' (Ivanov & Weber-Sinn, 2018, p.118).

18. The consignment was split and III C 14966 arrived with other highly valued objects in the collection directly from Ballenstedt in the Harz region, where Werner von Grawert resided at the time. Today, sixty-six of these objects are still in the Berlin database. Twenty-two objects were given to the Linden-Museum Stuttgart as *Doubletten* (doubles), and Herr Gliesmann assumed that the twelve missing objects could be considered lost.

19. My translation from the German: 'Wo es sich aber nicht nur um die Beschaffung einzelner Gegenstände handelt, da sammle man systematisch, d.h. so, dass die Sammlung ein möglichst erschöpfendes Bild der Kultur des betreffenden Stammes gibt. [...] Diese sind also in erster Linie zu sammeln; es ist gewissermaßen ein Inventar des gesamten Kulturbesitzes aufzunehmen.'

20. Email exchanges: Margareta von Oswald with Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, professor emeritus of African history at Paris Diderot, 1 September 2014; with Philip Gooding, PhD candidate at SOAS London, 18 July 2014; with Adrian S. Wisnicki, director of the Livingstone Online project, 20 August 2014; with Katharina Zöller, junior fellow and historian at Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, 13 May 2015/16 July 2015; email exchange between Verena Rodatus and Allen F. Roberts, 25 June 2014.

21. Email exchange between Verena Rodatus and Allen F. Roberts, 25 June 2014.

22. Conversation with Pierre Petit, 25 November 2015. The book can be consulted as a high-quality scan at https://archive.org/details/acrossafrica000came/page/357, consulted 29 September 2019.

23. SMB database consulted 11 February 2019, email from Boris Gliesmann, 11 February 2019.

24. Visitors and researchers had access to the files through the Museum's library. The Museum's curators, however, had priority of access to the files. They could keep the files for longer periods of time and had the privilege of reading and keeping the files in their offices or working in the archive space itself.

25. In August 2021, scans of the Museum's historical inventory books were made accessible online.

26. This lack of a search for sources 'elsewhere' was justified by us as a team of researchers by reference to a lack of time, networks, contacts, or a presumed absence of local institutions and experts, as well as by the difficulty of working and doing fieldwork in war-torn Congo. Research including fieldwork existed, but was dated (Nooter Roberts 1991). Pierre Petit had equally done fieldwork in the 1990s, but had not published his dissertation. Since then, I was told, fieldwork had been difficult due to the political circumstances in the DRC.
27. In an interview with the art consultant and expert in the art market for African art Bruno Claessens, he confirmed the explosion in ‘masters’ in the last two decades, notably in relation to the auction market, Antwerp, 5 November 2015.

28. This list of exhibitions is not exhaustive. It includes examples of exhibitions I could trace in the Museum's database and archive (loan procedures). Early publications include those of prominent scholars Carl von Eistein and Eckhart Sydow, as well as an exhibition and publications by the German artist collective Berliner Secession (Einstein, 1921; von Sydow, 1923; Berliner Secession, 1932), and exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York, among others. See for example Fagg (1964), Fagg (1966), Koloss, Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin, & Metropolitan Museum of Art (1990).

29. '[...] schönen Denkmäler afrikanischer Kunst', E 1494/02.

30. For an overview of the ongoing debate, see LaGamma (2012, pp. 263-265). Different positions include the following: Neyt (1994, pp. 216-217), Pirat (1996), de Strycker & de Grunne (1996) and Pirat (2001).

31. In his initial analysis, Olbrechts identified twelve sculptures as originating from the Buli Master, confirmed by the British anthropologist William Fagg in 1948 (quoted in Pirat, 1996, p. 56). In 1980, the art historian Susan Vogel identified twenty objects authored by the master; in 1996, Claude-Henri Pirat produced a *catalogue raisonné* with nineteen identified Buli pieces. In 2011, Alisa LaGamma mentions twenty-nine objects that have been scrutinised for evidence of belonging to the Buli legacy (Vogel, 1980, p. 133; Pirat, 1996, pp. 56-57; LaGamma, 2012, pp. 263).

32. I point in particular to the work of Yann LeGall, currently part of the project "The Restitution of Knowledge. Artefacts as archives in the (post)colonial museum" (TU Berlin/University of Oxford), who has been prioritising modalities of sharing knowledge and authorship with research partners throughout his entire research trajectory. The 'German Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts', https://www.cp3c.org/, is part of the political projects to render museum collections in Germany more accessible. Similarly, the database 'Collections from Colonial Contexts', part of the German Digital Library, (https://ccc.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/), is designed as a research tool. For example, however, the collections of the State Museum Berlin only figure in fragments as part of this database with 795 objects accessible from their entire collection, consulted 12 December 2021.