# Working Through Colonial Collections

Margareta von Oswald

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Margareta von Oswald. Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Leuven University Press. 2022, 978 94 6270 310 0. 10.11116/9789461664242 . halshs-03955923

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Working Through Colonial Collections
An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin
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Working Through
Colonial Collections

An Ethnography of the
Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Margareta von Oswald

Leuven University Press
The publication costs of this book were provided by Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access.

Universität von / Supported by

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Alexander von Humboldt
Stiftung / Foundation

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CENTRE FOR
ANTHROPOLOGICAL
RESEARCH ON
MUSEUMS
AND
HERITAGE

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This book is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2020.

Published in 2022 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Universitaire Pers Leuven. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium).

© Margareta von Oswald, 2022

This book is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 Licence.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This licence allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator.

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Attribution should include the following information: Margareta von Oswald, *Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin*. 2022. Leuven, Leuven University Press. (CC BY 4.0)

Unless otherwise indicated all images are reproduced with the permission of the rights-holders acknowledged in the captions and are expressly excluded from the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 Licence covering the rest of this publication. Permission for reuse of images should be sought from the rights-holders.

ISBN 978 94 6270 310 0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978 94 6166 424 2 (ePDF)

ISBN 978 94 6166 425 9 (ePUB)

https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461664242

D/2022/1869/54

NUR: 764

Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Cover illustration: Map of Africa, drawn in 1911 by the then-curator of African collections, Bernhard Ankermann

Layout: Theo van Beurden

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GPRC

Ghana
Nanofabricated
Paper Nanofibers
Contact

www.gprc.gov.gh
To my mother Anne and my father Moritz
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# A visual introduction

As part of my fieldwork, I commissioned the visual artist Marion Benoit to take photographs of the Ethnological Museum. In May 2015, she traversed the Museum's different departments in order to capture one moment of the Museum's organisational present. These images are a visual introduction to this book.

The photographs of the East Africa museum storage feature objects from communities located in today's Tanzania. These are not allowed to be shown without consultation with Tanzanian partners. This is why no images of the East Africa museum storage figure as part of this series.

- Back entrance (1-2)

- Hallways (3-4)

- Archive (5-12)

- Library (13-15)

- West Africa museum storage (16-25)

- Africa photography archive (26-28)

- Location for disinfecting (29-32)
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# Table of Contents

7 A visual introduction

43 Acknowledgements

45 Foreword by Sharon Macdonald

47 INTRODUCTION

75 CHAPTER ONE

Learning about German colonialism: On memory, activism, and
the Humboldt Forum

89 CHAPTER TWO

Being affected: A methodological approach to working through
colonial collections

113 CHAPTER THREE

Expanding collection histories: The museum as peopled
organisation

155 CHAPTER FOUR

Troubling epistemologies: On the endurance of colonial
discrimination

181 CHAPTER FIVE

Managing plethora: Caring for colonial collections

199 CHAPTER SIX

Researching provenance: The politics of writing history

217 CHAPTER SEVEN

Probing materiality: Collections as amalgams of their histories

235 CHAPTER EIGHT

Repairing representations: Curatorial cultures and change in the
Ethnological Museum

257 CONCLUSION

265 Timeline

283 References cited
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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of the research award for Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and was carried out at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Department for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I also received financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the International Scholarship Program Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the form of an ‘Aires culturelles’ scholarship, all of which I acknowledge gratefully.

Without the support of those who let me participate in their museum life this work would not exist. I thank all of those at the Ethnological Museum Berlin who shared their everyday jokes, thoughts, and reflections with me, and in particular Paola Ivanov, without whom none of what follows would have been possible. My gratitude for being made welcome at the Museum extends to the Museum’s and the Humboldt Lab Dahlem’s entire staff, but in particular to Jonathan Fine, Ulrike Folie, Silvia Gaetti, Boris Gliesmann, Peter Junge, Viola König, Ute Marxreiter, Caroline Nüser, Hendryk Ortlieb, Romuald Tchibizo, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, Eva Ritz, Verena Rodatus, Andrea Scholz, Andrea Schubert, Angelika Tunis, Agnes Wegner, Anja Zenner. Mathias Alubafi and Romuald Tchibozo were also working in the Museum at the time, and I want to thank them for their research and generous contribution to *Object Biographies*. Concerning my work at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, I would like to thank in particular Christine Bluard, Hein Vanhee, Bart Deputter, and Brigitte Cornet for letting me participate in the crafting of the museum’s permanent exhibition. I thank those who agreed to do interviews with me for sharing their experience and thoughts with me. Many of their reflections have become crucial points of departure for my analysis, as well as personal learning. I want to thank in particular Clémentine Deliss, Billy Kalonji, Wayne Modest, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep for the ongoing conversation.

I am grateful to my PhD supervisors Sharon Macdonald and Béatrice Fraenkel for their continuous, encouraging, and critical engagement with this research, and their support – on all levels – for getting my research done.
Your committed reading, editing, and discussion of my research have en-
riched and guided this work substantially. Béatrice, you accompanied me
through the ups and downs of this research, always with encouragement,
great advice, and care. Sharon, I don't know how to put my gratitude into
words. Sometimes it feels like you read my work more than I did. You taught
me how to write. Thank you.

The academic support of Sophie Houdart and Ann Laura Stoler as mem-
bers of my comité de thèse, as well as of Charlotte Klonk during a time of
institutional floating also remain unforgotten. I want to thank Emmanuel
Grimaud and Kerstin Pinther, James Clifford and an anonymous reviewer
for their valuable reflections on this research. For their editorial work on
my text, I want to thank Danielle Carter, Theresa Clasen, Deborah Cohen,
Christopher Feeney, and Frank Lange.

I don't think I would have survived the period of writing without my
dear colleagues at CARMAH. I would especially like to thank Larissa Förster,
Christine Gerbich, and Jonas Tinius for their ongoing interest in this research
– the most original thoughts in this book certainly stem from them. I also
thank my other most wonderful peers-turned-friends with whom I shared
the pleasure of reading and writing: Aida Baghernejad, Ulrike Gerhardt,
Friederike Landau, Yann LeGall, Antonia Wagner, and Patrick Wielowieski.
I am grateful to Stefanie Weißmann for her continuous and laborious efforts
to establish the Co-tutelle contract. I want to thank Ama Walton for legal
advice and mentoring.

The research seminar 'Réécrire le passé colonial: enjeux contemporains des collections de musée', as well as the related doctoral atelier at the EHESS Paris, accompanied my research for several years and the exchange with its many guests and my co-organisers Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Otoiu, Anna Seiderer, Benoît de L'Estoile, Dominique Poulot, and Laurella Rincon contributed significantly to my research and reflections.

Other than this wonderful professional context which appears in its out-
lines through the names I have listed, I thank my family, my love, and my
friends. To make it short: I am surrounded by love, warmth and strength
which I cannot account for, and the simple thought of what you have given
me makes me shed tears of joy.
# Foreword

Sharon Macdonald

This book goes behind the scenes of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin at an extraordinary moment, namely, during the 2010s, when questions of colonialism and the decolonisation of institutions came onto the public agenda in many European countries, and beyond, to a remarkable new extent, resulting in considerable and often vehement debate. Those museums that are variously called ethnological or ethnographic became key locations in which some of the most awkward and symbolically significant aspects of continuing colonial relations – cultural property, restitution, and who has the right to represent whom – were played out. In the process, the very legitimacy of these museums was questioned and they struggled to make the case for their continued existence, at the same time as looking for new modes of operating and positioning themselves.

Nowhere was the debate more intense than in Berlin, where it was planned that the public displays of the Ethnological Museum – one of Germany’s national museums and one of the largest ethnological or ethnographic museums in the world – would in future be shown in the Humboldt Forum. Opening in stages since late 2020 until 2022, this exhibition and cultural complex has been mired in controversy over its architecture and historical resonances. Locating the Ethnological Museum within it only inflated the disputes further.

Margareta von Oswald carried out what she calls ‘observant participant’ fieldwork in the Ethnological Museum during some of these fraught years. In addition, her documentary and oral history research take her further back into the past, and her coverage of continuing developments brings it closer to the present, showing both stasis and change underway. While this careful context-setting is valuable in itself, the significance of this book lies especially in its attention to, and original analysis of, the work being done within the Ethnological Museum in relation to its colonial collections. Her focus is not so much the high-profile cases of objects subject to restitution claims or the creation of the main exhibitions for the Humboldt Forum. Instead, she takes us into a variety of less prominent locations and more everyday practices within the Ethnological Museum, where we meet not only curators but also other staff whose work – usually invisible to the outside world – also shapes what is done and what it is possible to do. Striking here is just how deeply
and widely what she calls ‘colonial legacies’ may pervade the workings of the Museum, creating problems, for example, of the names and categories in the object database, of the sheer number of objects to deal with, and of remaining toxic substances that were used for conservation. Each of these – like the other challenges for ‘working through’ that she identifies – exerts its own force, posing awkward and even intractable problems for museum staff in their attempts to do things differently. An important message of this book, then, is that any attempt at change within ethnological museums – including attempts to decolonise the institution itself – needs to grapple with such usually overlooked routine museum work and ways of doing things.

That many staff in the Ethnological Museum are aware of the problems of their discipline and institution – and that in some cases they have long been trying to address these – is another insight of Margareta von Oswald’s work behind the scenes. By introducing us to particular individuals who variously try to get things done – sometimes in creative and even surprisingly improvised ways – she not only introduces readers to museum workers who never or rarely take public stage but also shows how they are often actively grappling with the situation at hand. Here she is able to draw on her own first-hand experience of curating an exhibition in the Museum – an experimental exhibition that might have ended up in the Humboldt Forum but did not – to reflect still further on the challenges of working differently with colonial legacies.

Since Margareta von Oswald completed her fieldwork, the situation has changed further. In particular, the wider public and media attention to colonial legacies and decolonisation have continued to grow, and governmental positions have become more supportive of provenance research and restitution. At the moment at which I write, that looks set to escalate further, though readers of this book will be better able to judge whether or not the momentum continues or not. Whatever is the case, however, a thorough working through of colonial legacies depends not only on change in this and other museums’ public-facing activities but also on the more mundane – but so crucial – matters identified in this important book.
Introduction

My fieldwork on ethnological museums started with a major conference in the summer of 2013. ‘The Future of the Ethnographic Museum’, hosted by the University of Oxford and its Pitt Rivers Museum, was the culmination of a major five-year-research project funded by the European Commission. Representatives of its eleven partaking ethnological museums, as well as pioneers in the field of museum scholarship and practice were present. The conference’s organisers Clare Harris and Michael O’Hanlon, both curators and anthropologists, stated in an accompanying article that ‘the ethnographic museum is dead’. Reflecting voices from the field, they wrote that ‘[The ethnographic museum] has outlived its usefulness and has nothing more to offer in pursuance of its historic mandate as a location for the representation of “other” cultures’ (O’Hanlon & Harris, 2013, p. 8). The provocative statement reflects what characterised the field at that particular moment: ethnological museums were facing what was described as an ‘identity crisis’ (O’Hanlon & Harris, 2013, p. 9). The demands that people – not only in academia, activism, and the field of art and cultural production but also in politics – addressed to the museum were manifold. Linked to the ethnological museums’ constitutive relation with the European colonial project, the moment was shaped by enquiries into their mission, authority over representation, and ultimately, the collection as rightful property of European museums.

These demands were far from new. In 1998, the French anthropologist Jean Jamin polemically asked whether ethnological museums should be burnt. Within the discipline, anthropologists had debated on the authority over cultural representation in both writing and exhibiting practices, ownership, and repatriation since at least the 1980s.¹ Restitution had been put and erased from the political agenda (von Paczensky & Ganslmayer 1984; Savoy 2021). What marked this particular moment in 2013, however, were
processes of fundamental transformation in ethnological museums across Europe, which requested museums take stance with regard to these queries.

Most major museums holding ethnological collections in European capitals had gone through or were preparing name modifications, changes in leadership, the radical restructuring of permanent exhibitions, and the construction of new buildings for their collections.² In the context of these museums’ transformations, their renaming reflected their search for a place within Europe’s museumscape. Former denominations established links to the different traditions of social and cultural anthropology in Europe, being named ‘anthropological’, ‘ethnographic’, ‘ethnological’, or ‘Völkerkunde’ museum. However, the large-scale museum projects of the last two decades throughout Europe typically chose names that erase this relation. Some museums introduced categories such as ‘world’, ‘cultures’, or a combination of the two in their titles.³ Others chose to name themselves after a particular place⁴ or to keep denominations linked to a particular person, usually a European collector or researcher.⁵ Such names made the museum’s position within the museumscape less legible. They also marked the profound unease governing museums holding ethnological collections, then and now: if the museums are no longer ‘ethnological’ or ‘anthropological’, which role do they choose to adopt?

With this question in mind, I planned my research with fieldwork in several European museums undergoing transformation. My research started in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (henceforth, Ethnological Museum or Museum with a capital M) and would ultimately lead to this book. In Berlin, the debates were particularly sensitive. The Humboldt Forum, a new cultural centre, would host the Ethnological Museum’s future exhibitions on Berlin’s Museum Island. The project put the questions of which ruins to keep, which monuments to (re)build in Germany’s capital, and therefore, which histories to honour or neglect on the political and public agenda: approved by the German parliament in 2002, the Humboldt Forum is now situated in the partly reconstructed Berlin Palace (Stadtschloss), selectively emulating the historical baroque architecture. The Stadtschloss was substantially affected by bombing in the Second World War, then demolished by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and replaced with the Palace of the Republic, to be finally rebuilt on the ruins of this demolished ‘House of the People’ (Haus des Volkes), as it was often referred to. Characterised by the coming together and confrontation of the nation’s different histories, or in Jonathan Bach’s words, the ‘incarnations of Germany’s twentieth century’ – imperial (until 1918), Weimar (1919–1933), National Socialist (1933–1945), a divided Germany (1945–1990), and a reunited Germany (since 1990) – the Humboldt Forum turned into a ‘conflict’
zone' in which the question of how to deal with its diverse histories has taken centre stage (Bach, 2017a, p. 91). Players in the Humboldt Forum were to be the collections of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin's Central Library, and the so-called non-European collections, represented by the Ethnological Museum and the Asian Art Museum. Most of Berlin's museum collections, including those two, are part of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; henceforth, SPK). The SPK consists of a large conglomerate of cultural organisations, including, among others, the State Museums of Berlin (SMB), the Berlin State Library, the Prussian Secret State Archives, as well as several research organisations. Employing more than two thousand people, it is Europe's largest cultural organisation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2018). The Humboldt Forum, often referred to as Germany's 'most important cultural project of the 21st century' (Parzinger, 2011), reflected this grandeur: The costs for the building alone rose from an original estimate of 480 million euros to 680 million euros in 2021 (Bundesregierung, 2019a, p. 2; Schönball, 2019; APA, 2021).

I wanted to understand how the Ethnological Museum was to position itself within a broader museum landscape, what its mission could be, and who it was to serve. The issues raised about the Humboldt Forum, and in particular, its relation to the Ethnological Museum, pointed from the beginning to larger questions of collective memory, and thus, to politics and the negotiation of German national identity. Observing how people negotiated the give-and-take of exhibition making and related tasks on a day-to-day basis, I imagined, would provide insights into how these larger questions resonated. Which echoes would they find in the process of producing the exhibition's move from Berlin's outskirts, where the Ethnological Museum was located, to Berlin's centre on Museum Island? I imagined that breaking open the process of production would allow me to enter, at their core, the debates on ethnological museums and their historical mission to represent culture. I didn't imagine, however, that it would be precisely via the debate on national museums collections that the negotiation of Germany's colonial past would take political centre stage in the period of 2013–2021, the period this research is concerned with.

I started my research with a body of literature on ethnological museums and material culture at hand that conceptualised objects and museums with metaphors related to change, hybridity, and transformation. The literature applied theories from actor-network theory to conceptualise how we work with and understand museums and their collections (Gosden, Larson, & Petch, 2007). These understandings focused on the dynamic and transformative potential of museums, describing them as 'enmeshed', or as 'assemblage' (Harrison, Byrne, & Clarke, 2013). The idea that the museum is
constituted by its objects was the point of departure for my investigation, but I regarded the museum not only as a construct consisting of material assemblages but also as a set of social collections (Byrne et al., 2011, p. 4). I adopted the analytical and methodological tool of the object biography to trace and problematise the negotiation between the different layers of significations that the objects had accumulated over time and their affective and political weights that were being negotiated (Harrison, Byrne, & Clarke, 2013, p. 5)⁶. I distanced myself from approaches that frame the museum as a static entity, going beyond the immediate physical and temporal confines of the museum, and involving a variety of events, negotiations, and technologies. In defining the museum as a 'repository of social histories in material form' (Gosden, Larson, & Petch, 2007, p. 2), I considered the museum as a dynamic and relational entity, made up of a variety of associations between people and things in a constant state of transition.

Working in the Museum made me see these approaches in a different light. The Museum didn't feel 'dynamic' to me. I experienced the everyday in the Ethnological Museum as shaped by frustration, anxieties, complaints, slowness, and hurdles. Despite the ongoing and passionate work of museum staff, some things just didn't seem to change. The museum staff related this atmosphere to what they framed as the larger organisational 'structures' affecting museum work. The public debate and activist opposition to the Humboldt Forum - which had just started to be built - influenced this atmosphere of stagnation, or even regression, as some critics situated the Humboldt Forum. These activist positions and the curatorial work within the Museum focused the attention on the complicity between ethnological museums and colonial rule, in particular German colonial rule. Taking these changes into consideration, my questions and analytical lenses shifted.

This book takes the current transformation processes of ethnological museums in Europe as its point of departure to analyse how colonial legacies are worked with and through in the present. Defined here as colonial legacies in themselves, ethnological museums have long been criticised for their attempt to both own and represent the world. This book focuses on how these points of critique are addressed in one museum - the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and in particular, its Africa department. How do museum staff work with collections that were collected in colonial contexts? How do the museum's colonial legacies materialise in the museum's everyday? How do museum staff relate to and engage with both the material and immaterial colonial legacies, as they become increasingly contested?

This book focuses on *how* and *why* the stubborn facts remain. Working in the Museum and researching the biography of particular objects made me realise not only how strongly colonialism had shaped the Museum's coming
into being but also how powerfully colonial logics influenced the Museum's present. I relate the resistance to change in the Museum to how colonial logics persist within it. In this research, I don't argue against change in ethno-logical museums - indeed, so much has changed in the decade during which I have followed this debate and which this book also traces. Rather, the book shows how deeply colonial ways of conceiving and doing the world are ingrained in the organisations we work with, how they linger and are carried along, and how they continue to act powerfully in our everyday.

## The Ethnological Museum as colonial legacy

My analysis departs from the observation that the Ethnological Museum is a colonial legacy in itself. I unravel the different dimensions of the collection's relationships to colonial rule in the following. I then show how in this book, I approach the Museum via an ethnography, which unfolds in the systematic working through of colonial collections.

Ethnological museums offer themselves as potential subjects for an ethnography of colonial legacies. Both in their material and immaterial dimensions, ethnological museums are a blatant example of colonial violence, as they played a crucial role in the colonial system of appropriation and alienation. They materialise contemporary anthropological ways of thinking that were informed or even structured by the racialisation that characterised the colonial endeavour. Today, the organisational character of the collections per se perpetuates the colonial construction of the 'unmodern other' through anthropological knowledge orders that themselves conceal the colonial encounter.

I work with the notion of 'colonial collections' in this book, but this doesn't mean that these collections are in themselves colonial. Many of the objects labelled as such and the related systems of governance and belief predate colonial times. The collections carry meaning and significance beyond the colonial encounter. However, these collections have been considered under and somehow limited to this attribution, due to their mode or the period of acquisition, production, and appropriation in 'colonial contexts', both in the colony and the metropole (German Museums Association, 2019, pp. 20-33). The collections stand in for the colonial and imperial histories that underlie their presence in the museum.

'Colonialism was profoundly material', argue Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Philipps (Edwards, Gosden, & Phillips, 2006, p. 3). The materiality of colonialism didn't only concern the extraction of 'resources' (gold, rubber, human resources, etc.). The often violent acquisition of
material culture in the colonies was equally a constitutive part of the colonial enterprise and governance. Colonial collecting allowed the coloniser to research, control, and disempower societies by means of seizing their material culture, both in the colonies and in imperial centres (Abonnenc, Arndt, & Lozano, 2016; Bennett et al., 2017). This included not only a mere material seizure but also a spiritual disempowerment, such as in the context of war: some objects were deliberately taken because they were of spiritual importance to those resisting colonial conquest (see, for example, Ivanov & Weber-Sinn, 2018). Colonial collecting usually went hand in hand with the establishment of colonial archives or, put differently, the collecting of material culture was part of constituting the metropoles' archives of colonial rule. These archives supported the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of knowledge from and about the colonies (Basu & de Jong, 2016). How museum staff used both these archives and collections – in exhibitions and research – often encouraged the justification of the colonial mission and supported the contemporary conviction and narratives of European and White superiority in imperial centres. Objects became principal players in the construction of narratives about the colony and confirmed the role of collecting as central, not marginal, to the colonial project.⁷

Anthropology was equally profoundly material, in particular in its constitutive phase, which coincided with the heyday of European colonial rule (1884–1914). As in other European anthropology departments, the progressive institutionalisation of anthropology in Berlin was closely linked to Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, then Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, and its collecting policies. From the museum’s foundation in 1873 onwards, its co-founder and director Adolf Bastian aimed to establish anthropology on the basis of the natural sciences. In that context, the collection would serve as the point of departure for research. Bastian was convinced that ‘the monstrous mass [was] necessary to sufficiently represent in a systematic, methodological order the ethnological provinces of the earth in their full extent’ (quoted in Zimmerman, 2001, p. 186). For Bastian, in contrast to the natural sciences, categories in anthropology had not yet been established, but would result from and be developed out of the totalising gaze on the collections. Bastian attempted to create a ‘universal archive of mankind [...] to provide a real basis for the study of ethnology’ (Bastian, 1872, p. iii). Defining anthropology as a ‘comparative’ and therefore ‘statistical’ discipline, ‘completeness [...] is the first and most important desideratum’. In the tradition of a salvage anthropology, Bastian described this desideratum of completeness as ‘eternal’ (‘für immer’), as in ‘impossible’, because he started from the postulate that ‘many tribes [Volksstämme] are irretrievably and forever lost’ (Bastian, 1872, pp. iv–v).⁸
The publication of the *Anleitung für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen* ('Instructions for Ethnographic Observation and Collecting') in several editions reflected the Museum founder's mission and alludes to the kind of collecting the Ethnological Museum pursued.⁹ The instructions put forward the aim to collect 'systematically', 'to give a preferably exhaustive image of the respective tribe's culture' and 'to raise an inventory, as it were, of the complete cultural heritage' (Ankermann & von Luschan, 1914, p. 9).¹⁰ At the same time, the fact that there was a need for the instructions pointed to the lack of documentation of the collections. This means

<figure><img src="image_43.png" /><figcaption>Figure 0.1. Cover of 'Instructions for Ethnographic Observation and Collecting', Bernhard Ankermann and Felix von Luschan, 1914</figcaption></figure>
that, unlike other museums, which would send scientific expeditions to the colonies,¹¹ the collections were mainly provided by colonial staff situated in the colonies who served as suppliers of material culture for the Museum. It is subsequently both the collections as well as the lack of information and documentation about them that constitute the Museum's legacy.

Concerning the Africa collections, objects arrived in disproportional numbers from the German colonies, namely what were then Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa, and German South West Africa (Ivanov, 2005, p. 42). Between 1884 and 1914, the African collections grew from 7,388 objects to 55,079 objects (Krieger & Koch, 1973, p. 106). The Berlin Museum's position as the 'Central Museum' encouraged the steady growth of collections, as the Berlin Museum claimed the right of ownership to all collections arriving from the German colonies.¹² About 64 per cent of today's Africa collections, consisting of approximately 75,000 objects, stem from what have been defined as 'colonial contexts', be they governed by German or other European colonial powers (German Museums Association, 2018, pp. 16-23).¹³ Ethnological museums played a crucial role in the colonial system in which 'comprehensive collecting [manifests] as a form of domination', as Mieke Bal pointed out (Bal, 1992, p. 560).

At the same time, the colonial project was backed up with ideologies, imaginations, knowledge systems, and knowledge production – in short, a mindset. This mindset justified the colonisers' mission by virtue of their alleged superiority, beyond actual colonisation – meaning the occupation of a territory and a society. As literary research has shown, 'colonial fantasies' and 'imperialist imaginations' were as much part of German colonialism as the exercise of rule. These imaginations and mentalities preceded, accompanied, and lingered long after actual German colonisation (Zantop, 1997; Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, & Zantop, 2001; Ames & Gilman, 2005). As Sharon Macdonald, Henrietta Lidchi, and I summarised it,

[e]thnographic museums, then, carry a colonial legacy not only in terms of objects acquired during specifically colonial periods and not only, indeed, in terms of the objects themselves. Questions of potentially wrongful acquisition of objects, as well as the issues of ownership to which they lead, are undoubtedly important, but they are only one aspect of the complexity of this legacy [...] Important too in considering the extended legacy of colonial relations are questions about particular knowledge formations and modes of knowledge making, the nature of the ethnographic museum and to whom it orients itself, and access to the collections and involvement in shaping their futures, in both the past and the present. (Macdonald, Lidchi, & von Oswald, 2017, p. 97)
<table><caption>Figure 0.2 Documentation of the Africa collection's growth between 1880 and 1945, in catalogue numbers (Katalognummern) (Krieger & Koch, 1973, p. 106)</caption><tr><td>1880</td><td>3 361</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1884</td><td>7 388</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1887</td><td>11 058</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1890</td><td>12 723</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1893</td><td>14 246</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1896</td><td>17 107</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1899</td><td>25 105</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1905</td><td>36 241</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1910</td><td>48 845</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1914</td><td>55 079</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1925</td><td>60 182</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr><tr><td>1945</td><td>66 953</td><td>Katalognummern</td></tr></table>

Figure 0.3, designed by the department’s curator, Bernhard Ankermann, in 1911, also figures on the cover of this book. This image epitomises the constitutive relationship between colonialism and the Ethnological Museum in both its material and immaterial dimensions. The map reflects contemporary ideas of the Museum’s collections, in which ‘a culture’, ‘a tribe’, or a particular ‘region’ could be represented through ‘its’ material production. Conceptions of ‘tribes’ and indigeneity were defined by drawing on collections, which were constructed as the materialisation of otherness, and in particular of ‘savageness’ and ‘primitiveness’. In exhibition, the objects were used as representative of particular kinds of otherness, as fragments of cultures. These exhibition and display modes as well as the objects themselves would have implications for the ways in which notions of ‘culture’ were normatively employed and how they were used in social management regimes in the metropole and colonies (see, for example, Dirks, 1992; Bennett et al., 2017). At the same time, the map reveals the strong impact that colonisation would have on the acquisition policy of the Ethnological Museum: all the areas marked in dark grey – indicating ‘complete or almost complete collections’ – are almost identical with the German colonies (see figure 0.4). The collections are proofs of colonialism’s materiality; they constitute one of colonialism’s tangible manifestations. How collections were used, then – in exhibitions and research – reveals how contemporary colonial ontologies were substantiated with the help of anthropology, and in particular, its museums.

At the same time, the relations between colonialism, anthropology, and museums have been shaped by ambivalence. As Benoît de L’Estoile highlights, colonial relations are characterised by ‘a multifarious process of appropriation rather than by the sheer negation of the colonised’ (de L’Estoile, 2008, p. 268). These processes of appropriation, roughly situated between
<figure><img src="image_44.png" /></figure>

Figure 0.3 ‘Map with Indications on the Collections of the Africa department in the year of 1911’ (authored by Bernhard Ankermann, Krieger, & Koch, 1973, p. 112)
<figure><img src="image_45.png" /></figure>

Figure 0.4 Map of contemporary national borders and German 'protectorates', designed and used for *Object Biographies* exhibition
the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, have historically adopted differ-
ent forms and modalities, but they have often been predominantly shaped
by violence, domination, and conquest. For de L'Estoile, '[a]lthough gener-
ally asymmetrical, this process of appropriation entailed, to some extent, a
mutual aspect' (de L'Estoile, 2008, p. 268). This concerns the discipline of
anthropology in particular. If one scrutinises the politics of anthropological
research at the time – both conducted in armchairs in German anthropo-
logical institutes, and in colonies abroad – it is clearly complicit with colo-
nial regimes of domination, appropriation, and racist misrepresentation. It
also crucially reveals an interest in and defence of cultural difference, ex-
change, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism.¹⁴ Seeing these processes of appro-
priation as a legacy, then, centres on the enquiry of a common history of
mutual, often violent, and conflicting relationships.

As the situation was complex in the past, it is equally contradictory in the present: ethnological museums, in their attempts to transform themselves, have researched, addressed, and problematised their much-criticised missions to own and represent otherness, while risking glossing over, legitimising, and reproducing epistemologies, representations, and inequalities conventionally associated with ethnological museums' coloniality. Working through these ambivalences, contradictions, and complexities of how the colonial presence manifests in the museum's present is what an ethnography of the museum as colonial legacy attempts to illuminate and understand.

An ethnography of colonial legacies

Colonial pasts, the narratives recounted about them, the unspoken
distinctions by which they continue to ‘cue’, the affective charges they
reactivate, and the implicit ‘lessons’ they are mobilized to impart are
sometimes so ineffably threaded through the fabric of contemporary
forms they seem indiscernible as distinct effects, as if everywhere and
nowhere at all. (Stoler, 2016, p. 5)

It is via an ethnography that I approach the black box of the ‘everywhere and
nowhere at all’ of colonial legacies in this book. I look at how the aforemen-
tioned relations between anthropology, colonialism and museums manifest
in the present. Whereas postcolonial critique has been accused of establish-
ing quick links and making causal assumptions between the colonial past and
its continuity in the present, I try to identify and understand the ways in which
people – including myself – approach the museum as colonial legacy through
an ethnographic account of the Museum’s everyday and the museum staff’s
concrete practices. Probing the different kinds of relationships to the colonial past in the present, I examine the persistence of colonial epistemologies in particular. Working through colonial collections manifests as an invitation to grasp and analyse the complexity of colonialism's remnants in the present.

The research interrogates ways of relating to the colonial past in two modes that I mark as distinct but that are related to each other. I elaborate these modes in the following two sections. On the one hand, the analysis deals with identifying and analysing the *explicit* negotiation, use, and mobilisation of the colonial past. On the other hand, this ethnographic approach to colonial legacies interrogates ‘the past as it lives now’, as Benoît de L’Estoile defines it, with reference to Bronislaw Malinowski (de L’Estoile, 2008, p. 272). It focuses on how colonial presences materialise, sometimes in uncontrollable, unexpected, or unpredictable ways, and how these past presences are dealt and lived with in the Museum’s everyday.

## The mobilisation of the colonial past

An ethnography of colonial legacies entails to understand how German colonial history is explicitly dealt with through the debate on ethnological museums and their collections. Sharon Macdonald’s concept of ‘past presencing’ is helpful here, as it is concerned ‘with how the past is related to at specified moments or stretches of time’ (Macdonald, 2013, p. 16). In this case my concern is with the way in which ‘Germany’s colonial past and history’ – defined differently by the many agents involved – is ‘related to’. This means in particular how the colonial past is mobilised, negotiated, downplayed, or neglected in regard to the Ethnological Museum’s collection in manifold ways – or to name even more nuances, how it is addressed, suppressed, silenced, censored, made invisible or visible.

That this book concentrates on the working through of colonial legacies also stems from the considerable developments in the field. One characteristic of ethnographic fieldwork is how research questions and foci shift when undertaking this work. In my case, my interests, in sync with the developments in the field and in the Ethnological Museum evolved towards a focus on German colonialism and its negotiation.

At the time of writing, between 2019 and 2021, the debate on German colonialism reached a momentum reflected in considerable public and media interest, presence in political debates, position-taking by different stakeholders, and policymaking. A few months after the Ethnological Museum’s opening in the Humboldt Forum in the fall of 2021, there was a general political agreement *that*, and sometimes even *how*, German colonialism should
constitute a significant part in Germany’s memory culture. Key events and examples include

* the government's coalition contract (January 2018) and subsequent political negotiations on a national level, including an official hearing in parliament and the definition of framework principles (*Eckpunkte*) on how to deal with collections from colonial contexts on both national and state levels (March 2019);¹⁵

* the application of public funds to provenance research, the subsequent establishment of a focus on colonial-era provenance research at the German Lost Art Foundation, and the nomination of four permanent posts devoted to provenance research in both Berlin's Museum of Asian Art and the Ethnological Museum in 2019 (BPA, 2019);

* the recurrent public positioning of the SPK, the Humboldt Forum, and its representatives as supporting restitution, reconciliation, and partnership with the formerly colonised (Parzinger, 2019; Dorgerloh, 2019).

In 2018, representatives of the government stated that ‘Germany and Europe need to face their colonial history’, and in direct connection with this recognition, described restitution as ‘only the first step’ in a process of historical reconciliation (Grütters & Müntefering, 2018). The Humboldt Forum’s website states that ‘*Colonialism and Coloniality* is a core theme in our programme’.¹⁶ The organisation is profiled to become a ‘centre for postcolonial debate’ (Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2019; see also Bundesregierung, 2019, p. 9). The commitment to the restitution of the so-called Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in the autumn of 2021 is the latest step in a chain of events and political decisions presented by politicians as contributing to the addressing of the colonial past in Germany.

However, it was only during the period of my research that the Ethnological Museum's collections were gradually, publicly, and politically defined as 'sensitive' (Lange, 2011, p. 19), and thus contested, in Germany.¹⁷ While the Humboldt Forum slowly took shape, the collections that had long been considered as unproblematic, scientific, and naturally part of European museums by museum officials and in cultural politics became 'contested', 'awkward', and 'unsettling', as Sharon Macdonald describes some of the characteristics of 'difficult heritage' (Macdonald, 2009, p. 1). In regard to German colonialism, Friedrich von Bose in his pioneering research described the Humboldt Forum as a 'catalyst of critique' and a 'discursive nodal point' - which was rapidly appropriated by cultural politics - to pin down how the Humboldt Forum functioned as a prism to problematise Germany's colonial past (von Bose, 2017a, p. 127; Federal Government Commissioner
for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters, quoted in Ringelstein, 2018). Whereas the constitutive relationship between colonialism and anthropology had, for some time, been acknowledged in scholarship, both concerning ethnological museums in general and in Berlin's specific case, ¹⁸ in public debate, journalists and politicians only gradually constructed and perceived the Ethnological Museum as a remnant of colonialism during the period of my fieldwork. The collections subsequently became subject to 'ongoing conflicts of interest and differences of view' (Macdonald, 2009, p. 19). From 2013 to 2021, negotiations around Germany's colonial legacies in relation to the Ethnological Museum's collections – both inside and outside of the Museum – show a shift of attitude in regard to how public organisations, politics, and the public debate have positioned themselves towards Germany's colonial past. This shift is orientated towards recognising and accepting Germany's colonial past as part of the nation's histories, as well as the aim to establish a moral consensus when it comes to how this past and its symbolic and material implications are publicly dealt with. That German colonialism has most prominently been addressed in politics and a broader public via issues related to museum collections stands out.

The period 2013 to 2015, which this book focuses on, is a time characterised by political insecurity about how to handle the rising claims related to German colonialism, which preceded the successive public, political, and national acknowledgement of Germany's colonial past. An analysis of this period allows me to identify the differences of view and to point to the lines of conflict that processes of negotiation of contested colonial legacies involves *before* reaching an apparent consensus. This involves an analysis of the questions, hesitations, and resistances that accompanied this process. Here, I build my analysis in particular on my own position as the co-curator of an exhibition addressing colonial provenance and violence. Beyond the political, cultural, and social developments, which seemed to change on an almost daily basis, this book focuses on how colonialism 'endures' in the museum (Stoler, 2016, p. 7), interrogating how the past manifests now.

## The colonial past as it lives now

Unlike the past's explicit 'mobilisation', such as for political means or financial reparations, an ethnography of colonial legacies also looks at 'the past as it lives now' in the museum's everyday (de L'Estoile, 2008). This approach entails grasping and situating the different forms in which colonial presences manifest and act on the present – not necessarily immediately identifiable or identified as such – including the sometimes scarcely obvious, historically
grown, and possibly transformed manifestations of colonial modes of know-
ledge production or representations.

To examine that which remains from the past, or put inversely, ‘the deep
imperial genealogies of the present’ (Stoler, 2016, p. 4), it is necessary to re-
late historical and ethnographic analysis.

As such, doing an ethnography of the museum as colonial legacy is dis-
tinct from but closely related to literature subsumed under the category of
‘anthropology of colonialism’, which centrally interrogates the relationship
between the colonial history and present of anthropology.

Anthropologists have long recognised that anthropology is ‘a daughter
born out of an era of violence’, as Claude Lévi-Strauss phrased it in the 1970s
(Lévi-Strauss, 1973, p. 69). Rodney Harrison has argued that anthropology
as a scientific discipline was founded ‘out of the desire to characterise racial
and cultural differences to legitimise the rule of colonial societies’ (Harrison,
2009, p. 238). The anthropology of colonialism then, as defined by Peter Pels,
consists in the analysis of the historical relations between anthropology and
colonialism in relation to the present.

The anthropology of colonialism is also always an anthropology of
anthropology, because in many methodological, organizational, and
professional aspects the discipline retains the shape it received when
it emerged from – if partly in opposition to – early twentieth-century
colonial circumstances. (Pels, 1997, pp.164–165)

Because the Ethnological Museum is an anthropological organisation,
the analysis of its historical modes of knowledge production and, more
generally speaking, epistemologies form a constitutive part of the analysis
of what constitutes its contemporary working. The Ethnological Museum
has already figured as a prominent subject of analysis to identify and de-
construct both past and present representations, in anthropology itself as
well as in cultural studies and museum studies more generally speaking.
Furthermore, the anthropology of colonialism puts anthropology’s intel-
lectual roots, tools, and methods at the centre of its enquiry. It questions
the disciplines’ relations, and in particular, its resistances to and complicity
with colonial regimes of power. Methodologically, this meant to not only
be in the presence of museum staff, to understand their everyday grappling
with the remnants and residues of the colonial past. It also meant to ask
past and present staff about the histories, especially recent, of the organ-
isation and to engage in a historical research of the organisation. An an-
thropology of colonial legacies thus necessarily works hand in hand with an
anthropology of colonialism in order to situate these present phenomena
within their historical genealogy.

I use the notion of ‘colonial legacies’ here although it is not agreed up-
on.¹⁹ Ann Laura Stoler, for instance, whose work this research substantial-
ly builds on, has advocated that ‘colonial legacies’ lack analytical potential
to depict and analyse how colonial histories matter, notably in contrast to
the notions of ‘duress’, ‘debris’, or ‘ruins and ruination’ that she has herself
established (Stoler, 2009; 2011; 2013; 2016). It is, however, exactly this lack
of conceptual precision and an evocative argument and thus the potential
for an open description and analysis of what happens on the ground that
prompts me to use the term ‘legacy’ here. In contrast to Stoler’s descrip-
tion of the remnants of the past, often implying the shattered or the broken,
the Ethnological Museum as colonial legacy seems relatively intact, even if
contested. It is rather the notion of ‘working through’ that stands in for the
argument here, as it refers to the analysis of how contending with the colo-
nial past materialises in the museum.²⁰

Working through colonial collections

I first came across the notion of ‘working through’ in the context of ethnolog-
ical museums in a conversation with the curator and scholar Wayne Modest.
Wayne Modest coined his understanding of the museum as a ‘space for the
process of working through’:

the objects sit in a space of contested, entangled relationality. ‘Working
through’ implies that one has to question, debate, to feel uncomfortable;
to box and fight about the objects and their meanings in the present.
(von Oswald, Ndikung, & Modest, 2017, pp. 15–18)

Modest’s description resonated with my work and my experiences in
the field. Working through points to hurdles, resistance, and process, as it
draws attention to work. In a classic ethnographic interest, I approached the
museum to understand its everyday, partaking in work practices, looking to
identify the extraordinary in the ordinary. To do so, between 2013 and 2015,
I worked as the assistant to one of the two Africa curators and then co-curated
the exhibition *Object Biographies* as part of the Humboldt Lab Dahlem with
Verena Rodatus. The Humboldt Lab Dahlem was a temporary programme
dedicated to finding experimental formats of working with the Museum’s
collections. These two different curatorial entries allowed me to do an ethno-
graphy of the Museum as a whole. I spent more time in the Ethnological
Museum than I had planned, and abandoned the comparative dimension of this work.²¹ Concentrating on the Ethnological Museum and its collection, this research spans different work practices – unlike most museum ethnographies, which tend to focus on one aspect of museum work or to concentrate on one particular department.²² In the library, archive, museum storage, conservation, as well as digitisation, I worked with museologists, exhibition designers, archivists, restorers, museum storage managers, and many more. The ethnography unfolded in working together, allowing me, to grasp what people actually did, not only what they say they did (Miller, 1997, p. 16).

Working *through* colonial collections translates the complications and adds the political and memorial aspect of museum work to the picture. English dictionary definitions of working through describe it as dealing with something that is difficult or unpleasant, to manage a problem that has many parts, or to go through a process of understanding and accepting.²³ In German, the different dimensions of working through unfold in their translation: working through translates as *durcharbeiten* and *abarbeiten*, *verarbeiten* and *aufarbeiten*. These notions carry different significations, histories, and connotations.

## Abarbeiten/durcharbeiten

*Abarbeiten* has the connotation of a to-do list, of a task to be done bit by bit, to toil away at a problem. *Durcharbeiten* means to engage with something thoroughly, patiently, from the ground up. Engaging with colonial museum collections is tedious and seemingly never-ending, always in process. The quantity of colonial collections remains innumerable: much is uninventoried and unknown to museum staff – not only for the Ethnological Museum, but for most ethnological museums in Europe. As the former storage manager once said about the conservation, storage and care of collections: ‘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 75,000 times’, referring to the estimated number of objects in the Africa department. Beyond quantity, colonial ideologies traversed the Museum. They were ingrained in its very structure and functioning.

An analogy with Siegmund Freud's concept of 'working through' (*durcharbeiten*) would be all too easy to make here. For Freud, in short, the process of working through consists of two phases: a resistance to remembering, articulated in the patient's sickness, followed by a recognition of the resistance, which, in turn, becomes an overcoming of this resistance and a process of healing. Ultimately, for Freud, the process of working through turns into a will to recover and, thus, a will to remember. However, and beyond the
critique of why the application of psychoanalytical concepts to institutions,
societies, or nations is difficult to maintain,²⁴ this schematic description of
Freud's concept risks oversimplifying the manifold ambivalences, nuances,
and contradictions the process of working through colonial collections in the
Museum entails. It turns the process into a progressive and somehow causal
one, denying at once the many precursors, as well as relapses, recurrences,
and reproductions the process may involve.

Aufarbeiten/verarbeiten

In Germany, possibly more than in other national contexts, the notion of working through (*aufarbeiten*) implies, even if only tacitly, references to dealing with contested pasts and trauma more generally speaking. In particular, it references the ways in which Germany’s National Socialist and, later on, socialist past have been dealt with. The notion of *Vergangenheitsbewältigung*, commonly translated as ‘coming to terms with the past’, stands in for the necessity to tackle one’s own history.²⁵ Nuancing a finite idea of engaging with one’s history, the notion of working through, *aufarbeiten*, refers to ongoing and inconclusive work: work that a dealing with contested pasts and their deployment and implications in the present comprehends. Working through underlines that remembering, as well as forgetting, are not passive acts, but actual ‘work’, active and continuous engagements. It alludes to the laborious, lengthy, and repeated efforts that working through the past involves, as well as to the multiple forms of difficulties, denials, resistances, and refusals to do so. Working through as in *aufarbeiten*, then, defies the illusion that one can get over and done with difficult pasts. What makes this process so difficult and repetitious, then, are the insistent ways in which working through the colonial past points to ongoing forms of exclusion, racism, and inequality that persist in our contemporary societies.

In their differences, the translations and their significations capture what
this book's argument is about: working through colonial collections in mu-
seums is a request to engage with the depth and breadth of how colonial
pasts manifest and are dealt with in the Ethnological Museum. The process
of reckoning with the past as political and memorial work (*aufarbeiten, ver-
arbeiten*) entails as much the practical, lengthy, tiring collection work inside
the Museum (*abarbeiten*), as it includes grand political symbolic gestures
outside of it.

Working through is not an ethnographic term. I use it here as an ana-
lytical and methodological approach that unfolds in the book's composi-
tion and structures its argument. In eight chapters, I unravel how colonial
logics traverse the Museum’s tissue and how they manifest in the Museum’s practices, infrastructures, and materialities. I focus on how museum staff address and engage with these durabilities, and how I myself encountered them. Different from programmatic terms such as ‘undoing’ or ‘unlearning’, ‘working through’ first and foremost implies the desire to comprehend and analyse the existing forms of engaging with colonial collections in the Museum. The book is structured around different practices. I describe the practices of museum staff, but also my own approach to this research and to dissecting and understanding colonial collections.

One central observation runs through the book: working through colonial collections always includes the risk of reproducing the mechanisms and logic one attempts to dismiss, erase, oppose, or counter. Working through is not an easy, linear process, but rather a repetitive, draining, and laborious engagement, which involves discomfort and conflict. Dealing with these questions doesn’t only concern the Ethnological Museum in its quest to define its position and interrogate its relationship to its colonial past. Rather, it relates to questions of the ‘working through’ of colonial legacies more generally speaking.

## The structure of the book

Working through stands in for the relations between that which remains and that which changes in processes of transformations. Museum ethnographies tend to be described as studies of closed-off and isolated societies, comparable to villages, dominated by the researcher’s interest in the organisation’s ‘total social life’ (Handler & Gable, 1997, p. 10; see also Gable, 2013) – in my case, the Ethnological Museum was located in Berlin’s suburbs, approximately ten to fifteen kilometres from the city centre and usually deserted. However, and in contrast to understandings of museums as villages or islands, the fieldwork in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum allowed me to see how ‘the local is negotiated into being in relation’ (Macdonald, 2009, p. 5). As Sharon Macdonald, Christine Gerbich, and I discussed in an article on methodological approaches to museum ethnographies, organisations such as museums ‘are, inevitably, entangled in multiple networks of various kinds, usually involving some degree of distributed governance’ (Macdonald, Gerbich, & von Oswald, 2018, p. 140). I was confronted with organisational and political change with regards to the Humboldt Forum, which did not seem controllable from within the Museum, because of this distributed nature. As such, this research project situates itself at once as an ethnography of a process, of an organisation in the making – the
Humboldt Forum – and as an ethnography of an established organisation – the Ethnological Museum – shaped by rules and regulations, routines, and habits. The research project addresses the relationship and tensions between individual agency and structure, between ‘good’ intentions and their outcomes.

The book shows how colonial legacies are identified, researched, and addressed within the Museum. It illuminates efforts and processes brought forwards and fought for by museum staff to identify and publicly address the museum's colonial legacies, as in an explicit mobilisation of the past. Whereas the book chronicles, describes, and analyses these processes, it focuses above all on the way in which museum staff struggle to find alternatives to the disciplinary framings and orderings, professional conventions, and organisational hierarchies, with a view to their historical genesis. The book notably discusses the limits and boundaries that museum staff face when trying to work through the museum's colonial legacies. It points to the constant push and pull, as well as the risk of reproducing, stabilising, and legitimising the museum as colonial legacy: tensions that the working through of contested legacies entails.

In the first chapter, I trace my own attempt to situate the remembrance of colonial history in Germany, and in Berlin. I start with my account on how I, as many others, didn't learn in school that there were German-governed colonies. Relating German memory politics with developments related to the Humboldt Forum shows how activist engagement prepared the grounds for the Humboldt Forum to become a 'catalyst of critique', as Friedrich von Bose (2017) put it.

Building on the history of how colonialism was remembered and silenced in Germany, the second chapter situates the reader in 2013, when I started working in the Ethnological Museum. The chapter introduces the reader to the field and fieldwork the book is based on. I describe the political context and affective atmosphere at the beginning of the fieldwork in 2013 as dominated by binaries, between an 'outside' and an 'inside' of the Museum and the Humboldt Forum, between 'good' and 'bad', between 'activism' and 'critique'. These binaries decompose, I show, once I enter the Museum. I observe curatorial work reckoning with the museum's histories of colonial collecting. My position as researcher changes from participant observer to observant participant, when I become the co-curator of an exhibition. I become 'affected' by the field (Favret-Saada 1977), a field in which the colonial haunts the present. The second chapter shows that working through the museum's colonial legacies as an observant participant prepared the grounds for a critical engagement beyond binaries. This work proved to be emotionally challenging within a public organisation
positioned in a politically uncertain context with regards to access to collections and inventory, collaborative practices, and ultimately restitution.

To ethnographically understand the workings of the past in the present within an organisation, its histories need to be engaged with. In the third chapter, I situate the Museum and its collection in their histories. I show how the history of the Museum as organisation, especially its recent histories, have been disregarded in its archiving practices and have to be reconstructed via oral history and fragments of archival traces. As such, the process of reconstructing organisational histories shows how archival and ethnographic work go hand in hand to understand the duress of coloniality in these organisations. The chapter focuses on the way in which the collections moved, beyond national borders, within Berlin, and within the Museum itself. Working through manifests here as engaging with and contributing to writing of organisational histories.

In chapter four, I trace how colonialism operates in the Museum's knowledge infrastructures. This chapter is structured along the learning experience of meeting and working with Boris Gliesmann, the database manager, who initiates me to the documentation work done in the Museum. I analyse the relationships between past and present inventory and cataloguing practices to argue that museum work is based on and continues to rely on colonial modes of ordering, naming, and thus conceiving the world. Working through manifests as a means to engage with categories, classification, and names. These are 'historically situated artefacts' (Bowker & Star, 1999b, p. 278), despite attempts to change, erase, or replace them. Names are difficult to get rid of. Avatars then figure here as a means to imagine alternative futures for the objects' historical groundedness, in terms of an 'epistemic disobedience' (Mignolo, 2011, p. 9).

Chapter five addresses the imbalance of resources—financial, personnel—and of attention attributed to the caring and managing of the results of colonial collecting (versus representative work). Building on chapter four, chapter five depicts the Museum as a space fragmented by hierarchies, through the story and narrative of Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, who pursued a twenty-year career in the department as its storage manager. 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—clearly reflected in the distribution of resources. Working through colonial legacies manifests here as an individual attempt to reckon with the ambitious project of collecting the world at the end of the nineteenth century. This personal narrative reveals how managing shortage (lack of budget, resources, and knowledge) results
in improvisation, and how it leaves its personal marks on the organisation's structure and materiality.

Departing from an account in chapter five of how little is known about the collections present in the museum storage, chapter six follows my journey to find out more about the provenance of a particular group of objects depicted as ‘Luba’ and acquired by a German military officer, Werner von Grawert. The process shows how little can often be found with regards to the object’s biography within and outside of the Museum. An analysis of the mechanisms of research reveal, on the one hand, processes of past exclusion and suppression of Indigenous voices (in the archive). On the other hand, I show how the disparity between the Global North and South continues in the production of knowledge on these objects. Following the Luba object in its itineraries through Western circuits of value, the invention of ‘masters’ as individualised producers has been an effective means to circumvent the lack of documentation in provenance and monetise the production of knowledge related to provenance. Working through provenance ultimately shows a process in which mechanisms of appropriation continue to serve Western organisations – universities, museums, and the art market – financially and symbolically.

Chapter seven questions the collections as active and agentive matter; it discusses the shifts from subjects to museum objects, and from museum objects to subjects. The chapter builds on ethnographic observations from museum practitioners responsible for conservation. I frame the museum’s obligation to keep things, built on conceptions of heritage as stable and durable, as the attempt to master materiality. The practice of musealising and the accompanying paradigm of conservation deny the collections other forms of existence and life than those imposed by the museum’s rules and regulations. As part of this paradigm of conservation, museum professionals since the nineteenth century have treated collections with pesticides. In turn, museum objects have transformed into agentive subjects, as they affect those surrounding them via their toxicity. The object then counteracts the attempt to control and destroy all possible forms of life, the attempt to *entwesen*, but rather develops a toxic agency. The object not only changes symbolically via a transformation of the significations and usages within and outside of the museum organisation. Rather, through its transformation of substance, it physically changes and turns into a material and chemical amalgam of its histories. Working through manifests here as engaging with the collection’s materiality itself.

The book’s last chapter closes the narrative on the working through of colonial collections. As the book’s different chapters analyse and show, the Ethnological Museum originated from and was still embedded in colonial
modes of doing and thinking the world. Beyond the question of *what* to
display, the chapter looks at processes of *how* exhibitions were produced. It
analyses the museum's curatorial cultures. Based on an ethnography of the
planning process for the Humboldt Forum, the chapter proposes that these
cultures remained authoritative, research-focused, and collection-centred.
I ascribe the resistiveness of this culture to the Museum's and SPK's un-
changing structures, which impeded change from happening. The book
ends with the observation that, if the Museum as such doesn't change its
foundational structures, attempts to transformation within the Museum will
remain challenging.

In the concluding discussion, I return to the book's main arguments by elaborating on the question of change and transformation in ethnological museums.

As a research resource, I chronicle the most important events, notably
political, of the developments related to the negotiation of colonial museum
collections in Berlin and Germany in a concluding timeline, starting with the
Humboldt Forum's foundation stone ceremony in 2013 and ending with the
opening of the Ethnological Museum in the Humboldt Forum in 2021.
## Notes

1. These dimensions of the 'crisis' had been identified, discussed, and responded to for at least thirty years. Seminal monographs and edited volumes that have significantly shaped my research include, for example, in relation to international case studies, Clifford (1988); Karp and Lavine (1991); Karp et al. (1992); Clifford (1997); de L'Estoile (2007); Gosden, Larson, & Petch (2007); Kazeem, Martinz-Turek, and Sternfeld (2009); Byrne et al. (2011); Phillips (2011); Harrison, Byrne, and Clarke (2013); Golding and Modest (2013). In the German context, see, for example, Berner, Hoffmann, and Lange (2011); Kraus and Noack (2015); Förster et al. (2018); Edenheiser and Förster (2019); Splettstößer (2019).

2. For an overview of the changes in ethnological museums, see, up to 2013, Pagani (2013), including the restructuring of the Dutch ethnological museum landscape, the opening of the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp, as well as the new permanent exhibition in Basel. Since then, in the German-speaking context, beyond the Humboldt Forum, the following developments have notably stirred debate: the appointment of Clémentine Deliss at the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt (2010–2015) with the introduction of a 'post-ethnological' museum mission; of Nanette Snoep at the State Ethnographic Collections (SES) Saxony (2015–2018), followed by her directorship of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne; the replacement of Nanette Snoep at the SES by Léontine Meijer-van Mensch in 2018; the appointment of Barbara Plankensteiner at the Völkerkundemuseum in Hamburg; and the subsequent name change of the museum to MARKK, as well as the name change, renovation, and opening of the new permanent exhibition in 2017 at the Weltmuseum Wien. On an international level, the reopening of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) in 2018 was the most awaited event, preceded by the release and handing over of the so-called restitution report by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr to the French president Emmanuel Macron in November 2018, which shifted attention to questions of restitution (Sarr & Savoy, 2018); for an overview of the debates related to the report, see von Oswald (2018).

3. The Weltkulturenmuseum Frankfurt changed its name in 2001 and 2013, and changed its concept and exhibition design in 2012; the Museum der Kulturen Basel change its name in 1996 and its permanent exhibition in 2011; the Weltmuseum Wien changed its name in 2013 and opened its new permanent exhibition in 2017; the Museum of World Cultures Gothenburg opened in 2004.

4. The Musée du Quai Branly opened in a new building and structural setting, including a new name in 2006. Since 2016, it has been called Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac; the Museum aan de Stroom Antwerp opened in 2011; Museum der Fünf Kontinente München changed its name in 2014; the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, reopened as the AfricaMuseum with a new permanent exhibition in 2018.

5. Museums named after collectors and/or researchers include: The Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne which reopened with a new permanenet exhibition in 2010; The Linden-Museum in Stuttgart; The Pitts River Museum in Oxford which reopened in 2009; The Humboldt Forum which opened in stages between 2020-2021.

6. The concept of 'object biographies' has been increasingly used as an analytical and narrative tool to understand the social and cultural life of things, first coined by Igor Koyptoff and Arjun Appadurai in the 1980s (Kopytoff, 1986; Appadurai, 1986). Despite criticism that the notion of 'biography' might mislead to an understanding of the objects' biographies as linear, or as attributing the object intentional and individual agency (Hahn, 2015; Joyce & Gillespie, 2015), the concept can serve as a point of departure to trace and analyse relationships between people and things over time and to depict the socio-material networks they are enmeshed in and show how long-lived things extend beyond different systems of understanding (Joy, 2009), including their museum lives.
Used in anthropology and archaeology alike, numerous examples of object biographies
now exist. For literature reviews and discussions related to object biographies, see,
for example, Hirschauer and Doering (1997); Gosden and Marshall (1999); Hoskins
(2006); Brower Stahl (2010); Chua and Salmond (2012); for monographs and edited
volumes dealing with particular object biographies, see, for example, Daston (2000);
Bonnot (2002); Daston and Galison (2007); Tythacott (2011); Bonnot (2014); Förster and
Stoecker (2016).

7. For case studies and examples that trace and interrogate the interrelatedness between museums, the colonies, and the metropoles, see, for international examples, Thomas (1991); Gosden and Knowles (2001); Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips (2006); Bennett et al. (2017). For German case studies, see Essner (1986); Gothsch (1983); Zimmerman (2001); Penny (2002); Weber (2005); Förster and Stoecker (2016); Brandstetter and Hierholzer (2017); Förster et al. (2018); Reyels, Ivanov, and Weber-Sinn (2018); Splettstößer (2019).

8. Extracts quoted from the German:

Die Ethnologischen Museen sind eine Schöpfung der Neuzeit und der Gedanke zu ihrer Anlage, um dem Studium der Ethologie eine tatsächliche [sic] Grundlage zu gewähren, konnte überhaupt erst dann gefaßt [sic] werden, nachdem bereits die Entdeckungsreisen den Blick über die gesammte [sic] Erdoberfläche erweitert und neben der historischen Entwicklung unserer eigenen Cultur [sic] noch eine große Zahl selbstständiger Cyclen innerhalb der Menschheitsgeschichte in den Geschichtskreis eingeführt hatten. (Bastian, 1872, p. iii)

Da die Ethnologie, als zu den comparativen Wissenschaften gehörig, statistischen
Regeln zu folgen hat, bleibt, wie in jeder Statistik, Vollständigkeit der tatsächli-
chen Daten, auf den sie ihre Aussprüche zu begründen hat, ihr erstes und wichtiges
Desiderat, und leider, wie es scheint, ein Desiderat für immer, da auf jemalige
Erfüllung dieses Wunsches wird verzichtet werden müssen. (Bastian, 1872, pp. iv-v)

For a documentation and analysis of Adolf Bastian's position and work, see, for example, Penny (2002); Fischer, Bolz, and Kamel (2007); Penny (2019).

9. The instruction was first published in 1899 by the curator of Oceania and Africa, Felix von Luschan; it was republished in 1904 in an extended version by the same author; and it was reformulated in a last edition by Bernhard Ankermann, Luschan's successor, in 1914. The instruction was designed like a questionnaire, with questions on one side of the page and blank spaces to fill in information on the other.

10. 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.'

11. The Dakar-Djibouti expedition (1931-1933) headed by the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule is probably the most famous example of such a 'scientific' collecting mission.

12. The extensive collecting of material culture was facilitated by the federal council's decision ('Bundesrat') in 1889 by defining Berlin's museum as the 'Central Museum' when it came to the acquisition of collections from German protectorates. This decision implicated that all collections acquired under publicly funded expeditions would be the property of Berlin's Museum, which could then decide to keep the collections, send them back to the colonies, or to send or swap doubles, so-called *Doubletten*, with other German museums. For further explanation and contextualisation, see, for example, Stelzig (2004, p. 39); Ivanov (2005, pp. 41-42).
13. This was different, for example, from scientific expeditions in colonial contexts, which focus not only on *owning* but also on *knowing* the people by means of their material culture, reflected then in the collection's detailed documentation. French museums, unlike Berlin's Africa department, acquired a significant part of their collections via scientific expeditions. For details on the different modes of acquisition concerning the Musée de l'Homme, see Sarr and Savoy (2018, pp. 42–52). Sixty-four per cent stem from the following calculation: between 1884 and 1914 (German colonial rule), the African collections grew from 7,388 objects to 55,079 objects (Krieger & Koch, 1973, 106). Given that today's Africa collection is estimated at 75,000 objects, the difference constitutes approximately 64 per cent (Website Ethnologisches Museum, https://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/ethnologisches-museum/sammeln-forschen/sammlung.html, consulted 16 April 2019).

14. For examples, see Pels (2008, p. 283). When it comes to museum collections, this aspect of mutuality is seen, for example, in the fact that not all the objects acquired in colonial contexts were looted, robbed, or acquired in dubious circumstances and that there is proof of diplomatic gifts, of trade, and of the early formation of an art market, including the negotiation of and adaptation to styles, tastes, and prices, or the mockery of the colonised through pictorial depictions of Europeanness. For discussions concerning German East Africa, see, for instance, Weber (2005, pp. 120–130); for Central Africa, see, for example, Schildkrout and Keim (1998); and for depictions of Europeanness, see Lips (1937).

15. The political debate focused on 'colonial cultural goods', both reflected by a document authored by both the national and regional ministers of culture (Kultusministerkonferenz, 2019), as well as an official hearing of experts in the German national parliament (Deutscher Bundestag, 2019), initiated by parliamentary questions put forwards both by the Green and the Liberal Party (Fraktion Bündnis 90/Die Grünen 2019; Fraktion FDP 2019).

16. https://www.humboldtforum.org/en/colonialism-and-coloniality/, consulted 15 November 2021.

17. See, for instance, the exhibitions and research projects *Sensitive Heritage: Colonial Traces to the Present Day* ('Heikles Erbe. Koloniale Spuren bis in die Gegenwart', Hanover, 2016–2017); see also von Poser (2018) and *Difficult Heritage: Colonial Objects – Postcolonial Knowledge* (*Schwieriges Erbe. Koloniale Objekte – Postkoloniales Wissen*, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 2018–2019), see also Grimme 2018.

18. For an extensive literature review, see chapter two of this book, and as prominent examples concerning Berlin's case, see Zimmerman (2001) and Penny (2002).

19. Objections to the term have been voiced, for example, in Dias (2008, p. 307) or Stoler (2013, p. 7).

20. Related reflections on and analysis of the persistence of the colonial in the present are subsumed in other intellectual traditions, which feed back and which I refer to in the course of this book. These include what has been referred to as postcolonial studies with such prominent scholars as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, or Homi K. Bhabha, those subsumed under the concept of 'coloniality' and 'decoloniality', with scholars such Aníbal Quijano or Walter Mignolo, or the Caribbean tradition of *créolisation et créolité*, with Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. For an overview and comparison of the 'decolonial' and the 'postcolonial', see Bhambra (2014).

21. I conducted fieldwork in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in 2015, and I led multiple interviews with curators and museum directors, which this work also substantially builds on: Julien Volper, Tervuren (Musée Royale de l'Afrique Centrale), 18 August 2015, Nanette Snoep, Leipzig (Director Ethnographic Collections Saxony), 19 April 2016, Yaëlle Biro, New York City (Metropolitan Museum, New York City), 6 June 2016, Kevin Dumouchelle, New York City (Brooklyn Museum, New York City), 8 June 2016, Gaëlle
Beaujean-Baltzer, Paris (Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris), 14 November 2017, Stefan Eisenhofer, Munich (Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich), 18 November 2016, Peter Junge (formerly Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, 19 and 25 January 2021).

22. In a text co-authored with Sharon Macdonald and Christine Gerbich, we review the literature on museum ethnographies extensively, which I rely on in the following. Examples include a focus on exhibition-making (Macdonald, 2002; Yaneva, 2012; Morgan, 2013; Bunzl, 2014; Franklin, 2014; Shannon, 2014; Bouquet, 2015; Jung, 2015; Kreplak, 2017; Marsh, 2019); analysis of how museums present and communicate about themselves, notably via exhibitions, and howyond p their role is perceived and negotiated by others (Butler, 1999; Price, 2007; Meza Torres, 2011; von Bose, 2016; Porsché, 2018); how they are used by their publics or how museums try to engage these publics (Roberts, 1997; Bhatti, 2012; Schmitt, 2012; Morse & Munro, 2015; Knudsen, 2016; Debary & Roustan, 2017; Kendzia, 2017; Sabeti, 2018). They include ethnographies of processes of conservation, archiving, and digitisation (Geismar, 2013; Domínguez Rubio, 2014; Beltrame, 2015), and of community work and collaborative projects (Hendry, 2005; Krmpotich & Peers, 2013; Schorch, McCarthy, & Hakiwai, 2016), and finally, of collecting practices, both contemporary and historical (O'Hanlon, 1993; Förster & Stoecker, 2016).

23. Online dictionaries consulted on 1 July 2019: *Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary*.

24. See, for example, Macdonald (2013, p. 11) and Rothermund (2015, pp. 13–15).

25. For a discussion of the different English translations and significations of the term, see Macdonald (2009, p. 9).
# Learning about German colonialism: On memory, activism, and the Humboldt Forum

I entered the Ethnological Museum's Africa department in 2013, because I had been interested in the genealogies of and current grappling with representations of the continent, and the Black body in particular, in art and museum organisations. The interest in representations stemmed from my former research in the field of contemporary art,¹ during which I understood that many of the imaginations, constructions, and narratives I encountered originated in or had been co-produced by anthropology and its museums – and that some of these narratives continue to be produced in these fields. I was aware of the origins of these representations in colonial ideology and had learned about the entanglement of colonial rule, anthropology, and colonialism in the mainly Anglophone literature about ethnological collections that constituted the state of the arts. However, I started to work in the Ethnological Museum a few months after the foundation stone ceremony of the Humboldt Forum, during which the activist group No Humboldt 21! stressed the colonial origin of the Museum's collection and requested the return of the Museum's objects, highlighting how Berlin related to both the slave trade and colonial rule. In the Museum, I was asked to join a research project about collections acquired in the former German East Africa, in today's Republic of Tanzania. Encountering German colonialism, I realised that I didn't know anything about it. I myself had not learned about German colonialism in school. I was unaware *that* Germany had governed colonies, and I was even less aware of *how* Germany had governed those colonies.

My situation reflected a common diagnosis at the time. Germany was suffering from 'colonial amnesia' (Kößler, 2006; Zimmerer, 2013b, p. 9). 'Amnesia' implies a 'forgetting' of the colonial past in Germany, an inability to recall this time period and its larger, encompassing structures and mechanisms. In this chapter, I unravel the processes and histories of remembering colonialism in Germany, histories I needed to chronicle, reflect on, and
assemble to understand the historical dimension of my research subject. How to situate the remembrance of the German colonial past in Germany? What were the key moments of memory activism? How did the remembrance of colonialism in Germany and the Humboldt Forum relate to one another? What prompted change in this process?

## ‘A gap in memory politics’: The remembrance of colonialism in Germany

In comparison with other European nations, the conditions and genealogy of colonial remembrance in Germany is particular. As Britta Schilling stated, ‘part of what makes the German case unique is not only that the colonial period was so short, but rather that it was cut short’ (Schilling, 2014, p. 4). Germany’s main colonial efforts started after the Berlin conference in 1884/85, from which on it occupied German East Africa (in the region of today’s Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), German South West Africa (in the region of today’s Namibia), Togoland and Kamerun in West Africa (in the region of today’s Togo, Ghana, and Republic of Cameroon) as well as concessions and protectorates in Kiaotschou (Jiaozhou Bay) in China, German Samoa (today’s Samoa) and German New Guinea (today’s Papua New Guinea), both located in the Pacific. These colonial efforts were preceded by individual German states with colonial ambitions, some of which had been involved in slave trade. Germany lost its empire with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Those who lived through and remember German colonial rule first-hand, then, belong to a different generation from those who lived under colonial rule in other European colonies.

Concerning Germany’s public memory, small groups were engaged in continuous attempts to commemorate German colonialism up to 1945, efforts that dispersed in the public sphere after the war. The year 1968, Britta Schilling argues, marked ‘the most visible and lasting caesura with Germany’s colonial past in the West’ (Schilling, 2014, p. 10). The destruction of several colonial monuments during 1968 student revolts, in solidarity with decolonisation movements in the Global South, left blank spaces in several cities’ public spheres, which led public discourse on German colonialism to be ‘laid to rest after 1968’ (Schilling, 2014, p. 10). Concerning its historiography, German colonialism has only recently been defined as a valid topic to be researched in German academia, encouraged by a focus in history departments on national histories, excluding transnational and global dimensions of these histories (Möhle, 1999; Reinhardt & Reinhard, 2018). Different to European imperial powers like France or the UK, Germany’s immigration
politics were characterised by contract-based labour immigration, unrelated to former German colonies. This has had an impact on who writes the histories of (German) colonialism in Germany: pioneers in the 1980s and 1990s in academia and public life had worked on rendering the question of German colonialism and its remembrance in Germany more prominent, most notably an emerging Afro-German movement.² Regardless of such exceptions, histories of colonialism have only partly been shaped and enriched by former colonial subjects, their descendants, and diasporas in Germany. At the same time, and significantly, German historiography and memory politics focused on reckoning with the Holocaust and the German *Sonderweg* (Eckert & Wirz, 2013, p. 508; Zimmerer, 2015, p. 22).

Although these different factors contribute to what has been termed an ‘absence of the colonial past in German remembrance culture’ (Lutz & Gawarecki, 2005, p. 10) and, more particularly, on a political level, a ‘gap in memory politics’ (Bauche, 2010), the term ‘colonial amnesia’ has been challenged. On one hand, recent research has shown that private colonial remembrance has always continued (Schilling, 2014), and debates and controversies on colonialism in the historiographies of both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR resurged after the Second World War (Bürger, 2017). On the other hand, the term ‘amnesia’ denies memorial space and agency to those who suffered from colonial rule as well as to their descendants, who, even if not publicly recognised and with little space accorded to them in Germany’s memoryscape, kept and continue to recount memories and histories of German colonial rule. The established use of the term ‘amnesia’ also discredits the work of activists, academics, and cultural producers who have been engaged in rendering Germany’s colonial past visible, continuous efforts that particularly intensified in the years 2004 and 2005.

## Claiming recognition of Germany's colonial past

In activism and research, the years 2004 and 2005 have been described as pivotal turning points concerning the public remembrance and awareness of German colonialism. These years marked several anniversaries, giving the opportunity both in Germany as well as in the former colonies to request public remembrance. In 2004 came the 120th anniversary of the so-called Berlin Conference of 1884 – also known as the Congo Conference – which confirmed the distribution of territory and trade rights on the African continent among European colonial powers. More importantly, 2004 coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the genocide committed on the Herero and Nama in Namibia (Zimmerer & Zeller, 2003; Böhlke-Itzen, 2004), and
2005 coincided with the anniversary of the Maji Maji war in Tanzania (Becker & Beez, 2005). Of major importance in both Tanzania and Namibia, these events were officially remembered in the former colonies (Becker, 2010; Förster, 2010). However, within Germany, no official commemoration ceremony took place, but was rather relocated abroad.³

In view of the active silencing of German colonialism in German politics, a 'social movement in memory politics' started (Bauche, 2010). This movement was supported and sustained by a growing number of research projects related to German colonialism, concerning both its histories⁴ as well as its contemporary implications in Germany, such as language,⁵ popular culture and education,⁶ remembrance and *lieux de mémoire*.⁷ These developments were closely linked to each other, in the sense that activists were themselves academics or that academics were aware of and fostered the political aspect of their work. In 2010, the historian Manuela Bauche described members of this 'movement' or 'scene' as consisting mainly of Black and White Germans 'predominantly educated in a Western academic way, many of whom are historians, who sometimes share experiences as workers in memory sites remembering National Socialism; others come from anti-racism work' (Bauche, 2010). In different German cities, associations that engaged with the call for the recognition of German colonialism were founded.⁸ Activists tried to render knowledge about German colonialism public, knowledge that was scientifically 'acknowledged by specialists' but 'hardly present in public conscience' (Bauche, 2010).

The negotiation of German colonialism has concentrated on Africa. The historians Andreas Eckert and Albert Wirz's observed that colonialism and Africa have become 'almost a synonym' in Germany (Eckert & Wirz, 2013, p. 508). This was, for instance, reflected in the German contemporary art field, and cultural production more generally speaking, which I followed closely. Established and emerging artists and curators have made questions concerning Africa in the German cultural landscape visible, notably in regard to discussion of the colonial project and its afterlives – both concerning German colonies and colonialism in Africa more generally.⁹ What is meant by 'Africa' here is quite particular. Definitions usually explicitly or implicitly concern 'sub-Saharan' Africa, a seemingly regional depiction that continues to circulate despite virulent critique, as it implicitly refers to a racialised division of the continent into a 'White' North Africa, opposed to the southern part, long depicted as Black Africa (*Schwarzafrika*) in Germany.¹⁰ Finally, and crucially, contestations around museum collections in relation to colonialism were almost exclusively focused on collections from the African continent. In Germany, and at the Humboldt Forum in particular, this was notably reflected in the negotiation concerning specific objects and human
remains,¹¹ but also in regard to the concentration of expertise and interest concerning ‘Africa’ in German ethnological museums and academia. ¹² Berlin played a particular role in this context, as it allowed convergences of activism with other fields to take place. These convergences, in turn, provided fertile ground for the protests against the Humboldt Forum to arise.

## Relating German colonialism and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin

Two central controversies succeeded one another since the fall of the Berlin Wall with regards to the Humboldt Forum, and they continue to echo to this day: the debate on the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss versus the maintenance and renovation of the Palace of the Republic centrally evoke questions on the role of the public remembrance of GDR heritage in Germany. With the decision to devote the Berlin Palace to ‘non-European’ collections, the debate shifted the perspective towards controversies around Germany’s Prussian and colonial past, almost entirely eclipsing and replacing the preceding debates on Germany’s socialist past.

In 2002, the German parliament confirmed the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace, after more than a decade of debate (Internationale Expertenkommission Historische Mitte Berlin, 2002). The members of parliament based their decision on the recommendations of an expert commission appointed to imagine and design Berlin’s ‘historical centre’ (historische Mitte). The Berlin Palace, built and developed as the residence of the Hohenzollerns in 1443, was destroyed in 1950 by the GDR government after heavy war damage. In 1976, the Palace of the Republic was inaugurated to host the GDR People’s Parliament and served as a venue for cultural events and activities for GDR citizens. A landmark of GDR architecture, it had been closed since 1990. Advocates had begun to rally support for reconstruction shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The parliamentary decision opened a debate on how, in a unified Germany, the government should deal with GDR history, memory, and its traces. Framing it as a central place for lived experiences and social memory of GDR times, the Palace of the Republic’s advocates interpreted its demolition as a public erasure and devaluation of those specific memories. As such, the conflict regarding the Stadtschloss was interpreted by many as an East-West conflict, symbolic of the difficulties surrounding the process of reunification (Binder, 2013, p. 106). ¹³ The advocates of the Schloss presented the area around the palace – the Schlossplatz – as abandoned from an urban policy perspective, as a centre that needed to be re-established. As the years passed by, they radicalised their argumentation. The advocates ‘presented
the castle as the key to the genetic structure of the city, to its spirit and culture', as Jonathan Bach puts it in his compelling chronology of the debate (Bach, 2017b, p. 110). The suggestion of the demolition of one palace in exchange for the construction of another raised the question of which national history and memory was valued in what was being increasingly constructed as the historical centre of Germany's capital.

The decision to reconstruct the Berlin Palace triggered debate on whether the period before 1918 would be established as 'the actual identity-establishing moment for Berlin' (Philipp Oswalt, cited in von Bose, 2013). The expert commission's concept supported and integrated the arguments of the Berlin Palace's advocates: the commission suggested the name 'Humboldt Forum', with reference to the brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, figureheads for Prussian science, culture politics, and their 'cosmopolitan world view' (Parzinger, 2011, p. 18). The commission also recommended a narrative for the Humboldt Forum that would highlight Prussian accomplishments in education and cultural policies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, establishing this period as a reference point in German history. As Jonathan Bach argued, the reconstruction sought to recreate the 'Prussian aura', an aura which he depicts as 'ambiguous' insofar as it stood for tolerance and cultural enlightenment, as well as for discipline, obedience, and, crucially, violence in Germany's colonial wars (Bach, 2017b, p. 115). Beyond the obvious link between the library and the university to the Humboldt brothers, the Humboldt Forum's concept was centred on 'the dialogue between European and non-European [außer-europäischen] cultures' (Internationale Expertenkommission Historische Mitte Berlin, 2002, p. 22) and based on a proposal by the then director of the SPK, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann.¹⁴

The combination of the symbolic politics of the Stadtschloss with the non-European collections shifted attention towards how Germany was to position itself with regards to its colonial past. Scholars and activists both in Germany and beyond translated and applied postcolonial theory to this particular constellation, an area of study which had hitherto received marginal attention in German academia. The Humboldt Forum was repeatedly presented as a 'place for the world cultures' by integrating the 'non-European' collections (Parzinger, 2011, p. 6). The museums associated with 'Ancient and Modern Civilisations' – 'Islamic', Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and nineteenth-century European painting – are situated in opposition to the Humboldt Forum. The framing of the Humboldt Forum as representing the non-European established a dichotomy between the 'European' and the 'non-European', which continues to act on Museum Island. As Sharon Macdonald has argued, this particular 'constellation of difference'
contributes to an understanding of the ‘European’ that is defined in terms of historic belonging, rather than in geographical terms. It implies the construction of these collections as ‘European’ heritage, which, conversely, serves as a constitutive part of ‘European’ history. This history is constructed in contrast to the ‘non-European’, a history that is excluded from the narrative (Macdonald, 2016; see also von Bose, 2013; 2016). The dichotomy was reinforced by the exclusion of the collections of the Museum of European Cultures, which remained in the former location of the Ethnological Museum, in Dahlem. The politics of place on Berlin’s Museum Island were accentuated by the architectural frame of the Schloss, further emphasised by the housing of the ethnological collections. Critics understood the combination of a royal facade and ethnological collections as a continuation of colonial dominance and the maintenance of Western supremacy, while incorporating and ‘strategically’ using ‘reflexivity’ to fit with contemporary museum discourse, as Friedrich von Bose argued (2017b).¹⁵ The collections’ regional division in the Humboldt Forum confirmed ordering modes traditionally associated with anthropology and the claim to represent certain ‘cultures’ in their regional delimitation, traditionally via grand anthropological themes. These different points of critique confirmed how the Humboldt Forum unambiguously reproduced classificatory systems and representational politics that decades of critique and (international) museum practice laboriously tried to dissect and counteract, validating instead presuppositions grounded in colonial thought.

As Beate Binder pointedly argued in 2013, those advocating for the Humboldt Forum reflected the political ambition for the Humboldt Forum to be perceived as a representation of the national by profiling itself as cosmopolitan.¹⁶

> Centred on the notions of encounter, openness and cultural experience, the Humboldt Forum is designed as a space for reflection, in which the national is stabilised in a globalised world and speaking at the same time about tolerance and openness of the German nation. (Binder, 2013, p. 114)¹⁷

This positioning reflected the contemporary trend to adhere to an idea of important Western museums as ‘universal heritage’, confirmed when the SMB signed the International Council of Museum’s ‘Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museum’ in 2002. Interpreted by many as a means to warden off restitution (see, for example, Abungu, 2004), the International Council of Museums (ICOM) declaration stated that the collections have become ‘part of the museums that have cared for them, and by extension part of the heritage of the nations which house them’ (ICOM, 2004).
Understanding the collections as both universal and national reflections of the museum's mission, as Andrea Witcomb put it, is to 'encapsulate at the same time the world and the nation' (Witcomb, 2015, p. 130). The signature also signalled the organisation's general attitude that 'all objects came legally into the collections', as the SMB's director Peter-Klaus Schuster confirmed in 2004 (Schuster, 2004).

## Berlin as postcolonial metropole

Building on the above-mentioned research and activism on German colonialism, the intellectual and physical proximity of politics, academia, activism, cultural production, and, in particular, contemporary art in Berlin allowed the agents' shared interests in colonial legacies as well as in postcolonial theory to converge (see also von Oswald & Tinius, 2020).¹⁸ The focus of the Berlin-based postcolonial activism – material culture and heritage sites – related to claims later addressed at the Humboldt Forum. They enabled artistic and curatorial agents to link with, on the one hand, the call for restitution and repatriation, especially the return of human remains. On the other hand, they addressed the representation of colonial histories, both in their absence, such as in organisational narratives, as well as in their unacknowledged presence in everyday Berlin as a former colonial metropole (Heyden & Zeller, 2002; 2005). The most active associations – Berlin Postkolonial, Tanzania-Network, Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, AFROTAK TV cyberNomads, and AfricAvenir – confirmed the focus on German colonialism in Africa, encouraged by the fact that Berlin was home to Germany's largest African diaspora, both of German and international nationality (Diallo & Zeller, 2013, p. 12).

The activist claims for the repatriation of human remains from Germany's former colonies related those claims to the SPK. Berlin's significant collections of human remains were not stored in the depots of the Ethnological Museum, but in the Museum of Prehistory and Early History (Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte) since 2011 (Heeb & Jöbstl, 2017). ¹⁹ The relocation of the human remains in 2011 from the Charité, a university hospital in Berlin, to the Museum of Prehistory and Early History turned the SPK into a central target of critique for the activists. Whereas several returns of human remains were negotiated, the repatriation of human remains to Namibia in 2011 from the Charité was particularly contested, stirring debate and encouraging further activism, as German politicians didn't follow diplomatic protocol (see Stoecker, Schnalke, & Winkelmann, 2013). The claims for repatriations went hand in hand with the request for the recognition of
and claims for (financial) reparation concerning the colonial war and genocide committed against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908 in today's Namibia. The genocide was recognised by the German government in 2016, but the government excluded any possibility of financial reparations at the time (see Kößler, 2015; Bundesregierung, 2016).²⁰

Whereas the claim for repatriation was related to the Humboldt Forum in terms of its links to the SPK's collections, another of the activists' targets was challenging established modes of representation. This concerned both the deconstruction of colonial imagery, nomenclature, and monuments in Germany's everyday, as well as the (lack of) acknowledgement of histories of German colonialism in German public organisations. In Berlin, activists such as Tahir Della, Christian Kopp, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro, Manuela Bauche, Israel Kaunatjike, and Joshua Kwesi Aikins deployed different methods to make colonial histories visible in the first place and to develop counter-narratives. The activists used guided tours focused on the remains of colonial buildings and representations within the city, such as in Berlin's 'African Quarter' (Afrikanisches Viertel), to remind audiences of the 'everyday' and 'everywhere' of colonialism in Germany's cities. Furthermore, they intervened in the city's landscapes through the creation of informational and memorial plaques²¹ and by protesting against and changing street names honouring colonialists and colonial events.²² Joshua Kwesi Aikins, one of the initiators of changing Berlin street names, has depicted the strategy as a 'reversal of perspective', enabling memory politics to establish a resistant perspective (Aikins quoted in Kopp et al., 2018, p. 42; see also Jethro, n.d.). Finally, activists have challenged narratives at exhibitions addressing German colonialism, and there have been interventions in already existing exhibitions, in museums, and in independent project spaces.²³

The activists' focus on museums and heritage allowed the borders between professional fields to blur. One central moment of convergence was the organisation of the two-day event Anti-Humboldt: An event for the Humboldt Forum's selective deconstruction in 2009.²⁴ The conference took place on the occasion of the exhibition *A different approach to the world: The Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace. A glimpse at the work in progress*.²⁵ The exhibition was announced as a preview of the 'making of' the exhibitions to be integrated in the Humboldt Forum. A year after the Palace of the Republic had been completely demolished, the exhibition was located in the Alte Museum just opposite the demolition and construction site. Subsumed under the name Alexandertechnik, a group of scholars, activists, and artists criticised what they understood as the lack of recognition of European colonialism, accentuated by the Humboldt Forum's politics of representation. The event was also the occasion on which the collective
Artefakte//anti-humboldt was founded, which has continued to publicly oppose the Humboldt Forum.²⁶ Alexandertechnik accused the leaders of the Humboldt Forum of ‘ontologising otherness’, ‘demonstrating openness to the world as a self-proclaimed nation of culture [Kulturnation]’, ‘presenting the “Golden Age” of Prussia [...] as a post-1990 fill-in’, and of ‘exploiting non-European arts and cultures’ through their recontextualisation on the Museum Island (Alexandertechnik, 2009).

Whereas the 2009 event allowed Berlin's different scenes and fields to overlap and to solidify critique, the extent to which colonial legacies have been addressed in Berlin has since amplified, along with the significant number of (international) artists, curators, academics and other cultural producers who have opted for Berlin as their home or temporary city of residence. Colonial legacies within the contemporary art world were often negotiated with direct reference to the Humboldt Forum and the critique associated with it.²⁷

## Conclusion

In 2018, Germany's Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters, stated that it is 'above all thanks to the Humboldt Forum that colonialism has been put on the political agenda', attesting that it has 'operated like a catalyst, even before its opening' (quoted in Ringelstein, 2018). Contrary to Grütter's statement, my observations show how the particular context of Berlin's academic, political, artistic, and activist landscape provided fertile ground, laboriously prepared for more than a decade, for the critique of the Humboldt Forum to arise and, later, to be taken up by politicians and representatives of the Humboldt Forum itself. In particular, it was activism and cultural productions – often the result of unpaid, tedious, and risky work – rather than politics, that was involved in the 'laborious excavation work' of researching, addressing, and claiming Germany's colonial past, as the anthropologist Larissa Förster depicted the process.²⁸
## Notes

1. My former research projects included an ethnography of the exhibition *La Triennale: Intense Proximity*, with the artistic director Okwui Enwezor, which centrally interrogated representational tropes in relation to anthropology, modernism, and colonialism; see von Oswald (2016).

2. This includes the formation of the Initiative of Black Germans (ISD) as well as the Black Women in Germany (ADEFRA e. V.) in 1986, as well as the publication of the seminal work *Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte*; see Ayim, Oguntoye, and Schultz 1987.

3. During their visits to Namibia, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder avoided any kind of public apology out of fear of being confronted with claims for financial reparations. It was only the Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, in an act of 'personal courage' (Köfler 2005, p. 23), who publicly apologised for '[t]he atrocities of that time [which] were what would today be called genocide' (quoted in Eckert 2007, p. 37). Immediately sanctioned by the responsible ministry, the minister's reaction was framed as an 'emotional outburst' that 'could cost taxpayers billions' (Böhlke-Itzen quoted in Eckert 2007, p. 37). The minister's apology excluded a juridical responsibility that would have possibly and eventually translated into valid repatriation claims from the Namibian side (Eckert 2007, p. 37). In contrast to the genocide in Namibia, the remembrance of the hundredth anniversary of the Maji Maji war in Tanzania hardly attracted any public media attention in Germany.

4. It was thus around and after the time of the parliamentary vote confirming the Humboldt Forum that research regarding German colonialism became more prominent: concerning the memory of German colonialism and specific historic case studies (Eckert 1999; Zeller 2000; Heyden & Zeller 2002; Böhlke-Itzen 2004; Hoffmann 2007), as well as comprehensive, usually edited, volumes (Lutz & Gawarecki 2005; Hobuß & Lölke 2007; Perraudin & Zimmerer 2011; Conrad 2012; Habermas & Przyrembel 2013).

5. See, for example, for language, Arndt et al. 2004; Arndt & Ofuatey-Alazard (2011), and in particular controversies around the N-word in 2013, Zimmerer (2013b, pp. 22–25); Albrecht (2017).

6. See, for example, Bechhaus-Gerst and Klein-Arendt (2003); Kundrus (2003); Bechhaus-Gerst and Gieseke (2006); Langbehn (2010).

7. See, for example, Zeller (2000); Heyden and Zeller (2002); Förster (2010); Zimmerer (2013a).

8. *Freiburg postkolonial*, linked to the organisation Informationszentrum Dritte Welt, remains a precursor in this context, as it established a digital platform in 2006 based on local research but also collecting sources on German colonialism in general, which has turned it into one of the most frequently consulted databases on the subject, praised for its efforts in archiving colonial histories (Bechhaus-Gerst 2017, p. 50). Other associations were founded and continue their work in Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Cologne, Augsburg, and Dortmund.

9. Pioneering curators, such as Okwui Enwezor or Simon Njami, as well as a younger generation of curators, such as Alya Sebti, Yvette Mutumba, Gabi Ngcobo, or Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, have contributed to institutionalising (and have been supported to do so) contemporary cultural production and art from Africa in Germany's cultural landscape, in independent project spaces, biennales, and national museums. Public funding from the ifa or the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, some of it explicitly devoted to Africa (TURN fund), has supported these projects sustainably, such as the media platform and journal *Contemporary And (C&*)*, founded and directed by Yvette Mutumba and Julia Grosse.
10. For analysis and discussion on the concepts of *Schwarzafrika* and *Schwarzer Kontinent*, see Arndt et al. (2000, pp. 204–208), and for racist terminology in the German language more generally speaking, see Arndt and Ofuatey-Alazard (2011; Arndt (2012).

11. Examples of particularly contested objects include the so-called Benin Bronzes, confiscated in 1897 by British colonial forces, located in today's Federal Republic of Nigeria. Christine Howald and Felicity Bodenstein have depicted these objects as 'proxies' (*Stellvertreter*) for objects acquired in colonial contexts (Bodenstein&Howald 2018, p. 533). Another key object has been the throne of King Njoya from the Kingdom of Bamum, located in today's Republic of Cameroon, whose status is all the more contested, because the throne has been described as a diplomatic gift from Njoya to the Emperor Wilhelm II. For instance, both objects were part of a poster campaign by AfricAvenir: see http://www.africavenir.org/de/projekte/projekte-deutschland/dekoloniale-inwaende-gegen-das-humboldt-forum.html, consulted 2 August 2019.

12. In relation to academia, anthropology in Germany is Africa-focused. Several institutes devoted to the art histories and anthropology of Africa exist in Germany (Kunst Afrikas, Freie Universität Berlin; Institute of African Studies and Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, Bayreuth), as well as specific regional conferences. Within ethnological museums themselves, curators with a focus on Africa have recently been appointed to director positions in ethnological museums, with Barbara Plankensteiner in Hamburg (since 2017); Nanette Snoep in Saxony (2015–2018), who replaced the africanist Klaus Schneider in Cologne in 2018; Christine Stelzig in Munich (2011–2017); and Clémentine Deliss (2010–2015) in Frankfurt. Most of these curators dealt explicitly with their organisations' colonial entanglements and have focused on Africa, in particular in their programmatic focus, in exhibitions such as *FOREIGN EXCHANGE (or the stories you wouldn't tell a stranger)* (Frankfurt, 2014) (Deliss, Mutumba, and Weltkulturen Museum 2014); *GRASSI invites: #1 Fremd* ('foreign'), co-curated by Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Anke Dyes, and Anna Jehle (Leipzig, 2016); *Erste Dinge. Rückblick für Ausblick* ('First things. Looking back to look forwards') (Hamburg, since 2018); and Cologne's permanent exhibition.

13. The debate concerning the position of the remembrance of the GDR has taken another direction through the debates around the *Einheitswippe*, a monument commemorating Germany's reunification. The monument, designed by the office Milla & Partner, had to be voted for twice in the Bundestag, and was last confirmed in the summer of 2017 (Peitz, 2017; Fröhlich, 2018).

14. For a reproduction of Lehmann's suggestions, see König and Scholz (2012, pp. 21–26).

15. See chapter two for a detailed account of the activists' critique and, as key examples, see Artefakte//anti-humboldt (2013); No Humboldt 21! (2013); von Bose (2017b); Ndikung (2018).

16. Temporary occupation of both the palace and, after its destruction, the lawn, allowed for artistic and cultural projects to take place, transforming it into a 'Fun Palace' (Misselwitz, Obrist& Oswalt, 2005) and giving space for projects such as the private initiative of the Temporäre Kunsthalle (Temporary Art Gallery) (2008–2010); see also Bach (2017b, pp. 120–129).

17. My translation from the German.

18. These reflections, and in particular the notion of 'convergences', are based on discussions with Jonas Tinius and Larissa Förster.

19. Even though they were not stored at the Museum, the historic relationship between the collection of human remains and the Ethnological Museum was tight. The anthropologist and custodian for Africa and Oceania, Felix von Luschan (1885–1910), actively put together a collection of human remains, including 6,300 skulls (Heeb&Jöbstl 2017). At the same time, human remains were still an important part of the Ethnological Museum, as many objects included human tissue, hair, or teeth, as a simple search in the database
would quickly reveal. See, for example, the list of human remains identified by Berlin Postkolonial via the Ethnological Museum's publicly accessible online database (No Humboldt 21!, 2014b).

20. Even though the genocide was officially recognised as such by Germany in 2016, the right to claim reparations was officially excluded. The government's representatives argued that they were using the term genocide in a 'historical-political' and not in a 'juridical' way, meaning that 'no legal consequences result from this historical-political use of the term "genocide"'. This decision was disputed by the representatives of the Ovaherero and Nama people; a request reached the UN Council in January 2017 and remains open (as of May 2019).

21. Until today, there is only one official memorial plaque in Berlin commemorating the atrocities of German colonial rule in Namibia, on the Neuer Garnisonfriedhof in Berlin-Tempelhof. The plaque is just next to the so-called Herero Stone, which was constructed to remember the voluntary service of German *Schutztruppen* in Namibia in 1904-1907, which is regularly visited and honoured by right-wing and veteran groups. The plaque was installed in 2009 (Habermalz 2018). In 2012, different postcolonial associations succeeded in installing an informational and memorial plaque in Berlin's so-called African Quarter (*Afrikanisches Viertel*) (Kopp&Krohn, 2012).

22. One of the initiative's major successes consisted here in changing the Gröbenufer, or Groebenufer, named after a military officer engaged in the transatlantic slave trade in Berlin, to May-Ayim-Ufer, named after the feminist Afro-German poet, intellectual, and activist in 2009/2010. Ongoing is the fight in Berlin concerning the M*straße in Berlin-Mitte. A success of the initiatives has been the agreement to change the street names Lüderitzstraße, Nachtigalplatz, and Petersallee in Berlin's so-called African Quarter (*Afrikanisches Viertel*) (DECOLONIZE BERLIN, 2018).

23. Exhibitions addressing German colonialism in particular include, for instance, the exhibition *Namibia-Deutschland: Eine geteilte Geschichte*, curated by Larissa Förster and Clara Himmelheber, Deutsch-Historisches Museum, 2005; the touring exhibition *Freedom Roads. Koloniale Straßennamen. Postkoloniale Erinnerungskultur*, curated by H. M. Jokinen and Christian Kopp (August Bebel Institut, Berlin; Münchner Stadtmuseum; Kunsthaus Hamburg 2010-2013); or the touring exhibition *What We See: Images, Voices, and Versioning. Reconsidering an Anthropological Collection from Southern Africa*, curated by Annette Hoffmann (South Africa, 2009; Switzerland, 2009; Austria, 2011; Germany, 2012; and Namibia, 2013; for more information, see Binter (2014)). A precursor in German museography was the intervention *Colonialism in a Box* (*Kolonialismus im Kasten*), put in place in 2013, which allowed visitors to listen to an alternative tour concentrating on German colonialism, addressing the gaps in the German Historical Museum's permanent exhibition. The tour was based on critical guided tours and was developed by the historians Manuela Bauche, Dörte Lerp, Susann Lewerenz, Marie Muschalek, and Kristin Weber; see https://www.kolonialismusimkasten.de/, consulted 3 May 2018.

24. My translation from the German: *Anti-Humboldt. Eine Veranstaltung zum selektiven Rückbau des Humboldt-Forums*.

25. My translation from the German: *Anders zur Welt kommen: Das Humboldt-Forum im Schloss. Ein Werkstattblick*.

26. The group repeatedly organised events and put their protest on a wider agenda, such as in November 2011 in Paris's Bétonsalon and Musée du Quai Branly, http://www.betonsalon.net/spip.php?article362, consulted 24 April 2019. They prepared a special issue of the publication *darkmatter*, which would be released in late 2013 (Artefakte//anti-humboldt, 2013).

27. Representatives of the Humboldt Forum or Humboldt Lab Dahlem were invited to events. Examples are the participation of the curator Paola Ivanov at the conference accompanying the exhibition *Wir Sind Alle Berliner: 1884-2014* in 2015, or the participation
of Agnes Wegner, manager of the Humboldt Lab Dahlem, in the panel discussion *Blinde Flecken: Berlin*, which took part within the programme Return to Sender at the Hebbel am Ufer theatre, March 2015. In the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the debate around the Humboldt Forum was frequently taken up, such as by hosting the exhibition *Anti-Humboldt Box* (2013) and thus publicly legitimising the critique in a major cultural organisation. The Ethnological Museum hosted parts of the 8th Berlin Biennale and addressed colonialism both in discursive and exhibition formats (2014). The discursive series of four panels, *Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect*, was organised by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc in cooperation with Lotte Arndt and Catalina Lozano. The exhibition *Double Lives* was curated by Natasha Ginwala in cooperation with the curator Paola Ivanov.

28. Discussion with Larissa Förster of an earlier version of this text, 5 April 2018.
CHAPTER TWO

Being affected: A methodological
approach to working through
colonial collections

In the Workshop of Cultures (Werkstatt der Kulturen) on 22 October 2013, the audience was composed of approximately two hundred people. As an introduction to the discussion, the plans for the Humboldt Forum were described by the moderator Arnim Massing and panellist Kien Nghi Ha as 'particularly uninspired and unimaginative', 'revisionist', and 'lacking any kind of sensibility when it comes to dealing responsibly with one's own colonial history'.¹ Frequent ironical laughter from the audience accompanied the discussion, and people murmured when the moderator introduced the curator of the Africa department, Peter Junge. The curator was the fourth invitee, the moderator announced, and the only invitee representing the Humboldt Forum to accept the invitation. Visibly nervous, Peter Junge tried to explain his position. He expressed his gratitude for being invited and highlighted the need for dialogue. He emphasised the discrepancy between how the Humboldt Forum was publicly perceived and what it would actually do, which he described as 'breaking with the colonial past'. He foregrounded the work done in the Africa department at the Ethnological Museum and mentioned his practical work on exhibitions for the Humboldt Forum. A day before the event, during lunch at the Museum's canteen, Peter Junge had reassured himself: 'We have everything they want: collection history, contemporary art, visible storage'. But at the event the anthropologist Larissa Förster asked him why the Museum had not been more outspoken in recent discussions of colonialism:

You know the collections and its histories best, the problematic as
well as the unproblematic parts. Where is your expert's voice correct-
ing the cultural politics you are criticising? Why don't you take the
chance to position yourself in the debate, taking the controversies as an
opportunity?
Peter Junge responded diplomatically. He stressed his work at the Museum while refusing to take a critical stance. The curator occupied a position that bridged the Ethnological Museum and the Humboldt Forum, being both a curator and responsible for the Humboldt Forum's planning schedule. He was aware of the professional role he could adopt, and which one he couldn't, in a highly departmentalised and hierarchical organisational setting.

The next day, in the Museum's canteen, staff said to Junge that he had been 'skewered' (*aufgespießt*) by the critics. He vehemently denied it: 'I wouldn't ever let myself be skewered!' Despite his attempt to establish distance from the organisation, for those in the audience, he represented the SPK – the organisation representative of the Humboldt Forum at the time and owner of the Ethnological Museum's collections. 'This event was about exposing me, not about dialogue. It's like in 1968, but', he sighed and then continued: '[s]till, it is important not to dial in (*abhaken*) these kinds of events. Even if they are only a minority, and even if this kind of event dampens our mood'– the others seated at the table laughed again and seemed to agree – 'we have to remain in dialogue with them. These are the only people who are interested in the Forum, apart from the conservatives who want to rebuild the Palace! Ten years ago, no one questioned the origin of the objects. Today you are asked about it at every guided tour. That's why these people are important.'

In this chapter, I examine what it means to work in an organisation mired in anti-colonial controversy, between 2013 and 2015. In doing so, I use Jeanne Favret-Saada's notion of 'being affected' to support the study of these contested collections and contribute to the understanding of the curatorial struggles that were underway at that time.

My thinking about on Favret-Saada's reflections on affect began when I co-curated the exhibition *Object Biographies*, which explicitly dealt with the colonial provenance of the Ethnological Museum's Africa collection.² Instead of only observing curatorial work, I became myself a curator.

Monitoring my own affects allowed me to pay particular attention to the emotional dimension of curatorial work, which is only rarely considered in the museological literature. From my earliest work in the field, I described the general mood and emotions in my notes with observations such as 'is enraged', 'feels desperate', 'describes as draining' and 'feels accused of colonial crime'. Also, I myself was confronted with recurring feelings of unease, discomfort and malaise. Taking these emotions as analytical clues, it is thus not only the direct confrontation with colonial violence in the Museum's archives that I consider in this chapter. I rather elaborate on the responsibility of 'appropriately' addressing Germany's colonial history in a polarised
context. Part of that responsibility is to make knowledge and information accessible, to respond to the politics of representation and exclusion and to avoid reproducing the practices and mechanisms inherent to colonial collections and governance.

## The Humboldt Forum, anti-Humboldt activism, and German colonialism

In June 2013, Berlin city officials held a foundation stone ceremony for the Berlin Palace. Described as a 'little act of state' by the press, the ceremony included federal ministers and members of parliament who were joined via video by the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, and the former US Foreign Minister Henry Kissinger (Haubrich, 2013). Under beautiful skies, shouts of 'bravo' for the palace's most prominent initiators were accompanied by encomiums praising the Humboldt Forum as 'an opportunity for the whole of Europe' (MacGregor). A journalist wrote that '...a new phase begins' and 'the time of ideological struggles is over'. 'Construction is finally underway' (Schaper, 2013). For some, more than two decades of dissent seemed to end with the beginning of construction work.

While the joyful event was taking place, however, members of a newly formed coalition known as No Humboldt 21! had gathered in protest. The purpose of the coalition was to stop the construction of the Humboldt Forum, which they considered 'Eurocentric' and 'restorative', 'a direct contradiction to the aim of promoting equality in a society of immigrants' (No Humboldt 21!, 2013, p. 21). Whereas the journalist had pronounced the end of 'ideological struggles', No Humboldt 21! refocussed the discussion from debates about Germany's socialist past—triggered by the demolition of the GDR-era Palace of the Republic—to Germany's colonial history.

The physical separation between the festive foundation stone ceremony and the activists demonstrating outside the construction perimeters created a set seemingly insurmountable binary oppositions: between an organisation that perpetuated colonial modes of conceiving the world and one that opposed such worldviews, between 'inside' and 'outside' the Museum, between 'good' and 'bad', between the Humboldt Forum and the activists.

## No Humboldt 21! and the anti-Humboldt Forum campaign

The coalition's resolution was signed by 82 organisations, most of them located in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. Their specific objectives differed,
but most were engaged in de-colonial, anti-racist and feminist missions and some represented diaspora groups and their interests.

The logo for the No-Humboldt 21! campaign merges the image of the Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace (Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss) and that of the SPK. The difference is the eagle, which is crying and whose tears seem to morph into blood. The point was to signal which objects belonged to its critique—the building, its content, its name—and which did not (the Humboldt University and the Berlin State Library).

The activists focused their criticism on the publication 'The Humboldt Forum: "To Be in Touch with as Much of the World as Possible": The Goal and Significance of Germany's Most Important Cultural Project at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century'. Authored by the SPK's president Hermann Parzinger in 2011, the brochure was considered its *de facto* 'concept'.³ The No-Humboldt 21! campaign drew on international museum practice and recent scholarship as they identified five particular points of critique. First, the activists challenged the idea that museums were 'the legitimate owners of

<figure><img src="image_46.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.1 Logo of the No Humboldt 21! initiative</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_47.png" /></figure>

Stiftung
Preußischer Kulturbesitz

<figure><img src="image_48.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.3 Logo of the Stiftung Berliner Schloss</figcaption></figure>
their holdings'. In view of the colonial origins of the museum's collection, they called for the 'disclosure of the ownership history', adherence to a UN resolution in favour of repatriation and 'dialogue' with the 'descendants of the artists and the legal owners of the exhibits'. Second, they accused the Humboldt Forum of 'redeeming Berlin's colonial past', and demanded that no objects acquired during colonial times be exhibited in the Berlin Palace. Third, they denounced a politics of representation in which 'the cultures of the world are discriminated against, marked as "strangers" and "other"'. They pointed to the Forum's particular position on the Museum Island, and noted the separation between the 'classical collections' (Altes Museum, Bodemuseum, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Alte Nationalgalerie) and the 'Non-European' ones. Fourth, they criticised forms of knowledge production from the 'era of discovery'. In their opinion, Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist and one of the Forum's eponyms, embodied 'colonial dominance' and was thus not 'an appropriate person to name an intercultural centre after'. Fifth, they focused on the politics of access, criticising the way in which cultural goods remain unequally available to populations around the globe. They demanded that cultural goods in the Global North be permanently returned to their countries of origin in the Global South.

Neither the SPK, the Ethnological Museum nor the Humboldt Forum had released an official statement or position paper on German colonialism. But the statements they did publish didn't allay and even added to the activists' criticisms. SPK representatives relativised the impact of German colonialism on the collections by comparing it with those of other European colonial powers. Official representatives stated in 2001 that '[i]n contrast to the typical colonial countries Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, etc. where selected objects reached the European motherlands as spoil, German collectors and scientists developed systematic and – astonishingly modern – databases in Humboldt's tradition' (quoted in König 2013, p.33). Hermann Parzinger offered a similar argument in 2010, stating that 'concerning the collection's genesis, Germany has...a colonial past, but it is not like other European powers' (Hermann Parzinger [2010]; quoted in V. König 2012, p. 56). The SPK focused on the accuracy and scientific rigour of collecting and research practices, and downplayed the role of German colonialism in the museum's collections (Parzinger 2011, p. 31-32). Another argument put forward was that only a small portion of the collections was shaped by colonialism; most of it, like Berlin's Royal Cabinet of Curiosities, was of a 'pre-colonial' provenance. This argument overlooks that era's contested politics of acquisition and representation (von Bose 2016, p.128-129).

These statements reflected a then-common understanding of Germany's colonial history and national politics. Since the early 2000s, German
diplomacy had neglected or circumvented its colonial past and the crimes related to it (see chapter one). At the same time, the statements of the SPK ignored the latest academic research on the relationship between anthro-pological museums and colonialism in general⁴ and Berlin’s collections and German colonialism in particular.⁵

The activists’ campaign received a boost from the German Green Party Bündnis 90/Die Grünen⁶ and the left-wing party Die Linke,⁷ who in local governments and in the Bundestag vowed to investigate the colonial origins of the museum’s collections, in particular the human remains they contain. (Deutscher Bundestag, 2011; Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin, 2013a; Deutscher Bundestag, 2013). Support for the critique of the Humboldt Forum, therefore, had become entrenched among activists, politicians and academics, at the grassroots level (see also Ha, 2013), and in local and national political arenas.

## Inside the Ethnological Museum: Complicating the picture

I started to do research in the Ethnological Museum Berlin in October 2013. I focused on the past, present and future of selected objects from the Africa collection, as part of a larger ethnographic study of processes of transformations underway in ethnological museums in Europe. My archival and field research concentrated on practices related to the planned new permanent exhibition, which was to include the Museum’s Africa collections for the Humboldt Forum. When I started my work, I sympathised with many of the arguments of the No-Humboldt 21! activists. At that time, it was difficult not to. After the Forum’s foundation stone ceremony, activists organised a variety of public events, such as the travelling exhibition ‘Anti-Humboldt Box’⁸. They coordinated conferences,⁹ published articles and edited volumes.¹⁰ Meanwhile, the SPK, the SMB and the Ethnological Museum remained silent about the collection’s colonial past. In the autumn and winter of 2013, outsiders frequently voiced their frustration with the organisations’ behaviour.¹¹ The work at the Humboldt Forum took place behind closed doors, despite a provisional three-storey exhibition space known as the Humboldt Box located at the Forum’s construction site. The Humboldt Lab Dahlem (henceforth: HLD) organised exhibitions and ‘experiments’ to accompany the Forum preparations. With a budget of more than 4 million euros, the HLD was perceived as the Humboldt Forum’s showcase, yet it too had not taken a public position on German colonialism in the autumn of 2013.

Yet on my first day at the Museum, the seemingly clear-cut opposition between outside activist and museum insider collapsed. A museum staff member referred to the Humboldt Forum as ‘an ultra-conservative project
led by old white men'.¹² That view was no exception among museum staff members. Throughout the duration of my research, museum staff routinely criticised the Forum. Part of their problem, they often said, was the absence of a stated programme and a clear idea of who would define it. ‘No one wants to work for a project that is at the centre of criticism’, I wrote in my fieldnotes. ‘Museum staff lack identification with the Forum.’¹³ Some were unaware of the brochure ‘The Humboldt Forum: “To Be in Touch with as Much of the World as Possible”’, highlighting the disconnect between experts working closely with the collections and those representing the Forum. I realised then that the SPK’s leadership had not only *not* responded to the activists; they had not communicated effectively with their own staff. Neither did they seem to then have heeded the recommendations of the Forum’s international advisory board, made in 2011, that the organisation address colonialism and its latter-day repercussions (Heizmann and Parzinger 2012). The Museum’s Africa department curators, however, *had* defined colonialism as a central topic of their research and exhibition plans as early as 2008.¹⁴

Behind the scenes at the Humboldt Forum and the Ethnological Museum, then, were numerous opinions and positions, not a single unified view. My work at the Museum complicated the idea of straightforward binary oppositions – between those denying Germany’s colonial past and those facing up to it, between those against and those for the Humboldt Forum, between the postcolonial and the neo-colonial.

## Being affected: Making Object Biographies

After approximately two months of research in the Museum in December 2013, my position in the Museum changed. The HLD directorate approached Verena Rodatus, the museum apprentice (*Volontär*) working in the Africa department, and later myself, to curate an exhibition about what they subsumed under the term ‘looted art’ (*Beutekunst*).¹⁵ The HLD was under pressure to present critical voices and reflect the current state of the academic literature on German colonialism and provenance. Verena Rodatus and I were asked to respond to a request made to the larger structures of the SMB and the SPK, but were, however, in a kind of insider-outsider position: we would both be temporarily employed, we were new to the field, and we were not on staff at the Ethnological Museum. As one of the HLD’s leaders explained to us, it was ‘obvious to everyone’ that the provenance of cultural artefacts needed to be addressed, but no official ‘proactive position’ was likely in the near future. Neither the Ethnological Museum nor the SPK had the personnel and funds to deal with those questions because their curators
were in the final stages of determining their object lists for the Humboldt Forum. The HLD, by contrast, had enough resources at its disposal to fund such work.¹⁶

Initially, we were unsure whether to accept the offer. We worried that the Ethnological Museum or the SPK would distance itself from our criticisms because we were temporary employees, limit the project's critical scope or take over the project without changing their general stance. Working within the organisation, and being associated with the Humboldt Forum would restrict our room to maneuverer. Going from anthropologist and museum apprentice to public curators felt like a risk, one that could possibly drive a wedge between us and our immediate peers. As we later noted in the accompanying project management brief, one of our apprehensions was that we would be 'discredited in the critical field because of the institutional affiliation' (April 2014).

Our concern was not unjustified. The HLD's first efforts had received bad press (Probebühnen, March, June, September 2013),¹⁷ and the programme underwent an external review. The evaluators found that HLD had ignored or inadequately addressed the general expectations of ethnological museums and the Forum's critics in particular, and the news had started to leak (Mörsch et al., 2014). The HLD's projects had been met with hostility even by museum staff, some of whom criticised the HLD as 'appropriating the objects for a second time'.¹⁸ Some associated with the HLD found their experience emotionally challenging. 'I'd better do a good job so as not to lose my friends', one curator said in a meeting. Another recounted how she had publicly faced 'overt hostility, simply because I was working for the Humboldt Forum.' One person reported crying when a friend refused to say hello to her on the street. 'It's not nice when everyone turns away, like that', someone else said.¹⁹

Nevertheless, we decided to accept the offer in the hope of helping change the system from within. We developed the exhibition, titled *Object Biographies*, in conversation with the Africa department's curators Peter Junge and Paola Ivanov. A crucial issue for the exhibition was provenance research, which we had already conducted for the Humboldt Forum as part of our individual work. Our objective was to address the Museum's ties to German colonialism head-on by taking the collection's history and the trajectories of specific objects as the exhibition's starting point. We were interested in which stories had *not* been told, who and what was absent or rarely visible in the museum's own story. With the help of contemporary voices and research, both from Europe and Africa (von Oswald&Rodatus, 2017), we wanted to arrive at a more expansive understanding of the Museum's collections. It would
be the first, even if very small, show at the Ethnological Museum to put the
violent history of German colonial rule in Africa on centre stage.

From participant observation to observant participation

When I decided to co-curate the exhibition, my position changed from be-
ing a scholar and stipend recipient to a curator, from being a ‘participant
observer’ to being an ‘observant participant’. ²⁰ Becoming a ‘participant’
changed my conception of ‘distance’ and ‘scientific objectivity’ in the field.

Jeanne Favret-Saada's notion of affect in her work on witchcraft in rural France has helped me think through the particularities of my situation (Favret-Saada, 1977). The field of museum anthropology is obviously very different from that of witchcraft in France—not to mention, less deadly. Still, Favret-Saada's idea that researchers are affected by their work challenges the relationship between 'observation' and 'participation' in a way that is also useful for my field. Favret-Saada argues that earlier accounts of witchcraft are usually written from the perspective of anthropologists who were interested in observation, rather than participation. She recalls that academics had long reduced witchcraft to an 'accusation' and depicted it as 'a medicine for the illiterate and ignorant people' (Favret-Saada, 2012). By contrast, she describes that the people she encountered wanted her to become a 'partner'. They would only communicate with her once she too had been, as she put it, 'taken'. She depicts the feeling of participating in the field as 'being affected', without knowing whether or not she was actually bewitched herself.

Being affected and affecting the field

Though metaphors like being ‘taken’ were not unknown in my field – the
former museum director Clémentine Deliss once asked me if I had been
‘turned’ by ‘museum anthropology’, as in ‘turned like a zombie’²¹ – the field
of ethnological museums was also shaped by binary oppositions like those
that Favret Saada describes in her field.

Favret-Saada argues that participation can be an instrument of knowl-
edge. To understand the ‘intensities’ that come when working within a field,
one must experience them (Favret-Saada 2004, p.4–5). Researchers partic-
ipate in and contribute to developments in the field: they are both affect-
ed by the objects of study and affect them. Being affected also means that
one loses control over how one is positioned in the field. In conventional
‘participant observation’, the researcher can remain ‘just’ an anthropologist. Not so in the polarised atmosphere of Berlin, where the mere fact of collaborating with this state organisation meant being assigned a position. Unlike empathy, Favret-Saada argues, being affected tells the researcher about her own feelings and not necessarily the feelings of those who are the subject of research (Favret-Saada 2012; 1977). Being affected means becoming the person about whom the anthropologist is ultimately writing. In this way, the anthropologist’s own doubts, instabilities and anxieties become tools for analysis. Here, what Sharon Macdonald describes as the ‘anthropological approach’ – the ‘commitment to trying to see and experience life-worlds from the point of view of those who live them and within the context of which they are part’ (Macdonald 2013, 9) – becomes the personal, physical experience that is the researcher’s own ‘life-world’.

My approach to the field changed as I sought ways to exhibit the Museum’s objects publicly while balancing a complicated mixture of political and marketing interests, decision-making processes, legal regulations and professional convictions. As an insider, I began to look at the work of museum curators differently. Instead of focusing solely on identifying ‘mistakes’ – like many external critics of ethnological exhibitions – I became more in tune to their complexities and contradictions (see also Witcomb, 2015, p. 132).

## Para-ethnography and research ethics

As my role at the Museum expanded, the nature of my fieldwork changed. Initially planned as a comparative study between three museums undergoing transformation in three different countries, my research shifted its emphasis to the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. I worked with many people each day and my roles at the Museum frequently alternated between scholarship recipient, research assistant, curator, ethnographer and conference organiser.²² From the beginning, I was a full participant in the work of the Museum. This fostered what Gerhard Spittler has called ‘thick participation’ (2001). I paid staff rates at the museum canteen and had lunch with museum staff, gained access to internal email communications and had my own desk and computer. I shared gossip and experienced everyday struggles and routines. Many of my interlocutors were anthropologists: they regularly commented on, analysed and interpreted the field’s development. My research was ‘para-ethnographic’ insofar as the ethnography took place ‘side by side’ with my research interlocutors, I was never researching ‘up’ or ‘down’ (Marcus and Holmes, 2010). The frame of our relationship
was that of ‘intellectual partners in inquiry’, as Dominic Boyer has put it (2008, p.40).

In the classic ethnography ‘Hindus of the Himalayas: Ethnography and Change’ (1963), Gerald D. Berreman’s employs Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘impression management’ to problematise the relations between a research’s frontstage and backstage, and to reflect on the relationship between the ethnographer, her interlocutors, and the construction of the research field. Goffman’s impression management is based on a ‘dramaturgical’ approach. He analyses social systems as being divided between a ‘front region’ and a ‘back region’. For Goffman, the backstage serves to *prepare* a performance, with controlled access policies, whereas the front stage serves to *present* the performance. Generally speaking, I understood the Humboldt Forum as the field’s research front stage, seemingly shiny, whose representatives attempted to keep up the image of a mastered, ordered, and well-planned cultural project despite recurrent public controversies. The work routines which I got access to at the Ethnological Museum were the, sometimes messy, field’s backstage, where exhibitions and research projects for the Humboldt Forum were developed, prepared, and implemented.

Backstages might turn into front stages in the course of fieldwork, and the ethnographer and her interlocutors ‘are both performers and audience to one another’, as Berreman writes (1993, p. xxxiii). The division between front and backstage is not clear cut, but rather depends on the ‘function that the place happens to serve at that time for the given performance’ (Goffman, 1956, p. 77). As described above, the roles I adopted during my stay at the Museum often switched. Regardless of my role, however, I continued to take ethnographic fieldnotes and document my experiences. Sometimes my interlocutors forgot that I was first and foremost an ethnographer. At other moments, museum staff explicitly referred to me in these terms and discussed it. They did so, for example, by saying not to note or document particular information, or by saying to document something but not to mention them by name. Sometimes, I was taken aside to talk, or told to note particular, usually ‘hot’, information. Museum staff shared their experience with me, as they sometimes felt unable to express particular critique or analysis themselves with regard to their professional position.

From the very beginning of my fieldwork, I knew that deliberations about what to reveal and what to conceal from the museum’s backstage would be delicate. In the case of this book, this process has also entailed going through numerous rounds of editing, rewording, and paraphrasing, in particular in order to appropriately and ethically handle sensitive information, as well as to negotiate the relationships on which this research builds. I finished this book in 2021, in a political and discursive context which was
largely different from the one I participated in between 2013 and 2015. The increasingly charged context, as well as the accompanying negotiations, shaped my writing considerably.

As my interlocutors acted as ‘partners in inquiry’ in the field, the question of who was acting in, translating from, and interpreting the field; and thus what to (not) document, how to contextualise, who to name and who to keep anonymous were all difficult to evaluate. Some interlocutors shaped the Museum in profound ways and wanted their history to be documented. The anonymisation of these research interlocutors would have been difficult in any case but also against their wishes. When people appear with their name, they have read the text relating to them and we have negotiated the way in which they are quoted. I anonymised, summarised, and, in one case, fictionalised other accounts (see chapter 8). One central research interlocutor wished to not be included in the study, and I deleted all existing ethnographic descriptions related to her work.²³ In other cases, I decided to write about my own experiences, in order to address prevalent issues in the museum’s everyday, such as the affective and emotional dimension of curatorial work, that this chapter is concerned with.

The Ethnological Museum, the SPK and the Humboldt Forum are public, tax-funded organisations. Part of my reflections on ethics also consisted in deciding whether or not it was important to render transparent what was happening in them, precisely *because* they had failed to release information and had even given inaccurate information.²⁴ The decision on how to assess and evaluate the situation was one where ‘the weight of responsibility for adherence to good ethical conduct is on the anthropological researcher’ (ASA, 2011, see also DGSKA, 2009). To carry this responsibility and to find adequate solutions for the negotiation of the research ethics remained a major difficulty throughout the writing process. These negotiations continue to raise questions to me about how ethical fieldwork can take place in museums, especially those under public scrutiny.

## Curating contested collections

At the Ethnological Museum the curators of colonial collections were aware of the expectations to respond to activist critique and recent academic research, and the relationship between German colonialism and anthropology, in particular. For decades, researchers, archivists, and curators had worked on the history of colonial violence and theft. The difficulty lay in collaboratively addressing that history in a politically explosive climate.
Did our project challenge or perpetuate the museum's role as a 'colonial instrument' (Boast, 2011)? *Object Biographies* addressed not only what was being told but who was telling the story. Who was allowed to speak, and from which position and how? This also concerned the composition of our team and what has been called the 'delegation of interpretative sovereignty' (*Deutungshoheit abgeben*) and the politics of representation more generally.

I often felt defensive and apologetic when working on and writing about *Object Biographies*. I was worried about being *perceived* as perpetuating colonial injustice and of *actually* perpetuating colonial injustice from within a contested organisation.²⁵ Ambivalent feelings continued to accompany me as I tackled the collection's colonial legacy and the question of how best to discuss and exhibit that legacy from my privileged position within the Museum.

As questions of colonial provenance and restitution garnered more and more public attention, those publicly representing the HLD and the Ethnological Museum found the SPK's silence on those issues increasingly difficult. In January 2015, in response to a parliamentary inquiry by the Green Party, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters, announced that 'the government, including the SPK, defends the position that no unlawfully acquired objects should be kept within the collections of the State Museums Berlin, regardless of the time period from which they stem'. It was, in other words, an official guarantee that every object displayed in the Humboldt Forum would undergo provenance research and that this research would be 'made transparent' (Deutscher Bundestag, 2015, p. 2-3). The government position marked a shift in public and political debate that set the *legality* of collections against the *legitimacy* of owning them. The shift, in turn, was closely related to activist activities, including a long correspondence between activist organisations and the SPK (Prosinger, Mboro, & Kisalya, 2013; Kathmann, 2014; Prosinger & Mboro, 2014; Parzinger, 2014), and the sudden cancellation of a public event at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which No Humboldt 21! interpreted as a refusal of Humboldt Forum representatives 'to dialogue' with them in public (No Humboldt 21!, 2014a). In December 2014, *No Humboldt 21!* published a press release containing a list of the human remains and 'war loot' (*Kriegsbeute*) (No Humboldt 21!, 2014b) in the museum collection.
## Critique and complicity

In *Object Biographies*, we addressed Germany’s colonial history by narrat-
ing different stories of the objects’ provenance. We decided to focus on the
violent history of two figures from the historic kingdom of Kom, located
in present-day Cameroon (Nsom, 2005, p. 62). We understood that when
provenance research identifies illegitimate modes of acquisition, the po-
litical consequences can be significant. What does it mean to display colo-
nial loot within an organisation that has yet to take an official position on
colonialism? The question points to a paradox that often confronted me in
my work: the constant risk of legitimising or strengthening a contested or-
ganisation when working within it, even when that work is critical. The fear
of involuntary complicity accompanied me as I prepared *Object Biographies*
and thought about the possible public response.

<figure><img src="image_49.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.4 Ever seen looted art? Poster by No Humboldt 21! www.africavenir.org/de/projekte/projekte-deutschland/dekoloniale-einw aende-gegen-das-humboldt-forum.html, consulted 04.05.2019 © Creative Commons Licence</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_50.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.5 Prussian Cultural Heritage? Poster by No Humboldt 21! www.africavenir.org/de/projekte/projekte-deutschland/dekoloniale-einw aende-gegen-das-humboldt-forum.html, consulted 04.05.2019 © Creative Commons Licence</figcaption></figure>
In March 2015, HLD managing director Agnes Wegner wrote an email to the SPK's legal department (*Justiziariat*) saying that she was 'troubled'. She described her unease at a public event.²⁶ Seated below several *No Humboldt 21!* posters asking 'Ever seen looted art?', she found it hard to justify the presence of war trophies in the museum collections, though she felt institutionally bound to do just that (see figure 2.4). 'I often reach my limits, and words fail me.' She asked for advice and legal consultation and attached the exhibition texts of *Object Biographies*, to inquire about the communications strategy for the exhibition.

With regards to ownership and restitution, the common ground at the SPK consisted in arguing that the collection had been legally acquired within the framework of international colonial-era law,²⁷ and that any claims on artefacts would be beyond the statute of limitations. Accordingly, restitution could occur only 'from an ethical, political or moral point of view.' The duty of the Museum was to uphold the principles of 'keeping, conserving, making accessible'. 'If we give the objects to non-museum contexts, we are breaking the law. For better or worse, the museum perspective is: What has once entered the museum stays in the museum'.²⁸

This position expressed the legal limbo that objects acquired in the colonial era often find themselves. 'Law, by its nature, crystallizes the general consensus at a particular time', Lyndel Prott writes. 'There was no consensus on the (il)legality of colonization before 1960', when the United Nations Resolution on Decolonization was adopted (Prott, 2003, p. 103; see also Schönberger, 2016; 2018). And it was clear that legality at the time of acquisition was the decisive legal standard applied by the SPK. For instance, in 2012, Hermann Parzinger stated that 'what was right then cannot be wrong today' ('Was damals Recht war, kann heute nicht Unrecht sein') (Parzinger 2012). The problem for the SPK and the Humboldt Forum, however, was that the legitimacy of the legal argument had now come under public scrutiny (see also Förster, 2018).

The difficulty of drawing a clear line between legality and legitimacy became evident when we received the wall texts from the SPK's communication department, ten days before the exhibition was scheduled to open. As we learned, the *Justiziariat* and the Humboldt Forum's communication department had the right to control and eventually amend every text that had a possible 'link with restitution' (*Restitutionsbezug*).²⁹ Words and even entire sentences had been deleted; others were added new. For example, in the phrase 'unknown and sometimes problematic histories', the SPK deleted 'and sometimes problematic'. It also expunged the question 'Which histories are told, and which ones are silenced?' In the introductory text, we claimed to shed 'critical light on the museum's networks and practices'. The
new version read that ‘we are taking a new look at the Ethnological Museum, which has long confronted itself with its own collection history and will not only be showing objects in the Humboldt Forum, but also presenting the history of those objects.’

Needless to say, I was not happy with the result. I talked with Agnes Wegner, who thought it best if she, and the two Africa curators jump into the fray. In their communications with the SPK, they argued that our texts were scientifically correct, and that the exhibition project had been approved by the Museum’s and HLD’s directors with the explicit aim of making the Museum’s collection histories ‘transparent’. They also noted that SPK was out of step with academic scholarship, which in the 1990s had begun to identify looted art in the collection. A denial or concealment of that information risked exposing the Humboldt Lab Dahlem to ridicule.³⁰

After several exchanges, Wegner and the two Africa curators were able to reverse almost all the changes. But the process had shed a spotlight on the hierarchical nature of the SPK and its difficulty to take a public stand on the histories of its colonial collections and the issues of ownership and restitution. The emotional rollercoaster of the ordeal – I went from feeling outraged to feeling deprived of authorship – had left me exhausted.

Being affected helped me to understand the curators’ difficult position: how emotionally draining it was to engage critically with an organisation while having to defend it, especially one so complex and hierarchical, and the resulting lack of control over the final results, authorship and public communication.

## Collaboration and control

While planning the exhibition, we repeatedly reminded ourselves of our privileged role in the Museum. As part of an evaluation workshop, we invited the scholars Friedrich von Bose and Nora Sternfeld to comment on our team. They recommended that we rethink the team’s composition in order to break with conventional modes of representation. In particular, they pointed out that we failed to include a person of colour who would be ‘critical of reproduction (reproduktionskritisch) and able to address appropriation (Aneignung) from a Black, anti-racist and activist position.’³¹

After discussing their recommendations, we decided not to change our curatorial team. Instead, we invited two art historians with academic experience in the field, Mathias Alubafi and Romuald Tchibozo, to provide a written statement (reproduced in Alubafi, Rodatus, & von Oswald, 2018) and contribute to a larger research project on *bocios* in Benin and Berlin. Romuald
Tchibozo raised difficult questions about our position in the ‘decolonisation of research’. We examined different power asymmetries present in the project. These included the ability to acquire a visa and travel, the restricted access to the collections and the inability to move the objects beyond the walls of the museum. The control of the exhibition authorship and its products was defined by the organisation, while the budget lay in our hands (Tchibozo, 2015; von Oswald & Rodatus, 2017, pp. 218–19).

Our curatorial duo also contributed to maintaining the power asymmetry. We were only partly committed to giving up our privileged position within the project and to opening up the process (von Oswald & Rodatus, 2017, p. 218). In Bernadette Lynch’s words, despite ‘a commitment to the contact zone’, in terms of both encounter and ‘coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ ((Mary Louise Pratt quoted in Clifford, 1997, p.192), ‘we somehow continue to face the Other with fear, and work hard to exercise control’ (Lynch, 2014, p.6). Neither Mathias Alubafi nor Romuald Tchibozo was part of the curatorial team; they had joined the project after we had defined its general concept. And though we aimed for a particular understanding of collaborative museology for the project, in which the collaborator is defined ‘as expert in a knowledge not present in the museum,’ we afforded insufficient space to this ‘right to co-determination’ (Landkammer 2017, p. 278).

Hence, despite our efforts, we risked repeating, reproducing or reinscribing colonial mechanisms and power structures. Addressing past injustices does not mean that one is sure to avoid reproducing similar injustices in the present.

## Reflexivity and performance

Verena Rodatus and I published an article on *Object Biographies* that pondered the challenges of decolonising research and exhibition-making. Consider the following representative passage:

> We agree with Nora Landkammer, who argues that ‘decolonisation should concentrate on organisational development and on understanding community engagement as an all-encompassing practice for institutions (Landkammer, 2017, p.278).’ This would include prioritising and institutionalizing access to the collections and to the exhibition space for those who have been denied access, contribution and co-production in the making of the museum (Oswald and Rodatus, 2017, p.219).
This is all well and good, but we failed to consider that this kind of self-reflective writing about the exhibition served *us* as a curatorial team by facilitating our own positioning especially with regards to the exhibition's aftermath and academic reception. By contrast, those who had contributed from Benin, in particular those who were unable to travel – such as David Gnonhouévi, Romuald Tchibozo's student who had organised the research trip to Benin – stood to gain little.

Looking back, I feel ambivalent about our observations. Writing can be a highly performative act of self-reflectivity meant to divert responsibility. Friction and conflict remain because the consequences of such reflections are rarely taken seriously. What would 'prioritising and institutionalising access' mean for those who have been denied access?

The ambivalence lies in the fact that appropriation goes hand in hand with defensiveness, apology, reflexivity – and holding on to power. Could gestures of 'inviting' and 'collaborating', as long as they come from *within* the confines of a museum's structures and practices, be anything other than patronising? Is it possible to avoid paradoxical appropriation? Would the alternative be to *not* engage in these debates, to leave one's place to others, or to listen? Is there a possibility of sitting with and enduring these moments of fragility?

## Conclusion

Being affected enables reflection on how the colonial is imbricated in the present. Through it, I noticed how elements of our exhibition maintained and reproduced asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South despite our efforts to address them explicitly. The exhibition confronted us with the presence, reappearance, effects and continuities of the colonial past in our everyday practice and decision-making.

Being affected and using it as a research tool complicate the research of curatorial practice. In the case of *Object Biographies*, being affected shifted the analysis beyond binaries, and pointed to the paradoxes and ambivalence of working with colonial collections from within a contested organisation. By being implicated and being part, I could grasp how and why people grew weary and became defiant. I was confronted with the effects of organisation-al hierarchies, the anticipation of critique, the uncertainty of how my work would be publicly received and my contributions to reproducing the struc-tures and mechanisms I was critical of. At root were questions of curatorial agency and change. When does one become complicit? When is it possible to contribute to political and organisational change?
Shortly after the exhibition’s opening, in 2015, the SPK published its long-awaited statements (*Grundpositionen*) on the ‘treatment of human remains’ and on ‘non-European collections’ (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2015a; 2015b). It confirmed the SPK’s focus on provenance research and the deployment of shared heritage. Critics understood ‘provenance’ as a way to delay questions of restitution³² and interpreted ‘shared heritage’ as a tactic of avoiding returns (No Humboldt 21 !, 2015). Then, in May 2015, Hermann Parzinger shifted course and published an article about the Humboldt Forum titled ‘Berlin’s Rebuilt Prussian Palace to Address Long-ignored Colonial Atrocities’ (Scaturro, 2015). Announced as a ‘collaborative project’ a month later, the museum’s curators would put into practice the abstract and undefined notions of ‘shared heritage’ and ‘provenance’.³³ As in the years to come, the No Humboldt 21! coalition raised their voice in protest. In June 2015, they projected their logo and the abovementioned posters on the Humboldt Forum’s shell (Figure 2.6).

Between 2013 and 2015, a process of negotiation emerged in which politicians, organisations and activists sought to identify and forge a moral consensus on German colonialism. Through this process, the behaviour of the SPK was, like the resulting consensus itself, more reactive than proactive, and often at odds with the Ethnological Museum staff. Meanwhile, the debates around the collections' fate increased awareness of Germany's colonial history (Koalitionsvertrag 2018).

I close these reflections by asking about the role that I can take as a white, privileged academic from within the Ethnological Museum, an organisation shaped by colonial ideology? To what extent can I bring about change from this position? As I have argued, curatorial struggles tend to centre around paradoxes: critique and complicity; collaboration and control; reflexivity and performance. Within complex organisational structures and mechanisms, which side becomes predominant will forever be uncertain and ambiguous. Balancing and withstanding the inherent contradictions is a central (emotional) challenge in curating contested collections. As Nanette Snoep, then director of the Ethnographic Collections of the State of Saxony, stated in 2016: ‘It is not enough to talk a little bit about colonial history, put it in a small showcase, and that’s it. The malaise stays.’ ³⁴
<figure><img src="image_51.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.6 Projection of the No Humboldt 21! Logo on the Humboldt Forum's building shell, 12 June 2015, No Humboldt 21!, photograph by Andreas Siekmann.</figcaption></figure>
## Notes

1. The following quotes are transcriptions from the video recording of the event: *Preußischer Kulturbesitz? Postkoloniale und entwicklungspolitische Perspektiven auf das Humboldt-Forum - Zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern und Human Remains aus der Kolonialzeit (Prussian Cultural Heritage? Postcolonial Perspectives and Perspectives from Development Policies on the Humboldt-Forum - Dealing with Cultural Assets and Human Remains from the Colonial Era)* at the Werkstatt der Kulturen, 22 October 2013, organised by members of No Humboldt 21!, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEojPEqZDSY, consulted 20 February 2020. Quotations are from Arnim Massing and Kien Nghi Ha, translation from the German: '[...] vollkommen fehlenden Sensibilität für einen verantwortlichen Umgang mit der eigenen Kolonialgeschichte'.

2. The point of view expressed in this chapter is solely mine, even if I sometimes use 'we' to describe Verena Rodatus' and my curatorial ambitions and approach with regard to *Object Biographies*.

3. The German title is 'Das Humboldt-Forum. "Soviel Welt mit sich verbinden als möglich." Aufgabe und Bedeutung des wichtigsten Kulturprojekts in Deutschland zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts'. The brochure was available in German and English, https://www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/en/newsroom/media-library/documents/document-detail/article/2013/11/27/media-the-humboldt-forum-to-be-in-touch-with-as-much-of-the-world-as-possible.html. Last accessed 23 May 2019.

4. Examples of key literature on the relationship between museums and colonialism include Clifford (1988); Thomas (1991); Karp and Lavine (1991); Coombes (1997); Clifford (1997); and Gosden and Knowles (2001).

5. Examples of precursory and key literature on the relationship between museums and colonialism include (Stocking, 1985; Clifford, 1988; Thomas, 1991; Coombes, 1997; Clifford, 1997). Concerning Berlin's collections, notably the monographs by historians Andrew Zimmermann and Glenn Penny analyse the relation between colonialism, anthropology, and the museum; as well as Kristin Weber-Sinn's work on German East Africa (Zimmerman, 2001; Penny, 2002; Weber 2005). They were preceded and complemented by articles and dispersed research, focusing on academia and museum institutions (Krieger & Koch, 1973; Essner, 1986; Bergner, 1996; Ivanov, 2001; Penny & Bunzl, 2003; Ivanov, 2005), or particular collectors and museum staff (Gothsch, 1983; Fabian, 1998; Stelzig, 2004; Fischer, Bolz, & Kamel, 2007; Ruggendorfer & Szemethy, 2009).

6. 'Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Clara Herrmann (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) vom 28. Juni 2013 (Eingang beim Abgeordnetenhaus am 01. Juli 2013) und Antwort (Postkoloniale) Auseinandersetzung mit dem Humboldt Forum', Drucksache 17 / 12 360, http://www.clara-herrmann.net/sites/default/files/AnfrageKolonialisierung.pdf, published 28 June 2013, last accessed 20 April 2018.

7. 'Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Niema Movassat, Christine Buchholz, Sevim Dagdelen, Annette Groth, Heike Hänsel, Inge Höger und der Franktion Die Linke. Weiterer Umgang mit menschlichen Gebeinen aus ehemaligen deutschen Kolonien und anderen Überseegebieten', http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/000/1800010.pdf, published 23 October 2013, last accessed 20 April 2018.

8. The exhibition 'Anti-Humboldt-Box' was organised by *Artefakte/anti-humboldt* (Brigitta Kuster, Regina Sarreiter, Dierk Schmidt) and *AFROTAK TV cyberNomads* (Michael Küppers-Adebisi) in cooperation with Andreas Siekmann and Ute Klissenbauer, and was exhibited in different locations.

9. For more information on the organised events, see the association's website, http://www.no-humboldt21.de/programme2/. Last accessed 25 April 2019.
10. A special issue of the internet journal *darkmatter*, edited by *Artefakte//anti-humbolt*, was released in October 2013. 'Afterlives' brought together discussions and scholarly analysis regarding the politics of representation, restitution and historiography regarding the Humboldt Forum. Any action of No Humboldt 21! was documented and published on the initiative's website and has thus become a sort of archive of the continued resistance to the project. They also published a chronology of the events in their common publication (No Humboldt 21!, 2017).

11. Several participants at a conference in Dahlem voiced this frustration (fieldnotes from 10 December 2013).

12. Extract from my fieldnotes, 14 October 2013.

13. Extracts from my fieldnotes, from 8 November 2013, 11 November 2013 and 2 December 2013.

14. Plans for the Africa department exhibition going back to 2008 note the presence of colonial war loot in the collection (V. König, 2012, p. 24). The earliest concept of the permanent exhibition - introduced by Paola Ivanov in 2012 - states that colonial history will occupy a central role in the exhibition. This position was repeated in the exhibition plans published by Peter Junge and Paola Ivanov in 2015 (Ivanov, 2012; Ivanov & Junge, 2015).

15. Using *Beutekunst*, a colloquial term for 'looted art', instead of the official term *Raubkunst* or *Raubgut*, referenced debates concerning art that had been confiscated during National Socialist rule and to debates on contested provenance. This was no coincidence, as the Schwabing art trove of Cornelius Gurlitt had just been revealed as a 'Nazi loot discovery'.

16. Fieldnote from 11 December 2013.

17. Examples include Pataczek (2013); and Fuhr (2013). However, while the exhibitions received relatively little attention, some reviews were positive and encouraging (Wulff, 2013; J. König, 2013).

18. Fieldnotes from 23 February 2013.

19. Personal communications and conversations with the author. Fieldnotes from 23 February 2013, 17 March 2014 and a conversation in 2016.

20. See for the shifts from participant observation to observant participation, Bastien (2007).

21. Discussion of the author's presentation of her PhD project at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac as part of the seminar 'Ecologie des collections', on 7 May 2017.

22. In the beginning of my fieldwork, I received a three-monthly scholarship that took place within the framework of the 'International fellowship programme for sabbatical leave and research residencies at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin' (Internationales Stipendienprogramm für Arbeits- und Forschungsaufenthalte an den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin), https://www.smb.museum/forschung/stipendienprogramme/internationales-stipendienprogramm.html, consulted 20 February 2020. I co-organised two conferences at the Humboldt Lab to fund my research.

23. Paola Ivanov asked me to print the following statement of hers (email communication, 20 May 2022): I never agreed to become one of the protagonists of Margareta von Oswald's dissertation. In addition, I was not informed about the change of focus in terms of content and methodology. It is therefore unnecessary for me to give my consent to the publication of individual text passages (including the research agreement) in the dissertation.

24. Examples include the following: denial of the existence of human remains in the SPK's collections (Prosinger, Mboro, & Kisalya, 2013; Kathmann, 2014) and denial the existence of any museum storage in the museum's cellar (Häntzschel, 2019; Peitz, 2019).

25. Mary Elizabeth Moore describes her feelings with regard to white privilege in similar terms, fearing that her acting 'would be perceived as a racist act and could well be a racist act' (Moore, 2019, p. 254).

26. 10 March 2015, 'Blind Spots: Berlin' (Blinde Flecken: Berlin), https://www.heb-bel-am-ufer.de/programm/pdetail/gespraech-blinde-flecken-berlin/, consulted 02.05.2019.
27. For an extensive review of the legal frameworks for requesting returns, see Splettstößer (2019, pp. 57–71).

28. Fieldnotes from 08 October 2014. The representative explained the legal situation to Verena Rodatus and me during a meeting about communication strategies for *Object Biographies*.

29. Email from legal department, 12 March 2015.

30. Resumé of email exchanges from 12 to 17 March 2015.

31. Notes from Workshop I, 19 June 2014, Ethnological Museum Berlin.

32. See for example Häntzschel (2018); and Zimmerer (2019).

33. In the following years, Paola Ivanov and Jonathan Fine continued to initiate further research and curatorial projects in Tanzania, Namibia, Angola, and Cameroon.

34. This is an extract of an interview with Nanette Snoep at Leipzig’s Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde, 19 April 2016.
<figure><img src="image_52.png" /></figure>
Expanding collection histories:
The museum as peopled
organisation

With my arrival at the Museum, the search for archival material and, in
particular, photographs documenting exhibitions started. My intention
to capture the objects' lives in the Museum required understanding when
and how objects moved within and beyond the Museum's walls. On my
quest, I realised that the (photographic) documentation in the Ethnological
Museum was dispersed and diverse in its materiality. Different museum
staff whom I consulted were not necessarily aware of where to find what.
The research guided me through the entire Museum, beginning with the
Africa department's own photo archive, leading to the Museum's general
archive, then the Museum's photo laboratory, and finally arriving at the
'Americas' archive, which stored photographs understood as 'museum his-
tory' (Museumsgeschichte).

What I found in search of historical documentation was scattered,
unsorted, sometimes in bad condition, and usually difficult to identi-
fy and attribute to particular events, their dates, or even location. On the
computer, single files of images were stored in low resolution in different
folders, with names such as 'general photos historic, unsorted'. Images
were not dated. The file names were unspecific ('Ausstellung Afrika_2.jpg';
'EM_Afrika_2.jpg'). The Africa photo archive consisted mainly of photo-
graphs that didn't have any relation to the collections:¹ the object cards as
well as all the photographs relating to the collection - such as photographs
documenting the 'field' - were destroyed by fire during the Second World
War. The efforts of Kurt Krieger, the Africa department's director (1945-
1985) and museum director (1970-1985), to document the Africa collec-
tions were reflected in laboriously staged, beautiful object photographs.
They constituted an incomplete but approximate public inventory of the de-
partment's collections, published in several volumes since the mid-1960s
(see figure 3.8; Krieger, 1965; 1969a; 1969b; 1990). It is in the department's
photographic archive where I found further singled-out exhibition photographs, negatives, and slides, as well as remnants from old exhibitions, such as maps used in exhibitions, which helped to trace the chronology of exhibitions in the Museum (see figure 3.4–3.8). As part of the department of visual anthropology, I watched and recorded films with the help of the anthropologist Ulrike Folie (see figure 3.1–3.2), including those stored in the so-called secret cupboard (Geheimschrank), and I found internal VHS recordings of the Leipzig repatriation (see figure 3.3). In the ‘official’ museum archive, I identified the documentation of more recent exhibition documentation – since the opening of the new building in the 1970s – with a row of folders documenting the different exhibitions in varying detail (see a series of photographs of the archive in the visual introduction, images 5–12). The traffic of collections to the museum’s exterior were precisely documented by loan contracts. The objects’ movement within the Museum was much more difficult to trace, however, because most exhibitions generally lack documentation (exhibition texts, labels, maps, etc.) and lists of the exhibited objects in particular.

Photographs understood as ‘historical’ were shelved in a room located behind the museum storage of the ‘Americas’. Referred to as the Museum’s photographic archive devoted to ‘Museum history’ by museum staff, the cupboard held one folder and a box with numerous envelopes. These included photographs on cardboard of the museum’s first exhibition, glass plates from the late nineteenth century, but also the extensive and detailed documentation of the construction sites of the Ethnological Museum’s building in the 1960s. As in exhibition catalogues, photographic documentation focused on object photography, not exhibition documentation, one of the inhouse museum photographers confirmed.

The diverse kinds of materialities, their dispersed locality, and the different qualities of conservation confirm an unsystematic and hierarchical approach to the documentation and keeping of the Museum’s organisational histories. Some histories seem to be understood and valued as ‘History’ with a capital H in the organisational self-understanding, but the attention and resources devoted to the organisation’s histories post-Second World War, including exhibition histories, are minimal at the time of research.²

The literature on the Museum focused on its early, formative period in the nineteenth century. Entire books are dedicated to the museum’s ‘founding fathers’, such as Adolf Bastian, the museum’s co-founder, and Felix von Luschan, curator for Africa and Oceania from 1885 till 1911 (see, for example, Fischer, Bolz, & Kamel, 2007; Ruggendorfer & Szemethy, 2009). The comprehensive research project on the archives of the Africa department (1873–1919), led by Christiane Stelzig, is a central reference (Stelzig
& Röhm, 2000; Stelzig, 2004). Two monographs draw in particular on the early histories of the Ethnological Museum: Glenn Penny's *Objects of culture. Ethnology and ethnographic museums in imperial Germany* (2002) and Andrew Zimmerman's *Anthropology and antihumanism in imperial Germany* (2001). Documentation of the museum's recent histories are summarised in museum guides, and particular aspects of this history are touched upon in the museum's own journal (*Baesseler Archiv*), as well as in the yearly reports of the Foundation Prussian Cultural Heritage (*Jahrbuch*) or in particular articles or book chapters (see, for example, Schindlbeck, 2013; Schorch, 2018). On the recent histories, Friedrich von Bose's ethnography of the debates around the Humboldt Forum addressed the imaginations and plans of the Stadtschloss (von Bose, 2016). However, the museum's only comprehensive (self-)documentation is a special issue of the *Baesseler Archiv* from 1973. The issue appeared on the occasion of the museum's hundredth birthday and traces the history of each department, as well as the museum's history itself. What is documented, what is taken care of, and how, indicates which histories are given importance and are taken seriously within the organisation.

A museum's history is not accomplished with the making of a collection. Rather, this history starts to unfold in following the collection's fate in its making: the exhibition, conservation, storage, inventory, and digitisation, as well as documentation and research. These processes continue within the Ethnological Museum. To document these museum histories meant to work, listen, and be there. Organisational knowledge was scarcely documented, but rather was incorporated by the people working in the Museum, some of them for several decades. It was only by working with museum staff that I was able to comprehend, trace, and document these histories – histories that crucially shape the organisation and its everyday, but which were also subject to rapid change in the context of organisational restructuring. Ways of knowing and being in the Museum were passed on and constructed through personal interaction in the organisation. I needed to find out who knew what and who was interested in sharing.

While the Museum is certainly centred on its collections, my observations and participation in the museum work led me to see the Museum as a 'peopled organisation' (Morse, Rex, & Richardson, 2018, p. 116). Conceiving the museum as peopled means to devote attention to particular people. In this book's case, I draw mainly on the accounts and knowledge of Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, who was responsible for the reorganisation of the Africa storage, as well as Boris Gliesmann, the Museum's database manager. The history of digitisation and storing is briefly introduced here and then two chapters are entirely devoted to their contribution to the Museum in the making, focusing on the histories of inventory and taxonomy (chapter
<figure><img src="image_53.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_54.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_55.png" /></figure>

Figures 3.1 – 3.3 Watching films from the Visual Anthropology department, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Margareta von Oswald
<figure><img src="image_56.png" /></figure>

Figure 3.4 – 3.8 Different forms of existing documentation of exhibition and objects (object cards, diapositive, negatives, a map from 1926 exhibition, object photographs), Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer: Margareta von Oswald, except for 3.8, photographer: Anna Lisa Ramella
four) and the history of the making of the East Africa storage (chapter five). Whereas these chapters give space to their personalities and voices, the present chapter serves as an overview to the Museum's histories, presenting these in chronological order.

In this chapter, I trace the Africa department's history from its foundation to the present day. I concentrate on the multiple physical relocations and structural changes that were involved in the collection's movement. Here, I mention the history of the Africa department's permanent exhibitions only cursorily. Whereas my initial aim was to write and analyse the exhibition history of the department, including the many major exhibition projects taking place outside of the physical Museum itself, I came to realise that this was a task too large to take on at this time. In the following, I give a first impression of the richness of the Museum's archive and visual material, serving also as an invitation to deepen and work on the many gaps and blind spots in the Museum's history.

**Building and locating a collection: The (Königliches) Museum für Vökerkunde between Mitte and Dahlem (1886–1973)**

'By 1900, Germany's leading ethnographic museum had descended into chaos.' This is how historian Glenn Penny opened his book on Berlin's Ethnological Museum (Penny, 2002, p. 1). The historian Andrew Zimmermann, in turn, foregrounded that the collection had become so large that the situation had begun to 'escape all control' by 1886, the year of the museum's foundation (Zimmerman, 2001, p. 190). Then called Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, the Museum's collections were housed in a building in Berlin's Königgrätzer Straße, just next to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, the Museum for Decorative Arts, which today is occupied by the Gropius Bau (see figure 3.9).³ By 1900, the museum director Adolf Bastian stated that 'the cases are overfilled so that every instructive arrangement of the collection remains impossible' (quoted in Zimmerman, 2001, p. 191). In their contemporary reading of the Museum's history, both historians describe in detail how the museum founders' mission to represent and research humanity in its completeness had failed. Instead of research, museum staff were forced to concentrate on the management and administration of what was arriving in the Museum. Curators complained about their task being reduced to working 'like handymen, to take inventory of objects as they came in from every possible part of the earth' (Fritz Graebner quoted in Zimmerman, 2001, p. 194). Researchers that came specifically to do research on the collections were forbidden access. As outlined in this book's introduction, European
<figure><img src="image_57.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3.9 Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, at the corner of Königgrätzerstraße and Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, 1886, wood engraving from the Leipzigner Illustrierte Zeitung, 1886, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin</figcaption></figure>
colonialism enabled an overwhelming quantity of objects to arrive, adding to the already existing collections, some of which had their origins in Berlin's Royal Kunstkammer. The situation prompted staff to describe the condition of the Museum as 'untenable' (Westphal-Hallbusch, 1973, p. 29). In 1907, the Museum was threatened with closure by the police, unless corridors and stairs were immediately cleared so that at least two people could pass each other (Westphal-Hallbusch, 1973, p. 29).⁴ All of the collections were housed within the Museum, with no separation of exhibition and storage spaces (see figures 3.10-3.11). Visitors complained about the apparent chaos. They lamented that the public interest was explicitly neglected by museum staff and demanded repayment of their admission charges (Stelzig, 2004, pp. 40-41). Adolf Bastian's fervour to represent humanity in its diversity and entirety turned out to be inherently paradoxical: the more objects arrived, the less overview researchers and visitors would get.

For years, museum staff, anthropologists, and politicians in Berlin heat-
edly discussed what to do with the masses of objects and how and where to
construct a new museum building to properly house the collections. This
included quarrels over whether to separate 'display collections' and 'study'
or 'work collections' (*Schau-/Studien-/Arbeitssammlung*) as well as whether
to build distinct museums representing peoples considered of 'nature' and
of 'culture' (*Natur-/Kulturvölker*), and, more precisely, whether to separate
the 'Asian' collections from the 'ethnological' ones (Westphal-Hallbusch,
1973, pp. 18-30). A first relocation, however, of the collections was only re-
alised in 1906. The collections were moved to a cheaply and rapidly con-
structed 'shack' (*Schuppen*) in Berlin's Dahlem suburb, located about twelve
kilometres from the Museum. The architect Bruno Paul was commissioned
to design an entirely new museum in the same area. The draft, consisting
of four buildings representing four different world continents excluding
Europe, was approved by the Berlin parliament (*Abgeordnetenhaus*) in 1912
(see figure 3.12; see also Westphal-Hallbusch, 1973, p. 32).⁵

Interrupted by the First World War, the construction of the building in
Dahlem, which had started in 1914, was left unfinished. It consisted only
of two floors without a roof. After the war, the Museum was confronted
with major financial problems: it was converted into storage spaces, whose
costs were covered by selling parts of the collection itself, namely so-called
*Doubletten*, objects considered doubles of other objects in the collection
(Westphal-Hallbusch, 1973, pp. 29-34). As a result, the exhibition spaces
stayed in Berlin's centre, and the storage spaces were moved to Dahlem. The
new exhibition suggested a change of paradigm with a 'singled-out' arrange-
ment of objects, on 950m2. Exhibition and storage would from now on be
separate entities. The exhibition was curated by the new department director,
<figure><img src="image_58.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_59.png" /><figcaption>Figures 3.10–3.11 Exhibition title unclear ('Africa collections') (before 1926), Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Königgrätzer Straße, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photographer unidentified</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_60.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3.12 The planned museum buildings around 1910. View of the northern part, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin</figcaption></figure>