In the exhibition, Letters of Stone, running currently at the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (FHXB) in Berlin, Germany, you learn that the first official “Stolpersteine” (stumbling stones) placed in Germany, were for Siegfried and Edith Robinski, relatives of South African anthropologist Steven Robins. Stolpersteine are brass covered pavement stones that “memorialised Jews persecuted by the Nazis”.

Placed outside the homes where deported Jews had last lived, they commemorated the painful history of Jewish expulsion and extermination. Surprisingly, then, the Stolpersteine placed for members of the Robinski family also appeared to locate South African memory in the streets of Berlin.

The installation of the Stolpersteine formed part of Robins’s decades long journey, told in his book “Letters of Stone”, to trace his family history and restore their dignity as Holocaust victims. The book revolves around a careful reading of a collection of handwritten letters but it also references the history of anthropology and German race science in southern Africa. “Letters of Stone” ties the personal story of restitution into an academic history linking Germany and South Africa.

The book is also about material stuff that makes telling stories and recalling memories possible. By referring to museums, paper texts and brass plaques, it says something about the basic stuff that makes memories possible. And while this is about one author telling the story of his family, this project involves many people contributing to a better understanding of Jewish histories. Three moments in the book bare this out.

Holocaust Museum

One major turn in the uncovering of the Robinski family story came in 1996 when Robins visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC. Struck by the “disorientating effect of the exhibition”, the sheer heaviness of mass extermination, he approached a librarian and explained that his “father’s family had perished in the Holocaust”.

The librarian pulled out a copy of the Berlin Gedenkbuch, the register of the last known addresses and dates of deportation of Jews living in Nazi era Berlin. There he discovered the names and fates of “Cecilie, David, Edith, Edith (Siegfried’s wife), Siegfried and Hildegard” Robinski, names he had until that point not known.

Robins said:

I felt like a detective stumbling across the first hard evidence… What had once been vague and abstract knowledge now took on a concreteness and facticity.

But it could have been different. The museum project was launched in 1978 by the then US president, Jimmy Carter. But progress was a struggle, as historian Edward Linenthal shows in his behind the scenes story of the making of USHMM, “Preserving Memory”. Officials wondered about how to include the story of the Holocaust into the story about the American nation.

The USHMM was officially dedicated in 1993, roughly three years before Robins’s visit. What is important here though, is that there was an institution in Washington stocked with a collection of important objects and books like the Berlin Gedenkbuch. Also, that there were competent librarians who knew what information to make available to visitors – that all made it possible for the author to find this information about his German family.

Stumbling Stones

Using the information in the Gedenkbuch, Robins was able to find his relatives’ last known address in Berlin. The director of the FHXB, Martin Dusphol, suggested that it would be a fitting memorial to place Stolpersteine outside this house. With Dusphol’s help, Robins approached Gunter Demnig, the artist who made and installed the Stolpersteine, and initiated the process of placing Stolpersteine with the Berlin City Council.

The Stolpersteine started off as part of an art project by Demnig that documented the first order for deportations in 1992 in Cologne. The project grew in that city, but then through another art project, Demnig came to Berlin and installed 55 Stolpersteine in the city’s Kreuzberg district.

Placed as art objects that were meant to make people stop, think and remember the city’s former Jewish residents, these Stolpersteine were illegal although tolerated, because of their social importance. There are now tens of thousands of Stolpersteine all over Europe, and the project is ongoing.

Much like the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which memorialises black people who were forcibly removed under apartheid, the FXHB documents the history of the colourful and rapidly changing neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. It has been instrumental in facilitating the installation of Stolpersteine across Berlin. With the assistance of this important institution and people working there, the first official Stolpersteine commemorating the last home of the relatives of a South African anthropologist was installed in Kreuzberg.

Handwritten Letters

But the story of Robins’s relatives took another sharp turn with the surprising discovery of a parcel of handwritten letters. It was a small, decades old collection documenting a fraught correspondence between relatives from 1936 and 1943, the Nazi era. Stored in a plastic bag, in a cool, dark place, they had been protected as a family archive. But the stories they were meant to tell were largely unreadable, since many were written in an old German Gothic Script. They needed to be decoded before they could be translated.

And so the letters were scanned on a computer and sent to the FHXB who helped translate them into standard German. It was through connections established at the Holocaust Centre in Cape Town, that Robins met Ute Ben Josef, an art historian and former librarian. She became the translator and primary interpreter of the letters, revealing a deep, difficult family story that stretched from Germany to South Africa.

The exhibition “Letters of Stone” shows that there is more to memory than words and ideas. Referring to letters, books, brass plaques and archives, it is also about the materiality of memory, and how material things make a scaffold that supports people’s memories. Moreover, it shows how the recovery of memory and history is social and collective, involving many people who all add in different ways in making an understanding of the past possible.

–The exhibition Letters of Stone runs until the 12th of November, 2017 at the FHXB in Kreuzberg.

–This article was first published as “Holocaust story tells how material things make a scaffold for people’s memories”, on The Conversation Africa, 10 September 2017.

All Photographs  © Röhner Ellen/FHXB Museum

Sitting in a back room of the Babylon Kino, in downtown Berlin, we listened as Fabia Mendoza proudly riffled off the numerous front pages her husband, the artist Ryan Mendoza, had made since the sensational story broke about the relocating of civil rights icon Rosa Parks’ house. We had just watched her documentary The White House, the official backstory to the project. It presents a visual chronicle of how Ryan Mendoza entangles a journey of self-discovery into the current housing blight in Detroit, ultimately rescuing Rosa Parks’ house from the demolition list and re-erecting it in Berlin.

The documentary shows Ryan Mendoza initially traveling to Detroit to acquire a house to send to Europe for an art installation. To the artist’s complete surprise, the White House project generates a slew of negative publicity, casting him as a contributor to the blight and criticizing him for promoting “Ruin Porn.” After a second urban intervention, he gains notoriety as an artist working with blighted houses in Detroit, which eventually leads to Rhea McCauley, Rosa Parks’ niece, approaching him for assistance to save the house where Parks lived in the 1950’s from demolition. Despite initial reservations about playing into a “white savior” stereotype, he takes on the project, stripping the house, packing it up, and rebuilding it alone back in Berlin.

In the Q&A after the screening, a polished, clued up, and prepared Fabia Mendoza, spun the project’s positive media impact. She was at pains to dispel any lingering suspicions about her husband being just another white savior. Yes, there was some controversy, but what was more important was “awareness”, that everyone was now talking about Rosa Parks, she explained. Yet, we wondered, when did people stop talking about Rosa Parks?

The documentary carries the tension of a good story trapped in a short-sighted race-sensitive idea of white male saviors exploiting black culture. The film calls on black working class Detroiters to tell their story about the city, about poverty and the housing crisis. We’re introduced to kids cycling on colorful, pimped-out bikes who tell us about their streets and the city. Later, interlocutors sing or rap for the director, taking advantage of the opportunity to express their black city culture. This is “real Detroit” telling its own truth.

Hearing that Ryan Mendoza wants to relocate a house from Detroit to Germany for his White House project, members of the public initially express surprise but eventually lend their support, perhaps in the belief that it will highlight their plight. And yet, strangely, while it is undeniable that this is about banks and the city of Detroit abandoning poor black folk, the voices the Mendozas coral in this footage often insist that this is not a story about race. It is one about humanity.

Against the black urban mise en scene that is Detroit, Ryan Mendoza appears as an intruder who breaks into scenes with his tallness, his goofy, larger-than-life self. He’s in the houses, down and dirty in the business of demolition. He makes a cameo in a rap song filmed in the aftermath of the demolition of Rosa Park’s house, and is shown as the lonely worker painstakingly rebuilding it again in his courtyard during a cold and dark Berlin winter. You get the sense that for him it is all pomp and drama, deeply felt. When the media coverage gets dark, he delivers candid monologues about how personal a crisis the misunderstandings are.

But what indeed has Ryan Mendoza put up in Berlin? A house, a heritage object, or an art-installation? Is a house still a house when it is dismantled, its frame moved across the world, and reassembled in a courtyard without street access? Berlin regulations do not allow one to simply up and build a house where you like. Fabia Mendoza made it clear: the Rosa Parks House is officially a “temporary installation” and as such is unconnected to utilities, only partially visible from the street, and without an interior. For us at least, this change in state is important. And indeed, members of Miss Parks’ family clarify, remarking in the film and elsewhere how the house is now “in its afterlife.”

Read in this way, Ryan Mendoza has made a personal art project out of a piece of Black history. Herein lies one of the fundamental issues of the white savior complex, a phenomenon nodded at but entirely undigested by the artist. To riff on Teju Cole’s eloquent critique, in this form of the white savior complex, African-American heritage here, and Black heritage more generally, is simply a space onto which white egos can be projected, a space in which any white European or American can satisfy their artistic or emotional needs.

In doing so, even when “making a difference” or “raising awareness”, they draw more attention to themselves than to the issues at stake, inserting themselves into a conversation that fundamentally should never be about them. “It feels good,” notes for example a Berlin Tagesspiegel journalist about Berlin being able to play host to the house. The question is never asked, though, of whether it is important or even necessary that a German city feel good about the legacy of an African-American civil rights icon.

To be clear, as one always needs to be when critiquing the white savior complex in action, this is not racism, nor do we fault the Mendozas for, as far as we can tell, they’re making an effort to help both the Rosa Parks Foundation as well as Detroit and Berlin-based youth social initiatives. Yet we wonder: was the $100,000 raised to disassemble and move the house to Berlin somehow not enough to save the house where it was, or otherwise help the Rosa Parks Foundation on the ground in Detroit? Or were other options simply never considered?

In the end, how far have we come? The problem remains that the story is still about the white savior. It is not about justice but still about the emotional experience that validates privilege. It is only enough to pause and acknowledge, as Ryan Mendoza does before continuing to tear down his first house, that one is white and this should really be about black people.

There is hence no consideration of the other ways in which a person with a certain privilege can attempt to help a community. In the end, Rosa Parks’ house is no longer part of the black heritage landscape in the United States – across the world, Ryan Mendoza’s Rosa Parks House ensures that the artist’s name now has a place next to Miss Parks’ in any conversation about her legacy. Yet, wasn’t this always about his story?

Like so many others, this rescuing of black history comes with a slick sheen of altruism. But for the Mendozas it framed as a struggle, a burden. They never wanted this house. It belongs in the US, they insist. As Ryan Mendoza himself put it, “I would like to see it here for as short a time as possible. I totally love this house but this is not my house. I’m trying to give back as much as possible.” But what is never made clear, however, is what it would take to get the house back – or where exactly it would go.

The house has taken on a life of its own, through educational projects, and art and cultural performances that riff on Rosa Parks’ place in American cultural memory. But in all of this, we cannot help sense that something is not quite right. That the house is out of place here in the outskirts of Berlin. That Rosa Parks’ story fits awkwardly with that of a white European artist seeking to reconnect with his American roots. Somehow, in this fantastic tale of rescue and re-erection, we cannot but shake the feeling that, ultimately, Rosa Parks is simply a famous guest in the big story of Ryan Mendoza’s house.

“This post was first published on 18 May 2017 on Africa is a Country http://africasacountry.com“

Als die Kunsthistorikerin Bénédicte Savoy vor gut vier Wochen aus dem „Internationalen Expertenteam“ austrat, das die Gründungsintendanz des Humboldt Forums berät, forderte sie vor allem eines: mehr Provenienzforschung, also mehr Forschung zur Herkunft und zum Erwerb der Objekte, die im Humboldt Forum ausgestellt werden sollen, vor allem wenn sie aus kolonialen, gewaltförmigen Kontexten stammen.

Die FAZ schlug daraufhin vor, eine „Provenienzstelle“ am HUF einzurichten. Die Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz erklärte in einer Stellungnahme, alle Exponate des HUF seien bereits „einer ersten Prüfung der Provenienz unterzogen worden“. Dennoch legte Präsident Hermann Parzinger im Interview nach: „Wir brauchen dringend eine Stelle, die uns bei der Finanzierung solcher Provenienzforschungsprojekte unterstützen kann“. Und auch dieser Wunsch ist in den letzten Monaten immer wieder geäußert worden: Die Stiftung Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste möge ihr Portfolio – und damit ihre Förderung – auf koloniale Provenienzen ausweiten.

Es liegen also genügend Vorschläge auf dem Tisch, die sich aufgreifen ließen, um Provenienzforschung im Humboldt Forum wie an deutschen ethnologischen Sammlungen insgesamt langfristig zu verankern. Doch wer die Debatte verfolgt, kommt nicht umhin sich zu fragen: Welche Art von Provenienzforschung ist hier eigentlich gemeint? Wieviel davon braucht es – und wieviel davon ist schon geleistet worden, etwa in Berlin, Bremen oder Stuttgart, wo es ja schon seit einiger Zeit Drittmittelprojekte in dem Bereich gibt? Und schließlich: Mit welchem Ziel soll Provenienzforschung letztendlich betrieben werden?

Zunächst zur ersten Frage: Bénédicte Savoy hat – sicher bewusst überspitzend – argumentiert: „Für mich ist es weniger wichtig zu wissen, welche Funktion ein Gegenstand in Namibia hatte, als zu erfahren, unter welchen Umständen er hierher gekommen ist“. Das ist erstaunlich, denn was, wenn die Umstände des Erwerbs nur zu rekonstruieren sind, wenn man die „Funktion“ und Bedeutung des Objektes und damit auch den persönlichen, kulturellen oder auch politischen Wert erkennt, der ihm von den Herstellern, Nutzern und „Erwerbern“ vor, sagen wir, 100 Jahren zugeschrieben wurde?

Geht es also wirklich vor allem um Raubgut, wie es auch der Historiker Jürgen Zimmerer mit dem Hinweis auf den „vermuteten unrechtmässigen Erwerb aller Objekte“ immer wieder nahelegt? Zunächst einmal besteht, was geraubte und entwendete Objekte angeht, in der Tat ein immenser Forschungsbedarf. Erst vor wenigen Jahren wurde im Depot des Berliner Ethnologischen Museums Kriegsbeute aus dem Maji-Maji-Krieg (1905-1907) im damaligen Deutsch-Ost-Afrika (heute Tansania) „wiedergefunden“ – also gute 100 Jahre nach ihrer Einlagerung. Solche Funde dürfen in Zukunft kein Zufallsprodukt oder Resultat des Engagements einzelner KustodInnen bleiben.

Dort, wo Kolonialkriege und koloniale sogenannte „Strafexpeditionen“ stattgefunden haben, wurden fast immer auch Haushalte, Paläste, Tempel, Schreine und Heiligtümer etc. geplündert. Eine systematischere Provenienzforschung könnte mit solchen gewaltförmigen Kontexten beginnen, zumal in den ehemaligen deutschen Kolonien, die für deutsche Institutionen auf jeden Fall Priorität haben sollten. Darüberhinaus wurden Objekte im Rahmen kolonialer Machtasymmetrien auch von Einzelpersonen abgepresst, gestohlen, zu billig ertauscht und erkauft. Forschungen und Publikationen zum deutschen Kolonialismus, auch zum kolonialen Alltag, die vieles davon erhellen können, liegen vor, sie müssen nur endlich systematischer in Beziehung zu den Sammlungen gesetzt werden. Natürlich wirft das auch die Frage nach recht- oder unrechtmäßigem Besitz und Eigentum auf und wird in einigen Fällen zu Rückgaben führen, wenn diese dann auch gewünscht oder sogar gefordert sind.

Allerdings: Wer Provenienzforschung allein von der Raubkunst-Debatte her denkt, bekommt ethnologische Sammlungen weder in ihrer historischen noch in ihrer aktuellen Vielschichtigkeit in den Blick. Zunächst einmal beherbergen ethnologische Museen auch neuere Sammlungen – nicht zuletzt solche, die EthnologInnen seit den 1970er Jahren in kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit dem Kolonialismus und in Zusammenarbeit mit ExpertInnen der Herkunftsgesellschaften zusammengestellt haben; EthnlogInnen, die sich im Zuge der so genannten Writing-Culture-Debatte kritisch mit Formen und Modi der Repräsentation befasst, postkoloniale Theorie rezipiert, die wechselseitige Konstruktion von „Eigenem und Anderem“ herausgearbeitet und sich kritisch mit globalen Verflechtungen auseinandergesetzt haben.

Zweitens bedeuten auch koloniale Erwerbszusammenhänge nicht immer gleich, dass es sich um Raubgut handelt. Nehmen wir ein Beispiel aus dem afrikanischen Kontext: Zahlreiche Objekte in den Sammlungen zeugen davon, dass sich afrikanische Künstler, Kunsthandwerker und Händler die europäische Nachfrage nach „exotischen“ Gegenständen um 1900 zunutze gemacht und explizit für den dadurch entstehenden Markt produziert haben. Afrikanische Akteure partizipierten damit zum Teil sehr aktiv am sich herausbildenden Welthandel. Genauso gab es Tausch oder Geschenke zwischen Eliten, es gab Überlassungen, wenn Gegenstände nicht mehr gebraucht wurden und viele Dimensionen mehr. Auch wenn dies alles unter kolonialen Bedingungen stattfand und daher jede diesbezügliche europäische Quelle mit kritischen Blick zu lesen ist: Schon Nicholas Thomas hat mit seinem Buch über „verflochtene Objekte“ im und aus dem Pazifik 1988 gezeigt, dass wir den Blick für die Handlungsspielräume lokaler Akteure schärfen müssen und sie nicht allein zu „Beraubten“ machen dürfen. Gerade dies ist von Anfang an auch ein Anliegen postkolonialer Studien gewesen.

Um solcherart komplexen Dynamiken zu erforschen, reicht es aber nicht, mit kolonial- oder kunsthistorischen Methoden an die Sammlungen heranzugehen. Hier sind vielmehr das Fach Ethnologie und im oben angeführten Beispiel die afrikanische (Kunst-)Geschichte mit ihren einschlägigen Methoden gefragt: mit ihrem Blick für innerafrikanische Verflechtungen, ihrem Zugang zu mündlichen Überlieferungen und ihrem Interesse an der Komplexität und Historizität von Geschichts- und ästhetischen Diskursen vor Ort.

Damit ist auch ein grundsätzliches Problem konventioneller Provenienzforschung benannt: Provenienzforschung als ein Nacherzählen der Stationen des Erwerbs und der Aneignung der Dinge durch Europäer greift zu kurz und ist eurozentrisch – und das nicht nur, weil sie die Bedeutung eines Dings wie auch die Orte, Zeiten und Distanzen, die in seiner Provenienzgeschichte eine Rolle spielen, zunächst einmal nach europäischen Maßstäben bemisst. Darüberhinaus sind viele Dinge, noch bevor sie in die Hände von Europäern gelangten, schon vor Ort verkauft, getauscht, geschenkt, bisweilen sogar geraubt gewesen. Haben wir nicht aus der Forschung zur Geschichte der Sklaverei und ihrer Abschaffung gelernt, wie komplex sich das Interessensgeflecht verschiedener AkteurInnen auf und zwischen den Kontinenten darstellen kann?

Genau hier hakt ethnologisch informierte Provenienzforschung theoretisch und methodologisch ein: Sie kann aktuelle und historische Konzepte vom Recht an einem Ding oder auf ein Ding entfalten, die sich mit seiner Herstellung und seinem Gebrauch einst verbunden haben oder heute noch verbinden. Letztere lassen sich manchmal nicht in Begriffen wie Eigentum fassen und vor allem nicht in Kategorien von „individuellem“ vs. „gemeinschaftlichem“ Eigentum einteilen. Ethnologisch informierte Provenienzforschung kann die Bedeutung der Objekte und ihres Transfers auf Seiten der verschiedenen AkteurInnen und die Geschichte der Ansprüche, die auf Objekte erhoben werden, beleuchten. Im Zuge des „ontologischen Turns“ der letzten Jahre fragt die Ethnologie auch verstärkt danach, ob ein Ding tatsächlich immer nur ein Ding ist und von allen für ein solches gehalten wird, oder ob es nicht auch andere Möglichkeiten gibt, die Verbindungen zwischen Dingen und Menschen zu deuten: Was ist zum Beispiel mit beseelten Dingen? Was ist mit den Beziehungen, die Menschen gezielt durch den Tausch und die Weitergabe von Dingen stiften? Welche Verantwortung tragen uns also beispielsweise Geschenke aus der Kolonialzeit auf?

All diese Aspekte beleuchtet eine ethnologische Provenienzforschung – vor dem Hintergrund einer Wissenschaft (der Ethnologie bzw. Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie), die international seit Jahrzehnten, etwa im Rahmen der Material Culture Studies, eine kritische historische Bearbeitung von Sammlungen vorantreibt. Entsprechend diskutierten auf einer Tagung mit dem Titel „Provenienzforschung in ethnologischen Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit“ im April dieses Jahres EthnologInnen und HistorikerInnen aus Deutschland mit internationalen Gästen und KollegInnen aus der NS-Provenienzforschung über verschiedene diesbezügliche Ansätze, Methoden und Strategien. Neben dem Desiderat einer langfristigen Systematisierung und Institutionalisierung wurden dabei zwei Dinge klar: Erstens, Provenienzforschung in diesem Bereich muss von Anfang an bundesweit vernetzt angegangen werden, weil koloniale Erwerbungen aus ein- und demselben Kontext in der Regel gleich in mehreren Museen in Deutschland zu finden sind. Gründe hierfür liegen einerseits im enzyklopädischen Ansatz der Wissenschaften jener Zeit, andererseits in der Konkurrenz der Museen untereinander. So gibt es Kriegsbeute aus dem Maji-Maji-Krieg an mehreren ethnologischen Sammlungen in Deutschland, genauso wie Objekte aus dem Besitz von König Njoya von Bamum in Kamerun.

Zweitens müssen besitzende Institutionen von Anfang an mit Individuen, Institutionen und Interessensgruppen der Herkunftsländer kooperieren. Es reicht nicht, „source communities“ zu beteiligen, vielmehr müssen Forschungsagenden gemeinsam ausgehandelt werden. Ein solches Vorgehen erfordert intensive Beziehungsarbeit und ein Netzwerk, das sich in der Regel nur durch langjährige Kontakte in die Herkunftsländer der Sammlungen aufbauen lässt. Es geht um ein neues Paradigma: um die gemeinsame – einvernehmliche, aber möglicherweise durchaus kontroverse – Produktion von Wissen über diese Sammlungen. Und dies nicht nur in exemplarischen Einzelprojekten, sondern in größerem Stil, auf nachhaltige Art und Weise.

Das würde eine systematischere Provenienzforschung auf von der bisher gemachten unterscheiden: eine größere Vernetzung in der Fläche, eine bessere Abrufbarkeit und Vermittlung der Ergebnisse in der Öffentlichkeit, so dass eine breitere Reflexion über die Entstehungsgeschichte der Sammlungen und Institutionen im Zusammenhang mit dem kolonialen Projekt und über ihre Rolle heute möglich wird. Eine dahingehende Sensibilisierung der Öffentlichkeit und der Besucher entsteht aber nicht etwa durch längere oder präzisere Objektschildchen, sie entsteht durch Ausstellungen und Vermittlungsprogramme, die explizit über die Problematik von Provenienz und über den Zusammenhang zwischen Sammlungen und Kolonialismus sprechen (wie beispielsweise die Ausstellung „Deutscher Kolonialismus“ jüngst im DHM). Solche Konzepte gilt es in den nächsten Jahren verstärkt zu entwickeln, mit einem besonderen Augenmerk auf die Frage, wie sich aus all der mühevollen Forschungsarbeit auch Ideen, Material, Visionen und Kooperationen für weitergehende zukünftibe Projekte entwickeln lassen.

Doch zurück zum Humboldt Forum: Provenienzforschung darf aus diesen Gründen nicht einfach nur die ‚Vorarbeit’ zu einem mehr oder weniger schillernden ‚Schaufenster der Wissenschaft’ in Nachbarschaft zur Museumsinsel sein – damit würde nur eine Art ‚Clearingstelle’ für den Ausstellungsbetrieb geschaffen. Gerade in der ehemaligen Kolonialmetropole Berlin kann es nicht allein um den lückenlosen Herkunftsnachweis und/oder um die Rückgabe von Raubgut gehen. Vielmehr muss ‚postkoloniale Provenienzforschung’ hier auf ein umfassendes Verständnis (post-)kolonialer Verflechtungsgeschichte und auf eine transnationale Einbettung der Sammlungen abzielen. Dafür ist ein langfristigen Bekenntnis der Kulturpolitik zur Aufarbeitung des kolonialen Erbes in den ethnologischen Museen in Deutschland vonnöten. Unumgänglich ist der Auf- und Ausbau von dauerhaft angelegten Forschungsstrukturen um die betreffenden Sammlungen herum, auch unabhängig von einem zu schaffenden „Forschungscampus“. Projektstellen für eine „Humboldt Forum Kultur GmbH“, wie sie zuletzt in zweistelliger Zahl geschaffen wurden, helfen bei der Bewältigung solcher Herausforderungen nicht weiter – stattdessen muss die Arbeit der Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler in Dahlem auf eine breitere konzeptionelle wie auch strukturelle (finanzielle und personelle) Basis gestellt werden.

Larissa Förster ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin des Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage und Sprecherin der AG Museum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde, die im April 2017 eine Tagung zu „Provenienzforschung in ethnologischen Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit“ (in Kooperation mit dem Museum Fünf Kontinente München) veranstaltete.

“The museum is not only an institution of modernity and ordered citizenship, but is the primary institutional form of empire. It was made and is being remade and adapted through both sides of empire’s history: by a rapacious and violent empire of plunder and pacification, and by empire as ‘benevolent colonisation’, humanitarianism and trusteeship over people and things”
Ciraj Rassool

The establishment of CARMaH has brought an urgently needed think tank to the Humboldt-University’s Department of European Ethnology. One of its major research projects, Making Differences in Berlin: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century”, stresses “the challenge of dealing with ethnographic collections and displaying ethnography in the current Berlin developments”, thereby questioning “divisions between ‘European’ and ‘non-European’” while emphasizing that “the collections and practices of the Ethnological Museum, and the move to the Humboldt-Forum, are an obvious and central focus here”. The latter is also publicly disputed by an international association of groups acting under the slogan No Humboldt 21, an initiative which, I would argue, makes a serious engagement with non-Eurocentric perspectives on Western museums and heritage mandatory. Having the opportunity to hear – and not only to read – positions, for instance, from African scholars in a lecture and being able to discuss these issues with them in person is still a rare event in German academia. Thus, further strengthening the ties between CARMaH and the Department of European Ethnology’s research laboratory, Critical Europeanisation Studies, I searched for a scholar who would offer such a perspective. My initial choice was Kwame Opoku, a prominent lawyer from Ghana with international expertise in Western museums, cultural goods from Africa, Asia and America, and all the corresponding – although widely ignored – UNESCO resolutions. Opoku has worked as an Ombudsman for the United Nations in Vienna and has repeatedly written about Berlin and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation with respect to the delicate case of Nofretete. However, the Berlin branch of Africavenir had tried several times in vain to invite Opoku to Germany. Fortunately, this omnipresent organisation could recommend another acclaimed scholar which CARMaH had already planned to invite.

Ciraj Rassool is a Professor of History and Director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape; he has served on the boards of several South African museums and wrote his dissertation about The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa. His collaborative project on the South African Empire – South Africa replaced Germany in 1915 as colonizing power in Namibia – was published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies in 2015. Rassool is currently continuing his research on biography during a sabbatical in Germany as a fellow of the University of Cologne’s International Colleague Morphomata and his convenient location along with CARMaH’s Margareta von Oswald’s perseverance enabled CARMaH to successfully invite Professor Rassool to Berlin.

Together with the late Martin Legassick, in 2000 Rassool co-authored the book Skeletons in the cupboard: South African museums and the trade in human remains 1907-17. This publication is a striking example of what engaged science can achieve: it initiated the repatriation of human remains from an Austrian museum back to South African soil. The story of this repatriation in Rassool’s CARMaH lecture “Rehumanising the Dead of Anthropology” demonstrated how his interest in biography, empire/colonialism and museum/objects are linked. The lecture’s provocative title served as a reminder that there was an era in Western knowledge production when Physical Anthropology, and what is nowadays known as the sphere of Social or Cultural Anthropology (or Ethnology), were not as clearly distinguishable as they are today. It was the period at the beginning of the 20th century which Legassick once labeled “the South Africanization of science”. The term refers to the trade and collection of human remains from the plundered graves of the Khoisan community which were located in the Northern Cape border region. It was this specific region, Rassool states, “through which the flows of human remains and artefacts began to be directed to South African museums in the service of a special South African concentration on ‘living fossils’, as they competed with their European counterparts”. While some of these remains became founding collections of South African museums, others ended up in an Austrian museum in Vienna.

Rassool applied a narrative strategy tending towards empathy right from the beginning of the lecture when he asked the audience to stand up and commemorate the Soweto Uprising, as it happened to be the South African Youth Day. In the intriguing speech that followed, he narrated the odyssey of two corpses that were removed from African soil for Europe’s scientific purposes more than 100 years ago. It is crucial to note that Rassool remained faithful to an empathic approach: using the biographies of Klaas and Trooi Pienaar as the central theme, he gave life to these two corpses – a married couple with documented names. He outlined the complex colonial setting in which these two Khoisans had lived their lives as servants on a farm until they suddenly died from malarial fever. He described where they were buried, the posthumous objectification of their corpses by tomb raiders, how their corpses – or what was left of them after being shipped to Europe – were transformed into European museum artefacts, how they were finally “rehumanised” in an unprecedented process of negotiation between Austria and South Africa, and officially reburied in South Africa in 2012. This unusual form of scientific storytelling enthralled the listeners.

Several different groups were engaged in that process. The research conducted by Legassick and Rassool quasi-decolonized South African museums: collections there not only included skeletal remains of Khoisans with South African origin, but also such of Namibian provenience, hence indicating the ambiguous South African status of having been colonized and colonizer simultaneously. At the same time, activist scholars and civilian groups in Austria had already criticized the manner in which the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (1870-1921) was being remembered and officially honoured in Austria. In their book, of course, Rassool and Legassick had also named Pöch as the person mainly responsible for the robbery of the Pienaars; however, they did not know of the Austrian critique of Pöch at that time. One of the Austrian organizations involved in that critique was the Southern Africa Documentation and Cooperation Centre in Vienna. In Rassool and Legassick’s book, the Austrian activists found more detailed evidence against Pöch. Strategic alliances were forged on an international level, crucially reinforced by the involvement of the local Khoisan community represented by Petrus Vaalbooi as well as the South African government on a state level. The latter clearly demonstrates the importance of a strong state when an African country makes repatriation claims.

The process of “rehumanisation” deserves particular consideration here, because the South Africans insisted the human remains be repatriated in coffins as deceased humans. At first, the Austrian authorities rejected such a demand, arguing that there is no juridical ground for such a manoeuvre, and that what was left of the corpses could only be returned as simple museum artefacts. But the pressure from the groups involved and eventually the support of the Austrian Museum for National History’s director, Maria Teschler-Nicola, finally led to success. This success is at least partly explicable by the combination of the political power of the South African government, as seen in the speech of Jacob Zuma at the reburial of the Pienaars, together with the proof in Rassool and Legassick’s book that the remains were identified as Khoisans, and more specifically, that there is an oral history of the Pienaars in South Africa. Archival records from South Africa as well as from Austria also played an important role: it was the Western preoccupation with the provenience of its museum objects which made the complete identification, and thus the rehumanisation, possible.

The lecture poignantly revealed the underlying Eurocentrism – or plain cynicism? – of concepts like “digital repatriation”, the much too often knee-jerk answer of Western museum directors when questions of repatriation are being raised. Also in the case of the Khoisan community, such practices had already been applied. What does “digital repatriation” mean for an African people who have not only a blatant history of violent colonial suppression but also an epistemological conception of the relationship between bodies and objects, one which totally differs from an European understanding? It reduces the whole idea to absurdity. In this context Rassool mentioned the term “Survivance” from Native American studies and its importance in that case. He questioned the Western concept of museums itself: for Rassool, “the modern evolutionary museum that emerged as part of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ is a primary site of the formation and reproduction of empire”.

In the following discussion, Rassool reminded the audience that instead of being obsessed with object biographies, we should rethink what a museum is – and what the relationship between museum, object and society is. With the latter, he answered a question raised by CARMaH’s director Sharon Macdonald of whether the rehumanisation debates had changed the way in which repatriation of objects was being approached. Rassool argued that the separation between objects and bodies is a concept which simply does not work in African contexts. Other questions addressed the idea of rehumanisation, and if this is originally a South African concept. Rassool reminded us of the twenty years of discussion about recreating humanity in post-Apartheid South Africa, about family members who were objectified in their life and are now rehumanised as citizens of a nation, not just as some “Bushmen”, and about the loaded term which “repatriation” is, because it so unidirectional and exclusively refers to the nation. The emergence of a South African nation takes on a very different meaning if you look at it from a Khoisan or an Afrikaner’s point of view. New museums, Rassool hence argued, need to be spaces which problematise the nation. An interesting moment was when he asked us to think about what rehumanisation means when you can no longer identify the body parts.

The last question was raised by Reinhart Kößler who just recently published a book titled Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past. This book not only broaches the issue of remembering the genocide perpetrated by Germans against the Herero and Nama in what is nowadays known as Namibia, but also the issue of human remains from there, remains that were brought to Germany for the grand cause of racial science. Some of them have already been given back to Namibia. Kößler pointed to competing narratives which exist in Namibia, one of the government which constructs the victims of the genocide as national heroes, and one articulated by the Herero and Nama – underrepresented in the Namibian government – which emphasizes them as ethnic heroes. Of the remains that were returned, Kößler stated, some were neither Herero nor Nama, and, as a German and thus a member of the perpetrator’s group, it gave him an uneasy feeling saying this to representatives of the victims. Rassool explained that these remains probably still lie in a Namibian ethnographic museum instead of having been given back to one specific group, and that the national structures in this country are just too different from those in Germany. By saying this, Rassool suggested that Kößler was applying a German perspective on Namibia in this case; according to an African understanding, bones can tell history – which makes questions of ethnicity secondary. He then ended even more pragmatically, museums make persons, and are thus a project of person formation which shall always be open to new forms.

Sebastian Pampuch is currently research assistant and doctoral student at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin. His research project is about African exile in a divided Germany.

Further reading:
Ciraj Rassool: Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, 2015, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 653–670, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2015.1028002

“It is the building that always catches and holds the sun, the grey center of the city, its regime-orange reflective glass mirroring the setting sun perfectly as it moves from panel to panel along the chequered surface, drawing you in to notice it on the way up the Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. (…) When the Palast der Republik was first opened in 1976, it was clad in white marble with 180 meters of windowed facade, triumphant in its transparent splendor, and so named “the house of a thousand windows”. There is now no trace of the white marble; the structure is raw wood and the windows are tarnished like dirty metal. It is as if the state is letting time make up its mind, letting entropy do its job and make the decision it is loath to make. But the sore in the centre of the city is too public and so, a month ago, the wedding cake won and the Palast der Republik was condemned. The revivalists were triumphant. Soon Museum Island will be homogenised into stone-white fakery and will no longer twinkle with a thousand setting suns.”

Tacita Dean’s (2004; cited in Carvajal, et al. 2008) description of the facade of the now demolished Palace of the Republic evokes the ambiguities surrounding its erasure from the city fabric and the wider dilemmas of presencing the GDR past (Macdonald 2013). Having visited the site over a decade later, walking around the construction site of the new Berlin Palace, I could not find any traces of the artist’s experience. No remnants of the “house of a thousand windows” are to be seen. The emerging Berlin Palace – intended to house the Humboldt Forum – is not a light trap. With its empty windows, this raw, matte facaded concrete structure appears similar to many residential blocks found in post-socialist cities (image 1).

The accompanying fundraising catalogue meticulously presents the cost of every part of the building’s future window decoration – members of the public are encouraged to make financial contributions to the new palace’s expensive baroque ornaments (image 2).

In front of the construction site, other types of objects are on sale. Street vendors sell GDR memorabilia to tourists on their way to Museum Island – there are matryoshka dolls, GDR car stickers, replicas of military hats and toy Trabants. These ersatz artefacts in front of the demolished Palace of the Republic replace the absence of GDR material culture of the site. (image 3)

On the opposite site of the river, with an entrance directly facing the construction site, the DDR Museum is strategically positioned to cater for those who want to learn about the formerly divided city in situ. Alongside other GDR heritage sites and museums scattered around Berlin, such as the Stiftung Haus der Geschichte Museum in the Kulturbrauerei, the Cold War Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, the Stasi Museum, Berlin Wall Memorial Bernauer Straße and others, the DDR Museum represents one of the many facets of Berlin’s GDR past. As a visiting researcher at CARMaH, I spent an afternoon at the museum tracing the material from the demolished Palace of the Republic and participating in its guided tours. This short review emerged out of the visit experience and from discussions with the academic researchers at the Department of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

A window into a socialist past?

Within its historically resonant location, the popularity of the museum is striking – on a summer day, the space is full of visitors. German and international tourists line up to explore the exhibition individually and in groups. The traces of the Palace of the Republic are located next to a Trabant – one of the museum’s highlights. The Palace exhibition includes an architectural model of the “house of a thousand windows” and an example of the lavish modular ceiling lamps that once illuminated the interiors. The explanation panel, “Palazzo Prozzo”, emphasises the symbolic role of the Palace as a state spectacle. One of the copper window panels, that once enchanted Tacita Dean, hangs from the ceiling. The corresponding label describes the chequered surface of the facade as a cabinet of mirrors:

“This pane of metallised thermo-glass from a Belgian manufacturer was part of the curtain facade of the Palace. 25 metres high and 6870 m2 in the area, the metallised cladding produced a golden mirror-effect. Rumor has it that Erich Honecker decided personally on the appearance of the palace, against the wishes of the architect. Designed to reflect sunlight, he felt it added extra prestige to his parliament building.”

Alongside these objects that emphasise monumentality and status, a display cabinet presents a restaurant menu and a coffee set. These functional artefacts remind of the utilitarian uses of the Palace and its numerous amenities, restaurants and entertainment venues, bringing up the social memory related to daily life of the space. This display (image 4) evokes one of the key dilemmas of ‘past presencing’ GDR material culture – reconciling the ambiguities of the mundane and the political, the monumental and the ordinary.

On entering the GDR apartment exhibition space, the first German-speaking tour guide jokingly remarks that some visitors come into the space and immediately notice the lack of windows. This is just a museum – he comforts them – there were windows in socialist blocs. In a dictatorship, the guide explains – everything is government-controlled – life is characterised by homogeneity and scarcity. There is no individuality like that found in the West – everything is geared towards uniformity. Objects are produced fast, cheaply and all look the same. The guide points at the toilet tiles – in the GDR these were seen as a scarce resource – produced almost exclusively for export. He proceeds to explain the co-dependence of GDR manufacturing and West German consumption – the Westerners were supporting the dictatorship through purchasing cheap Eastern products. He remarks that this morally dubious exchange is similar to our consumer behaviour now.
The German tour of the living room begins with a question: Where can you watch TV from the toilet? In the DDR Museum! As with the windowless room, the toilet’s lack of a door is not a reflection of actual living conditions under socialism, but rather explained as a mere decision of museum design. “There were doors in the GDR”, the guide reassures. The guide proceeds with a description of GDR television, emphasising the political uses of media and the risks associated with tuning away from state propaganda programmes. He tells a story of GDR children being asked by their teachers about the look of the clock shown before TV news programmes. Via the child’s description of the clock’s hour markers – points or stripes – a teacher could learn whether the children’s parents watched East or West German television, and report them to the authorities if the latter.

On the next tour of the exhibition, our German-speaking guide focuses on the specific mode of consumption under socialism. All products and domestic objects – he explains – were unified to reduce social tensions – the logic was that the same products meant no jealousy and this led to lack of war. At the same time, he points out, enforced uniformity inevitably led to “problems with being an individual” and most East German citizens had “arranged their lives” to overcome the state-imposed similarities. Illicit Western music in a cassette player was one of the many examples of tactics of resistance. Beyond the mode of dictatorship-led interpretation, the guide presents a reality of negotiations and tensions of everyday life.
As another English-speaking tour enters the space, the guide lifts a wall painting to reveal the “bug”. We are being recorded; in the East your private sphere is infiltrated by the Stasi. The recording device is situated opposite the television set – almost all East Berliners had a TV set to watch West German channels. “You’re trapped in the communist world” – the guide concludes – “but you can still watch West German news”. The guide explains that television was instrumental in building an appetite for a Western lifestyle. After the Wall fell and welcome gifts were offered from banks for their new potential customers, many went to pick up the welcome money (Begrüßungsgeld) to use it in purchases in West Berlin’s department stores. The former East Berliners commonly chose products they had seen on West German TV. In this way, the guide explains, “TV played an important role in bringing together the nation” after reunification.

The last tour is presented to a group of German adolescents. The visitors are encouraged to pick up the phone to listen to people speaking with a “bad Saxon accent” and take a group photograph while exclaiming “Stasi”. The discomfort of socialist life is best exemplified through toilet paper – grey and uncomfortable. It was lucky that the regime was stopped by a friendly revolution – so unusual in comparison to what has recently happened in Ukraine – the guide remarks. It is important to know history – he continues – in order to identify certain patterns and tendencies. He mentioned that we are currently experiencing a situation in Poland and Turkey comparable in some ways to Germany in 1935. After this introduction, the group is invited to further explore the contents of the room.

For Susan Buck-Morss (2002), domestic space under socialism was a place “where people actually experienced the differences between socialism and capitalism in daily life (byt), both as dream and as reality” (2002: 190). The living room presented in the DDR Museum and interpreted by the tour guides evoked dream-like qualities of a multifaceted, ever-changing place of control, enforced uniformity and struggle for individuality. Notions of entrapment and acts of everyday resistance are evoked, bringing out discomfort of things as well as notions of homeliness. Paradoxically, the tour guides’ kaleidoscopic interpretations of the domestic space are reminiscent of a Soviet anecdote reported by Geoffrey Hosking. A listener calls the Armenian Radio with a question: “Is it possible to foretell the future?” The presenter answers: “Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. The problem is with the past: that keeps changing.” (cited in Watson 1994).

In the DDR museum’s eerie representations, the imaginaries of “grey life” under dictatorship are punctuated by “Stasi” jokes. Repeatedly, the typologised realism of interactive in situ display is being contested by the guides who emphasise the artificiality of the space, reminding the visitors that “this is just a museum”.

Unhomely palaces, uncomfortable objects

Representations of the GDR past have been one of the most problematic challenges of German historiography and museology. The DDR Museum, like many other private museums presenting the period, was built on donations of everyday material culture and chose to focus on daily life. As one of the tour guides pointed out, some of the contributors of the collections have sent their objects with labels. He pointed to a photo album sent by an anonymous donor with a homemade, printed label stating: “Typical GDR holiday album” (bottom object – image 5). This object signifies the ambiguity of the artefacts – was the album of a typical type, did it represent typical destinations or did it denote a typical GDR family’s holiday experience? This ambivalent act of giving away personal belongings and self-classifying them as “specimens” of the time is typical for the challenging processes of musealising the GDR. Objects such as a family photograph or the Palace building where many East Germans met for meals do not escape the ambiguities of classifying and interpreting GDR material culture and its museological representations.

For me, this accumulation of GDR objects in the shadow of the erased Palace is the greatest contradiction. Taken together, as a paradoxical whole, the demolished building and the crowded museum demonstrate that the representation of the GDR and its material culture remains a space of tensions in Germany. Complex histories and multiple memories, absences and conflicting reconstructions of the past are drawn together. It remains to be seen what the position of this part of Berlin’s past in relation to the new Palace and the Humboldt Forum exhibitions is. Will the GDR past enter the future-oriented, cosmopolitan vision of the new Forum? Or will it always be relegated to its shadows?

Magda is a Senior Research Associate working on the Reinventing Learning Cities project at the University of Bristol. Her PhD (2010-2015) combined ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums and archives. As part of this project, she co-curated exhibitions at the Constance Howard Gallery and the Horniman Museum. Magda is currently a co-organiser of the Forging Folklore Research Network. She was a visiting researcher at CARMaH in July 2016

Key research interests: heritage and material culture, curating, urban anthropology, design and innovation research

Selected references:

Berdahl, D. (2008) ‘Re-Presenting the Socialist Modern: Museums and Memory in the Former GDR’ in K. Pence and P. Betts (eds) Socialist Modern: East Germany Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 345–66.

Bach, J. (2015). Collecting Communism: Private Museums of Everyday Life under Socialism in Former East Germany. German Politics and Society, 33(1/2), 135-145.

Buck-Morss, S. (2002). Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West. MIT press.

Clarke, D., and Wölfel, U. (Eds.). (2011). Remembering the German Democratic Republic: divided memory in a united Germany. Springer.

DDR Museum. The permanent exhibition of the GDR Museum focusing on everyday life in the GDR. Available at: http://www.ddr-museum.de/en/exhibition. Accessed: 27 July 2016.

Dean, T. (2008) ‘Palast’. In: Carvajal, R., Dean, T., & Fer, B. Tacita Dean: film works. Charta.

Jampol, J. (2012) ‘Problematic Things: East German Materials after 1989’. In: Divided dreamworlds?: the cultural cold war in East and West. Romijn, P., Scott-Smith, G., & Segal, J.(eds.) Amsterdam University Press.

Macdonald, S. (2013). Memorylands: heritage and identity in Europe today. Routledge.

Ludwig, A. (2011) ‘Representations of the Everyday and the Making of Memory: GDR History and Museums’. In: Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany, David Clarke and Ute Wölfel (eds). Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37-53.

Saunders, A., and Pinfold, D. (Eds.). (2012). Remembering and rethinking the GDR: multiple perspectives and plural authenticities. Springer.

Watson, R. S. (1994). Memory, History, and Opposition. School of American Research Press.

Winkler, A. (2015) ‘Remembering and Historicizing Socialism: The Private and Amateur Musealization of East Germany’s Everyday Life.’ In: Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization. McIsaac, P. M., & Mueller, G. (Eds.). University of Toronto Press.

Jobst Moritz Pankok (geb. 1974 in Mülheim an der Ruhr, arbeitet und lebt in Berlin) ist ein deutscher Bühnenbildner, Regisseur, Kurator und bildender Künstler. Sein Interesse gilt sozial engagierten Kunstprojekten, die zumeist mit der Kultur der Sinti und Roma in Zusammenhang stehen. Seit 2011 ist er künstlerischer Leiter der von ihm gegründeten Galerie Kai Dikhas (dt. “Ort des Sehens”), der ersten ständigen Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst der Sinti und Roma im Aufbauhaus am Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Die Galerie vertritt u.a. das britische Künstlerehepaar Damian und Delaine Le Bas. Seit ihrer Eröffnung hat Pankok über 70 Ausstellungen in der Galerie kuratiert und ist Herausgeber der Katalogreihe „Ort des Sehens. Kai Dikhas. Place to See“ über zeitgenössische Kunst der Sinti und Roma sowie die KünstlerInnen der Galerie.

Einige Tage vor unserem Interview traf ich Pankok auf einer Podiumsdiskussion im Rahmen des European Month of Photography (EMOP) im November 2016 mit den KünstlerInnen und KuratorInnen Valérie Leray und Nihad Nino Pušija in der Galerie. Die Galerie ist nun zum dritten Mal in Folge auf der in ganz Berlin stattfindenden Veranstaltungsreihe EMOP vertreten. Um uns herum steht die Ausstellung von Pušija (Parno Gras) und dem an dem Abend leider verhinderten André Jenö Raatzsch (Your Beautiful Blue Eyes), dessen dekorierter Tisch mit Bildern und Stühlen auf Abwesenheit, Repräsentation und Fremddarstellung hinweist: Ein Stuhl am Tisch ist scherzhaft für die “Bild Zeitung” reserviert. An dem Abend wurde (deutsch-, englisch-, und französischsprachig) über die Darstellung von Sinti und Roma im “Zeitalter der Partizipation” gesprochen. Welchen Einfluss hat das Medium der Fotografie auf die Darstellung von Realität? Und in welchem Zusammenhang steht Kunst und Dokumentation, vor allem mit Verweis auf die Frage nach der Selbst-Repräsentation von subalternen oder ausgegrenzten Minderheiten? Hinter den Stuhlreihen und im Eingang befindet sich die Rauminstallation “Your Beautiful Blue Eyes” von Raatzsch, bei der man nicht erahnen könnte, dass es sich um Kunst von Sinti und Roma handelt – überhaupt verzichtet die Galerie auf solche Hinweise, die die Kunst bereits im Voraus beschreiben und rahmen würden. Ein Zitat von Roland Barthes im Ausstellungsflyer verdichtet diese ästhetische Position: “Letzten Endes ist die Fotografie nicht dann subversiv, wenn sie erschreckt, aufreizt oder gar stigmatisiert, sondern wenn sie nachdenklich macht.” (aus: Die Helle Kammer)

Wie kam es zur Idee einer Galerie in Berlin?

“Für eine solche Darstellung benötigt es innovative Konzepte, die Tradition mit Zeitgenössischem, zum Beispiel in der Kunst, nebeneinander darstellt, wie beispielsweise im Jüdischen Museum.” 

Eine Galerie ist natürlich im weiteren Sinne ein Ort der Kunstvermittlung, deswegen machen wir auch Veranstaltungen, die über das enge Programm einer Galerie hinausgehen. Aber ein Kerngedanke einer Galerie ist nicht nur, dass durch Kunstvermittlung die Galerie als Ort für BesucherInnen entsteht, sondern für uns ist ganz klar, dass wir die Galerie auch als einen kommerziellen Ort sehen. Es ist uns ganz wichtig, dass wir hier nicht aus einer Art von “Mitleid” die Kunst präsentieren und dies als geförderter Ort machen. Wir meinen, dass die Kunst die wir ausstellen daher auch “marktfähig” ist in dem Sinne, dass sie eine hohe künstlerische Qualität aufweist. Ich glaube, dass Kunst, die eine gewisse Dringlichkeit hat und aus einer bestimmten Kommunikationsnotwendigkeit entstanden ist, also auch einen kommerziellen Wert haben kann und “darf”. Die Kunst, die wir ausstellen, hat also einen besonderen Wert und kann das Interesse von Sammlern wecken – und sollte dies nicht aufgrund ihrer Exotik, zum Beispiel, sondern weil durch die Umstände und Kommunikationsnot der Minderheit gerade hier eine besondere Kreativität zum Vorschein kommt. Es entstehen viele interessante und ausgefeilte Konzepte, mit dem Thema der Minderheit sich auseinanderzusetzen. Das wir ein kommerzieller Ort sind ist daher sozusagen Teil der Emanzipation von Kunst aber auch eine Forderung, die im Raum steht.

Dieser Text basiert auf einem Interview mit Moritz Pankok, geführt am 4. November 2016 in der Galerie Kai Dikhas. Jonas Tinius ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (post-doc) am Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Er schrieb seine Doktorarbeit über politisches Theater und Migration in Deutschland und forscht seit 2016 im Rahmen des Projektes “Making Differences in Berlin” (AvH-Stiftung) zu kuratorischen Praktiken und zeitgenössischer Kunst in Berlin.

“Was macht eigentlich ein Museum?” The headline on a label at the children’s corner of the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin caught my eye the other day. One thinks one knows the answer, but in fact, presenting an unambiguous response to this seemingly easy question to a child would pose a problem. “Now let’s see how they manage to get that across”, I thought almost gloatingly. Only recently I was fascinated by how the DHM managed to break down complex historical facts on German colonialism on specific labels in so-called ‘accessible language’. Curious to find out what museums do, I read on: a museum collects a great variety of things, the label told me, it examines and displays them. It obtains valuable but also very ordinary objects. There is one thing, however, these different objects have in common: under no circumstances will the museum throw them away! (“Ein Museum wirft sie auf keinen Fall weg!”).

Rather than the statement as such, it was more the affirmative nature of the exclamation mark that gave me some thought. It added an indignant and defensive layer to the label, anticipating the possibility that someone might think that throwing away things is what museums might do; unacceptably so.

The polite word to use for such a process in a museological context is ‘de-accessioning’, but even under this label the phenomenon as such has not been widely discussed in museum studies and related fields. Why this is so, and why museums are (apparently) bound to keep objects forever has been subject to a book I recently co-edited on museum storage areas, spaces where thousands of objects continue to exist without ever being shown (ed. with Kavita Singh, Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, forthcoming with Routledge). What are these objects, and why do museums feel an obligation to keep them? During my two-month fellowship at CARMAH these questions became pertinent in the conversations I had with various team members in the context of a variety of seemingly different projects, which pose very similar questions: what do we keep, and why? How do we know whether what we keep might be of interest for future generations? What do we get rid of, and how can we guarantee that we will not regret such decisions? Whose interests do we need to recognize when we keep objects for the future? These questions also came to the fore on a more political level at a roundtable I was involved in about ‘Heritage and the Politics of Recognition’, following an inspiring lecture by Laurajane Smith at CARMAH in December 2016. But most people would agree that they also play a role in our daily life. “Surely, you too own something which you will keep forever”, the museum label in the Jüdisches Museum concluded. Indeed, everyone who has undertaken some serious spring-cleaning has been confronted with this question. In these odd moments we envision our personal belongings as a potential archive for a future we cannot predict and for an audience we do not know; a moment, which can trigger thoughts much deeper and more existential than the original meaning the objects in questions ever had for us.

Halfway through my fellowship, I was confronted with these questions when I had to help clear the room of a great-aunt of mine who had died in an almshouse. She left no immediate descendants. The awkwardness naturally attached to such an occasion was enforced when my grandmother asked me to pick an object or two of my choice. Her sister (my great-aunt) loved playing the recorder, crocheting, and teaching budgies how to speak. Her tiny room was full of objects, which represented these peculiar passions, but I feel no particular affinity to any of these things. What to take? Something which was meaningful to her? Or meaningful to me? Unable to take a decision I observed how the dynamics unfolded: the family split into people who have “a thing with things” (and love owning many), blithely piling all sorts of strange knickknacks in bags and boxes, and those who don’t, like my ‘purist’ aunt who impatiently waited forever at the doorway, constantly asking whether we were finally done. For some reason I still need to figure out why no male family members had turned up in the room. I later found my uncle, enjoying cake in the kitchen.

In retrospect, the experience felt like a microcosm of many of the questions we had discussed at CARMAH about the material culture of the future: do we keep things for us, for those who originally owned them, or for our descendants? A workshop I carried out at CARMAH in January 2017, ‘Beyond the insular view: Berlin’s Museumsinsel in the light of current museological transformations’, took these questions further by looking at current debates about preservation both in Berlin and in the Middle East. Preservation, we discussed, is more related to disposal and even destruction than we often tend to think. Objects not being ‘selected’ for preservation are likely to be quickly disposed. It is often the case that the removal of former buildings, i.e. destruction, is a condition for the preservation of another. Palmyra’s construction as an empty tourist site in the early 20^th century by the French Mandate, for which a lively village inside the ruins had to be destroyed, is a case in point. Up to then temples had been used as mosques, churches and even as a space to give birth. In Berlin, the ‘resurrection’ of a Prussian castle at the expense of the removal of the DDR’s Palast der Republic is one example of a collective decision in which one historical past was prioritized over another. Deciding which objects and buildings should and should not be preserved in the historically charged architectural and geopolitical infrastructure around Berlin’s museum island adds an additional layer to a debate, which is already highly controversial. Going far beyond Berlin’s large construction site on the Schlossplatz, the hardly noticeable and seemingly innocent clearance and removal of material culture in the city – former DDR flag poles and border posts – might today be labelled a necessary ‘disposal’ in a place with countless building projects. But, in the future, these small acts of removal might also be considered by some an act of violent destruction of historical traces.

The museological reflex to keep as many things as possible ‘just in case’ may counteract such potential conflicts, but even here, canons, taste and preferences change. Storage space is limited. Be it in a museum, during house-clearance, or in urban structures; the preservation of material objects is in fact a complex and multi-layered process in which several groups of interest are likely to remain ‘unrecognized’ (to speak with Laurajane Smith). Given the variety of possibilities and the complexities it is all the more noteworthy that preservation tends to not only be presented as a moral duty, but that is also subject to specific normative regulations adopted by institutions throughout the Western world; institutions which extend their values to remote territories and material culture, for instance, in the Middle East. In other words, current debates rarely consider that preservation and destruction are not necessarily opponents, but potential accomplices in many ways. It is perhaps one of the greatest ironies that these values and their seeming imperturbability are part of the reason for widespread destruction in some parts of the world: Objects seen of value by some but as “idolatrous” to others were sometimes destroyed precisely because they were considered valuable and worthy of preservation by opposing parties. In short, attacks on so-called ‘shared’ heritage in the Middle East may be targeted subversions of the preservation paradigm. But this – to use a German metaphor – is yet another construction site.

Mirjam Brusius, is a research associate at TORCH, University of Oxford.

I managed to avert an ill-fitted winter coat and several hair clips after it was suggested that those were the things I should take. The problem was that there were things I actually did want to take, such as a tiny photograph of my great-grandmother in a silver amulet. But alongside other photographs this precious thing instinctively made its way to a red paper box, which everyone agreed my grandmother should inherit (who was in fact too busy with finding future homes for all those worn out coats in the wardrobe to even notice the amulet). Going through the piles of papers I found an envelope stamped in Cambridge, Mass, which contained a pile of photographs I had taken myself and sent to my great-aunt in 2013. I let it slip into my bag. Odd as it may seem, I liked the idea that my photographs went in circles and decided to archive the envelope and its content as a record of my cordial relationship with my relative. After much pondering I also took two further things, which I felt represented not only my great-aunt more specifically, but also the charged situation we were in on that day: a crocheted ladybird made out of wool and a nutshell, and a peculiar styrofoam bird – quickly adopted by some children present – which contained an authentic beak and feathers, possibly to serve as a substitute for one of my great-aunt’s birds, which had recently passed away. This bird itself (and in a way also the ladybird made out of a nutshell) carried baggage related to the issues of preservation and memory.

Silenced, ignored or ‘unrecognised’ people are, by this very definition, not part of the regular media-museum discourse. The CARMAH event, Heritage and the Politics of Recognition sought to explore how diverse communities in a city can be given a voice, listened to and represented in heritage and museum culture. So whose heritage is represented in public spaces? And who decides what is ‘our’ shared heritage?

Three stimulating lectures on people-power, the methods by which citizens are facilitated and enabled to, not only, have their stories represented, but also in doing so change the present and influence the future. All three lectures featured apparently disenfranchised citizens and the story of how these communities insisted that their heritage be represented in an often indifferent society. The three examples that were presented by each speaker were: the lives of de-industrialised Coal Miners, oppressed Inner City populations in London, and the exploited citizens of Newhaven, USA.  A panel discussion sought to examine how the experiences of diverse communities in other cities could be useful in defining how Berlin will represent its history, heritage and communities. I have a special interest in this topic, with experience in working with disengaged young people in museums. My role in Berlin is to help develop the Museum für Islamische Kunst at the Pergamon into a visitor focussed and inclusive experience.

In their talks the speakers outlined communities that could be described as being ‘unrecognised’, ignored or unenfranchised community. Laurajane Smith (Head of the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, the Australian National University, Canberra) discussed how in the 1980’s the mining communities of Great Britain were disenfranchised by the then Government, whose leader Margaret Thatcher decreed ‘that there is no such thing as society’. Towns’ and even some cities economies were destroyed and once proud communities humiliated. For thirty years these communities have been victims/survivors of destitution and neglect. As a group of people the British coal miners, their families and the towns that they lived-in can be seen as one community. Gareth Millington (Department of Sociology, University of York) presented the example of the people of Brixton. Brixton was a mainly Afro Caribbean neighborhood in London. For an accurate depiction have a look at the film Babylon from 1980. The 1981, the last days of the post-war settlement, riots were the result of, ‘institutional racism’ by the police and other agencies caused a community to be oppressed. David Huyssen (Department of History, University of York) described the cultural and economic influence of Yale University on the city of Newhaven, USA.  A post-industrial town, Yale, in the centre of the city, is the most powerful employer and has redeveloped swaths of the city. However, Newhaven has been subjected to ‘progressive inequality’ between the wealthy university in tandem with its business partners and the people of Newhaven many of whom are employees of the University.

One observation that could be suggested is that the process of heritage formation is borne by conflict, civil disobedience, strikes, revolution and political movements. Perhaps to find the heritage of the future we need to look for disquiet in the present. So we have examples of three ‘unrecognized’ communities and how these people harnessed heritage to become visible to either the authorities or general society.

The post-coal mining community of Overton and Wakefield, West Yorkshire, felt that there was mis-recognition, that they were underrepresented. Their story was not being told. The working mines were never going to return. So for regeneration and economic reasons the community government decided to re-develop the mine as a Heritage Museum, The National Coal Mining Museum at Caphouse Colliery in Yorkshire England. A significant aspect of the museum experience is the underground tour led by ex-miners. The community turned to heritage from which they developed self-esteem and recognition to acquire re-distribution of resources, which they achieved. The people of Brixton who were often treated with prejudice sought their ‘Right to the City’. The right to the city is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville. Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a “demand…for a transformed and renewed access to urban life”. So the initial cultural reaction to unrecognition were riots (an observation by the author is that the end of the Coal mining industry was also marked by conflict, perpetrated by the police against the miners), but subsequently the revolutionary culture of that period is now celebrated and admired. Cultural developments that lead directly back to the riots of ’81 include the Black Cultural Archives, Windrush Square and ‘First Child’ Sculpture which is a Soweto uprising memorial. The heritage is also in the nostalgia for the agitators and the civil unrest.  And in Newhaven, The university workers union has joined forces with the city’s other two main unions to create a powerful voice of the people. This union of unions have broken-down spacial and racial barriers that were originally constructed by the actions of the university. They have created a political movement that seeks to address racial and economic divisions and they have acquired a degree of authority by being voted onto the local council. They have used this authority to re-instate a sacked college kitchen worker, Corey Menafee, an African-American dishwasher, who knocked out a stained-glass window-pane that showed black slaves harvesting cotton in the fields. As Corey related, he no longer wanted to be subjected to seeing the “racist, very degrading” image at his place of work. The union is also challenging the college over its name Calhoun College, in honour of its alumni, slaver John Colhoun.

To this writer a similarity between these examples is that the ‘authorities’ did not approach these groups and invite them to tell their stories .These groups insisted that their concerns be discussed. In the case of the coal miners it was the local council who represented these communities that triggered the idea for the heritage museum and in London and Newhaven, it was people self-organizing to create change. Top level authorities did not beckon them into the establishment.

A thread that runs through these three cases is that of the politics of recognition. Professor Sharon Macdonald cheerfully introduced Laurajane with the observation that French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur has distinguished as much as 23 different usages of the notion “to recognize” grouping them under three main categories, namely recognition as identification, recognizing oneself and mutual recognition.

Recognition is a tool that Laurajane described. Heritage and identity are intertwined with commonsense and with policy. How can we define the power and consequences of the heritage we create? What power does heritage have? Heritage is a resource of power and the politics of recognition. In our lifetimes civil rights, indigenous rights and gender rights have developed to confront monocultural national identity. How is recognition defined? It is a struggle where a particular group demands a say in the politics of the day. Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth defined recognition as a search for recognition and esteem. Respect is a form of recognition. Receiving respect is essential to wellbeing and recognition. Negotiation of social values is esteem plus recognition. Nancy Frasier commented (2000) that lack of recognition causes disenfranchisement. A lack of recognition denies participation the distribution and redistribution of resources and rights. There can be no recognition without redistribution of resources and rights. People who seek recognition must first realize that they have a heritage that is not recognized. For recognition to occur, powerbrokers must first realize that they are excluding others.

The emotional skills of offering recognition include shame, pride, envy and compassion. Empathy is key to be able to offer recognition, empathy is often described as superficial. But, sincere empathy is required for recognition to proceed.

So there are six key elements relating to identity and heritage.

1)    Authority creates Heritage

2)    Individuals turn to museums to seek validation of their own identity, museums reinforce identify and some people use museums to see how their identity is being portrayed.

3)    Museums are often in a position to withhold recognition.

4)    Those who seek recognition, by definition, only have access to discussion and a voice out with the usual media.

5)    Heritage is a negotiation process.

6)    Self-recognition is a fundamental stage in any recognition process.

Laurajane’s ‘emotion-effective’ practices remind me of my work on the use of ‘values’ to engage with visitors, which I cannot resist in sharing. A case study that I developed in Scotland in the late 1990’s echoes the importance of emotion and recognition. The community that the museum worked with was disengaged young people to help develop their self-confidence.  A World Health Organisation study indicated that levels of personal self-confidence amongst children of school age were low across Europe, particularly in Scotland which ranked 23rd out of 29 countries in terms of confidence (Currie 2000, 26). Looking at this research again, Germany has even lower levels of wellbeing in young people! The Scottish Parliament published a discussion paper identifying concerns about the negative impact of low levels of confidence (and identified that low self-esteem is a risk factor for victimisation by others, adolescent eating disorders, teenage pregnancy and poor economic outcomes) and outlined activities that could contribute to raising levels of confidence. These activities included engagement in educational and cultural opportunities. The issue of confidence is also addressed in the Scottish School Curriculum. A cornerstone of this curriculum is to enable young people to become confident individuals, with self-respect, a sense of well-being, secure values and ambition.

Self-efficacy (the belief of ones’ own ability to reach specific goals) underpins confidence. The objective of a programme that was in operation at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, UK to improve young visitors’ self-efficacy. The aim was to use the museum to help young people develop life skills. The outcome was that teenagers used the museum collections to discover their own character strengths, and this improved their self-confidence.

The young people were asked to define their role models and crucially, what it was about these people that they found admirable. There are four main themes or values that young people found attractive in others: Determination; Endurance; Trust and Compassion. Our innovation was to find stories of these personality strengths in our collections in the museum. By completing video games the visitors are compelled to express their own compassion, trustworthiness, determination and endurance. Our visitors discover that they, in fact, share the attributes of their role models and heroes.

Back to Berlin and part two of the evening and the intellectual prowess was fortified with valued guest contributions during a lively round table discussion moderated by Katarzyna Puzon (CARMAH) that was dedicated to some of the issues presented earlier: Claudia Gemmeke (Director Department Forum, Stadtmuseum Berlin) represents a national collection of over 4.5 million objects that address the history of Berlin. Much of the collection is Art and Decorative Arts and they have five locations across Berlin and the surroundings. All this City Museum of Berlin collecting is in addition to the district museums of Berlin. The City museums do projects with pupils and committees to make them aware of the collections and to evaluate what types of exhibitions the citizens want to see. The goal is that different diversities are apparent in the museum. Noa Ha (Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin) highlighted that when creating a City archive it is often the immigrants to that city that are often neglected. The Roma people of Berlin had to create their own archive and some of the black people of Berlin and wider Germany have developed a ‘No Humboldt’ movement to protest against any proposals to glorify violence in the new Museum. Mirjam Brusius (Faculty of History, Oxford University) observed that Museums tend to pick and choose what is inclusive and what is seen as ‘other’. For example, Ancient Egyptian culture is seen to be embedded in European heritage and is presented as such, however, Islamic culture is seen as separate, ‘other’, and so it has its own special museum to mark it out.  Susan Kamel (University of Applied Sciences, Berlin) nailed it when she asked ‘how do you turn the philosophy of recognition into practice? And Sharon concurred, perhaps like Schrodinger’s cat, the moment you heritigize a movement you stop it in aspic.

For me Laurajane summed it all up nicely when she reminded us that the process of using recognition is just a tool. Alongside all the other tools at a museum’s disposal. What is important is what our higher calling is as museums. What we actually do in museum. Plus what can museums cause to happen? What are the consequences of our actions as museums…?

John-Paul Sumner is a Kulturstiftung Des Bundes International Fellow based at The Museum für Islamische Kunst Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. This role involves introducing an interpretation protocol for the permanent re-display of the museum.

On 21 June 2016, Regina Bendix, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen, and Stefan Groth, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn, held their talk about „‚Kultur(-erbe)‘ als flexibles Konzept in EU-Kulturpolitik und Außenbeziehungen“ („Culture (-al heritage)“ as a flexible concept in EU cultural policy and foreign relations), framed by the colloquium at the Department of European Ethnology under the heading European Heritage and Memory Politics. Together, Bendix and Groth had contributed to the DFG-Research Unit „The Constitutions of Cultural Property“.

Whilst „culture“ is much commented on and instrumentalized on a high political level, anthropological studies have so far neglected “policy on the ground”, the speakers claimed. Leaving „cultural heritage“ in scare quotes, Bendix and Groth traced the genealogy and tactical usage of cultural concepts in EU policies  dealing with identity and economics.

Bendix and Groth argued that the short timeline of „(cultural) heritage’s“ usage in European policies displays the incoherence, flexibility, and ambiguous contextualities of the concept. What is crucial, according to Bendix and Groth, is that „culture“ took on a life of its own for legitimizing politics, beginning as a vague claim for European ”unity in diversity“ and moving to a means of soft powered governance, economic success, identity mediations, and strengthening of international relations. Likewise, the speakers remarked that it is important not to neglect that the EU is not one, but quite a lot of actors with often contesting interests.

As one vantage point in 1954, the European Cultural Convention was initiated in Paris and was to become one opener of the Bologna Process. It states that a „common heritage“ fosters a „greater understanding of one another among the peoples of Europe“, and a  „development of European culture“. As such, according to the speakers, the European Cultural Convention conceptualized culture for the first time as a political and identical means.

In 1972, the UNESCO recommended „the protection, at the National Level, of the Cultural and Natural Heritage“ (http://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/). What followed, according to Bendix and Groth, were normalizing practices that enforced an imbalance of cultural heritage, which was conceptualized as materialized European values. Furthermore, in 1985, the Council of the European Union introduced the European City of Culture, now known as the European Capital of Culture, which aims to show the diversity and common grounds of European cultural heritage.

In 2008, with the European agenda for culture in a globalizing world, cultural diversity, creativity for growth and jobs, and vitalized international relations were promoted. Thus the paper conceptualized „culture“ as means of European „soft power“ and cultural diplomacy, and was explicitly instrumentalized for economic purposes.

This economic instrumentalization of cultural concepts was taken further most recently in 2015, when the European Commission published their report Getting Cultural Heritage to Work for Europe, which pushes the economic capabilities of cultural heritage: „Evidence demonstrates that relatively modest investment in cultural heritage can pay substantial dividends.“ Bendix and Groth reflected that politically, „culture“ is currently treated as an investment, rather than as a source of identity or commons.

Consequently, during the discussion that followed it was asked: What are the topological conditions of negotiations of cultural concepts? And how to relate the research of (policy) documents with participant observations in EU institutions, and with interviews conducted with their agents? Finally, the question was asked as to what distinguishes ‚heritage‘ from ‚culture‘In response, Bendix argued for heritage’s status as a product of processes of identity politics, which are elaborated with the help of cultural concepts.

Fabian Stark studies European Ethnology in Berlin, his forthcoming Master thesis follows European used clothing markets and its relationship with the fast fashion industry.

Monte Urgull in San Sebastian. European Capital of Culture 2016. Photo Fabian Stark

Rathaus San Sebastian. European Capital of Culture 2016. Photo Fabian Stark

Taking the lead from Nicholas Thomas’ new book  “The return of curiosity. What museums are good for in the 21^st century,” CARMaH invited some of Berlin’s most prominent curators and museum directors to discuss Thomas’ book in particular and the function and value of museums today more broadly.

As Thomas explained to a crowded and attentive audience, his forthcoming book seeks to tackle the following conundrum: On the one hand, scholars of museum studies have critiqued anthropological and archeological museums for being outdated, reaffirming and reiterating colonial and classist historical narratives in their exhibition curation and design. In this sense, museums seem outdated. On the other hand, numbers of museum visitors have never been higher than today. New museums are built and existing museums are expanding, investing in innovative infrastructure and exhibition formats. What then makes people go to the museum? Thomas argued that museums function as places for collaboration and collective exploration; they promote a sense of community in the shared process of acquiring knowledge. As spaces in which one can participate in public life, museums foster civil society. Relatedly, Thomas held that collections should be understood as more than an agglomeration of material things—they represent complex assemblages of places, times, peoples, atmospheres and economies. In this sense, collections are a repository that is contingent and can be used for the creation of new work, exploring or altering established relations.

The ensuing panel discussion centered around three main themes.

The first was brought up in Bernd Scherer’s critique of Thomas’ central notion of curiosity. Scherer argued that curiosity presupposes an object to be curious about. A curious attitude would reaffirm the colonial gaze, objectifying materials and peoples for scientific observation and imperial governance. Sven Sappelt commented that while Scherer’s critique holds true, it is not enough if one is to engage in cutting edge curatorial practice.  Sappelt explained that he is working with artists who have advocated postcolonial critique for the past decades but are now already moving a step further. In this sense, they are ahead of the average museumgoer who hasn’t heard yet of Said, Spivak and Hall. The exchange between Scherer and Sappelt reflected the difficulty of finding a museum narrative and design that can be educational as much as on the forefront of research. While postcolonial studies has been a hot topic in the academy and the arts for a number of years already, they are only now arriving in museums. Although the desire for academic research and museum display to merge more closely was articulated by Verena Lepper, its practical realization still proofs quite difficult. Second, the political responsibility of museums in face of rising xenophobia in Germany was debated. While Scherer held that cultural institutions are not equipped with the language to tackle problems which were prior taken care of by government institutions and will consequently not produce interesting work if they are under the pressure to ‘be political,’ Lepper argued that museums are funded by the government and are thus already shaped by its political directive. Inka Bertz underscored that it is imperative for museums to differentiate their own mode of action in the European refugee crisis from that of scientists and politicians. Third, Thomas’ central argument that museums are spaces for collective experience and collaboration was questioned by Bertz who argued that one thing which museums are good at is providing solitude for undisturbed individual experience. Therefore Bertz was skeptical in face of the trend to think of museums predominantly as communal spaces. She argued that it remains unclear how the nature of collections and archives and the community approach go together in practice.

Given the panelists’ comments, it remains in doubt whether curiosity as an attitude at the core of the revitalization of museums can be understood simply as the spirit of discovery of a child, that is, without judgment, like Thomas suggests. In this light, panelists and audience alike had more questions than answers as to the future of museums. From an anthropological perspective, it is difficult to not ask the obvious: Why not start with ethnographic fieldwork in the locations at stake? From Thomas’ argument about what museums contain one could set out to ask: What do visitors do with museums—how do they handle what is offered? How do people—visitors and employees alike—feel and move, think and talk in the museum? Can we understand a museum without focusing solely on individual experience, for example by mapping its atmosphere? Being curious about how humans and non-humans alike are in museums might reveal unknown and surprising things museum are good at.

Anne-Sophie Reichert is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research lies at the intersection of socio-cultural anthropology and historical epistemology of emotion, cognition and embodiment.

Taking the visit and Lecture of Wayne Modest, Head of the Curatorial Department at Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam as an occasion to observe the latest developments in the Berlin Museum Landscape, CARMAH invited him to visit the exhibition „Deutscher Kolonialismus“ [German Colonialism] at Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) and to join the exhibition’s curator Heike Hartmann to discuss the heritage of the colonial and the (re-)presentation of its objects. I and a small group of CARMAH staff and affiliates, as well as students from the Institute for European Ethnology were to join the exhibition walk.

„Deutscher Kolonialismus“ is remarkable for being the first stand-alone overview exhibition in a German State Museum on the (active) role of the German Empire in the colonial project, after years of debate and demands by activist groups and initiatives for a more thorough engagement with the time of colonial expansion and its legacy.

After an individual visit of the exhibition the group came together to engage with Hartmann on a broad range of questions, especially regarding her own position as a white curator in relation to colonialism but also colonial continuities in the museum landscape.

All of this touches on the question of the ‚post‘ in postcolonial, but what kind of notion can we have of Europe in a postcolonial context? Modest proposed here to consider the role of the Scandinavian states which were not, according to Modest, officially involved in the colonial project. Are they not part of the postcolonial Europe? In any way this postcolonial Europe can be said to be governed by a sort of anxiety politics, in which the anxiety the white hegemonial class feels over a loss of homogeneity, of everybody looking alike is projected onto those who – in their eyes – lack this likeness.

Modest then examined the role an ethnographic museum or museums in general can play and if and how museums can structure other kinds of politics – politics which are able to confront the perception of the colonial past culminating in the proverbial: „but it wasn’t all that bad!“. The ethnographic museum with all its potential has some serious inherent limitations, foremost the initial separation of those who belong (oftentimes looking at the exhibitions) and those who don’t belong (those whose artefacts are exhibited and who all too often don’t become visitors). „Migrants“ belong to the Volkerkunde museum, „Europeans“ to the national museum. Until we release ethnographic museum as a place solely speaking of the other, the migrant, the other, will always stay trapped.

Alternatively, museums can and should support and strengthen notions of citizenship not linked to race, ethnicity or blood. Referring to his own work in Amsterdam, Modest provided the example of how to exhibit Slavery and the Colonial Age, a period which is rooted in Dutch history as the ‚Golden Age‘. According to Modest, both can only come together in a specific moment, one as a trace within the other. If we speak of the Golden Age, the harrowing shadow of slave trade looms in the back ground. But if the latter is evoked, people will always conjure up images of those times when the ‘Dutch’ ruled the Globe. Another example is the removal of racist terminology from the exhibition texts at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam – is this a progressive act of banning words forever poisoned with inhumane connotations, or is it a mere act of denying historical facts?

From this he moved on to thinking about multiculturalism and (mainstream) politics of diversity. Stemming from his own experience Modest concluded that ‚diversity‘ is an empty word if it does not imply (and it seldom does) an intervention into the structure in an attempt to decolonize the whole institution. On the contrary, perhaps the tasteful multiculturalism is just as bad (or good) at making real histories of oppression invisible. Maybe a possible way out of this can be to start an exhibition from the decolonial moment, use the museum as a tool to address the inequalities of the present. A practical example is the intervention of an Amsterdam decolonial activists group in the galleries of the Tropenmuseum. It consisted in placing yellow text boards next to the exhibitions official text boards, without any kind of limitation or censorship from the directory board of the Tropenmuseum. In this way two alternative ways of referring to material culture, two alternative histories were laid out for visitors to engage with – both closely interconnected but still opening a gap in which new understandings can be formed.

Modest then closed his lecture on a hopeful, albeit explicitly not optimistic note; with the hope that we can manage to inhabit the ruins of history (and of museums riddled with their colonial past) and make something new of them.

The ensuing discussion for which Wayne Modest was again joined by Heike Hartmann on the panel circled around the questions the lecturer had introduced so emphatically. What is our role as academics or as visitors, as whites, blacks or people of color in this reforming of the museum? And how can the museum then go on to reach out beyond the limited scope of science and the arts? Both panelists highlighted the ambivalent nature of a museum, Modest talked of the Tropenmuseum as a place which often adopts a racist grammar in its worldviews on the one hand, and on the other a place that never tried to hide its colonial past, and that always took it as something that has happened and that needs to be engaged with in the present moment. As long as a museum remains a space only for the production of representation, such an engagement is impossible. Referring to her own exhibition at Deutsches Historisches Museum, Heike Hartmann points out the broad spectrum of comments and feedback from visitors. There is a lot of praise and constructive criticism, as well as people criticizing the necessity of such an exhibition and denial of the German implications in colonialism, coupled with racist world views and language. But even though not everybody might be in agreement, Hartmann argues that especially those who are in opposition to the idea of engaging with colonial history in such a critical way are addressed. This is because the irritation testifies to the confusion and to a clash of differing worldviews, and might be the beginning (at least for some) to question their own ideas and preconceptions.

Christian Beeck is an M.A. student at the Institute of European Ethnology.

After having returned to CARMAH´s rooms at the Institute for European Ethnology the audience was more than well-prepared to listen to Wayne Modest talk on „(Ethnographic) Museums, Anxiety Politics and the Question of the Postcolonial“ and the ensuing podium discussion with Modest and Hartmann, introduced and moderated by Larissa Förster and Susan Kamel.

Contrary to the established proceeding of a talk structured around a central theme with linear path of argument, Modest straight away established that his lecture would be more focused on introducing a set of projects and ideas on the relationship between anthropology (and anthropological collections) and history. What emerged here was the central theme that Modest continued to touch on and which functioned as a form of implied question in all of the following problematizations. The question of how ethnographic museums as institutions with all their historical entanglements but also all its resources (human as well as material) function in the present moment. Talking from his own professional, but also personal point of view, Modest introduced his current employer, the Tropenmuseum at Amsterdam. Having been opened as the Koloniaal Museum in 1871 – its mission having been to ‚inform’ the public about life in the Dutch colonies – the museum reformed, and in 2014 was merged with the Volkerkunde Museum and the African Museum. It has, in recent years, hosted a number of exhibitions aiming not to shed but rather to light on its role in propagating a racist worldview and colonial exploitation and oppression. Taking this as his starting point, Modest invited us to think about the different implications such a museum has in the present day. What does one make of a museum that broaches the issues of colonial history situated in a mostly non-white neighbourhood of east Amsterdam? What to do with a collection of over 375 000 objects and more than one million photographs? And, what does it mean for Wayne Modest – an academic on the one hand but also a person with afro-Caribbean heritage – to be working in such an institution? Is he a traitor to his own ‘origins’ – as he is being accused of?