Working Through Colonial Collections

What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.

Coloniality in the German Higher Education System: Implications for Policy and Institutional Practice

This article focuses on the public German higher education sector as a site upon and through which coloniality is enacted. This status quo indicates exclusionary effects and merits interrogation. We briefly discuss the history of German colonialism to understand how coloniality pervades higher educational structures in the German context today. Two proposals addressing coloniality in German higher education are made: the development of structures centering diverse faculty and the support of ethnic and identity studies.

The less considered part: Contextualizing immaterial heritage from German colonial contexts in the restitution debate

Since the publication of the “restitution report” by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in November 2018, the debate around the restitution of African artifacts inherited from German colonialism in German museums has become increasingly intense. While the restitution debate in Germany is generally focused on “material cultural heritage” and human remains, this reflection attempts to contextualize the “immaterial heritage” (museum collections inventory data, photographs, movies, sound recordings, and digital archive documents) from German colonialism and plead for its consideration in this debate. It claims that the first step of restitution consists of German ethnological museums being transparent about their possessions of artifacts from colonial contexts, which means providing all available information about museum collections from colonial contexts and making them easily accessible to the people from the former German colonies.

What Is Leitkultur?

This article interrogates the discursive regimes that underpin Leitkultur (guiding culture) discourse in contemporary Germany and argues that Leitkultur conjures Germany’s imagined “freedom from history” from within Enlightenment temporalities of liberal freedom. This requires that liberal Germany mark its limits in certain moments of German history—namely, National Socialism—while disavowing its role in the constitution of German colonialism. The return to the Enlightenment implied in hegemonic formulations of Leitkultur restores Germany’s freedom from an ugly past; this imagined return can carry the promise of a “diverse” and “inclusive” Germany only insofar as Germany’s colonial heritage is suppressed. The article aims to expose how Germany’s colonial legacy underpins dominant Leitkultur discourse while it is nevertheless hidden from it.