Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeCosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in GermanyThomas ThiemeyerThomas Thiemeyer Search for more articles by this author Thomas Thiemeyer is professor of Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (Historical and Cultural Anthropology) at the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut of Tübingen University. His core research areas are museum and memory studies. He is the author of Das Depot als Versprechen–Warum unsere Museen die Lagerräume ihrer Dinge wiederentdecken (The Storeroom as Promise–Why Our Museums Are Rediscovering Their Objects’ Storage Spaces) (2018) and Geschichte im Museum: Theorie–Praxis–Berufsfelder (History in Museums) (2018). Website: uni-tuebingen.de/de/6216PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn March of 2013 a group of historians hacked the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum or DHM) in Berlin. The members of the group Kolonialismus im Kasten? (Colonialism in the Box?) reimagined those parts of the permanent exhibition that dealt with or, according to them, ought to have dealt with Germany’s colonial past. Initially, they organized alternative museum tours. Later they provided an app with which visitors could call up alternative texts about the DHM’s showpieces. These texts reminded the visitors of events such as the series of medical tests that Robert Koch performed on people from Africa or the sensationalist Völkerschauen (Ethnographic Zoos) of the world fairs of the 1900s.1This guerrilla campaign in the DHM exemplifies the newest turn in the German culture of remembrance with its exemplary place, subject matter, and battlefield: Berlin, (post)colonialism, and the museum. After the turn of the millennium, a postcolonial dynamic slowly began to appear in the public sphere that has become highly conspicuous today. Germany’s colonial history—a topic that for a long time interested merely a few specialists—seems ready to be consumed by the masses. I will argue that this shift is representative of a new German culture of remembrance that I identify as cosmopolitan according to the concept of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider.2 At the same time, the Berlin case seems to be representative of similar debates in European (ethnological) museums in general.The days when German colonists invaded Southwest Africa and attached to it the prefix of German are long past. Germany’s quest for “a place in the sun” succeeded in relatively few regions and did not last particularly long–thirty-seven years, if one takes the founding of the German Colonial Society in 1882 in Frankfurt as the start date and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as the end date.3 Furthermore, colonialism mobilized the general population or even the whole of the political class or the aristocracy less successfully than it had done in France or Great Britain. Otto von Bismarck, for example, whose political judgment Germans to this day trust far more than that of the weak Kaiser “Willi Zwo” (Willi Two), had no sympathy for imperial colonial longings. Why then is the imperially sanctioned carnage of their distant past worrying the German public at this precise moment in history? Why now? This is the central question driving my argument. Four reasons seem to me to be significant: first, Germany’s transformed self-conception into that of a country of immigration; second, the widely publicized debates surrounding the Berlin Humboldt Forum; third, the changing place of the Holocaust within the German culture of remembrance; fourth, international debates about the rights of ownership of cultural heritage within contexts of injustice, namely art looted by the Nazis and collections from the colonial period.Germany as Immigration Society and Postcolonial TheoryColonial history is always a history of inequality, power imbalances, and repression. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that it is of growing interest to contemporary society and its great interest in violence (particularly in the case of genocide). “Since Germany founded its own colonies in 1884/1885,” writes the historian Jürgen Zimmerer,colonial wars have been fought time and again because protected areas usually had to be captured with grueling military efforts, and local resistance against foreign rule had to, from the start, be broken with military violence. Anticolonial resistance reached a highpoint at the turn of the century with the war against the Herero and the Nama in German South-West Africa (1904–1908) and the Maji-Maji War in German East Africa, both the two longest conflicts and those with the heaviest losses. With as many as 300,000 victims in German East Africa and as many as 100,000 dead in South-West Africa, these wars bear witness to a brutality and ruthlessness in German warfare for which the term inhuman is an insufficient descriptor. The conflict in South-West Africa went down in history as the first genocide of the twentieth century.4For Zimmerer, the “first genocide of the twentieth century” is not simply the suppression of an anticolonial uprising but rather a prototype for state-organized killing—a precursor to the Holocaust. This interpretation triggered a debate in 2007 because it placed the Holocaust within a continuum of a history of violence in the twentieth century.5 It threatened to relativize the singularity of the mass murder of European Jews because it compared the Holocaust with other forms of state-organized violence: genocide, ethnic cleansing, displacement, and others. Although the dogma of the incomparability of the Holocaust had begun to lose its strength since the 1990s, any statement embedding the Holocaust in a continuum with other genocides is nevertheless subject to especially keen scrutiny in Germany.6Zimmerer’s 2001 dissertation on German colonial politics in Namibia, which attracted much attention, marks the beginning of the current phase of remembrance in which German society is beginning to rediscover its colonial heritage.7 In the US, descendants of Herero from Namibia filed complaints against both German and international companies in September 2001. Following the model provided by compensation payments to forced laborers from the Nazi era, they demanded reparation payments for the genocide carried out by the Germans and the forced labor of the survivors. In 2004, the Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development issued an apology to Namibia for the mass murder of the Herero and Nama. The German Bundestag also joined in this gesture of remorse with a nonbinding resolution.8 The government is currently negotiating the case once again.However, it was not only politics that discovered the remembrance of German colonial-era injustice at this time; conferences and publications concerned with the topic, fueled by various anniversaries, also increased in number. Soon, groups were founded with the intention of raising awareness for Germany’s role in colonialism, including, among others, the activists from Kolonialismus im Kasten?, the association Berlin Postkolonial, websites such as Freiburg-postkolonial.de and Decolonize-mitte.de, and the interest group NoHumboldt21. The latter was founded in protest against the concept of the Humboldt Forum and is supported by numerous postcolonial associations and initiatives.Groups such as these have existed in the German Federal Republic since the 1960s. From time to time, as in Hamburg in 1967–68 or in Bremen in 1979, they were able to draw the public’s attention to their concerns. Yet it is only now that the topic has begun to reach a broad public and become nationally relevant. These groups share the idea that the colonial period symbolizes the ignorance of the Global North in regard to fundamental questions about the perception of the self and of the other. The colonial period as a symbol allows structural racism (colonialism as a “collective mental structure,” as it is called on the Freiburg website),9 which to this day shapes our society without being sufficiently perceived, to be compacted into one event, summarized under one label. What it problematized is the relationship a majority group within a society has to a minority group and the question of which categories help the majority to exclude, either openly or subtly, these minorities. It is here that struggles for recognition take place in which minorities demand the right to a voice in politics and cultural citizenship, both of which have been denied to them.10This growing rumbling of protest in the public echoed the postcolonial discussions that the humanities and social sciences (above all, literature studies, cultural studies, and anthropology) have been carrying out with verve for half a century. As more and more European states lost their colonies over the course of the twentieth century, the formerly occupied lands fought to emancipate themselves from Western hegemony, not only politically, but also intellectually (and still do). Since the 1960s, postcolonial studies have attempted to overcome entrenched contradictions stemming from the colonial era, contradictions that block thought and keep old power imbalances intact. They created awareness for the stigmatizing power of certain concepts that had been established in colloquial language, poising itself to overthrow the linguistic and therefore interpretive prerogative of Western elites. For too long, the elites had spoken in their own words about “foreign cultures,” presenting these cultures from their Western perspective. Left by the wayside were the voices, arguments, and opinions of precisely those groups who were being depicted.11These critiques were aimed at the fundamental category with which Western societies produce national identity and allegiance. They problematized culture as a category that classifies people according to their origins. Culture as a category took root in the nineteenth century in the newly founded nation states and is closely linked to the development of capitalism. While these postcolonial discussions came to Germany comparably late,12 today they are forcefully intruding on public awareness as they come up against a society in upheaval, one that must redefine its relationship with groups that, until now, have been unquestioningly deemed foreigners. This struggle for a new German self-identity as a society of immigrants comes to the fore in terms such as deutsche Leitkultur (the dominant German culture as a guiding culture) or integration.In Germany, the term integration is bound up with the idea that others must adapt to the majority, while the majority itself is not required to change. These “others,” even if they were born in Germany and have never lived anywhere else, are marked out by nationality, ethnicity, or religion—for example, as Muslims or Deutsche mit Migrationshintergrund (Germans with an immigration background).13 This deeply engrained nation-state and genealogical “certainty” in identity has been under threat (and has for this reason been defended ever more strongly with pure populism) since Germany began to familiarize itself with the idea that it is a country of immigrants.14 In terms of pure demographics, this has long been the case. Nearly a fourth of the German population immigrated within the last three generations. Within the society, however, this process of reorientation has only insufficiently been reflected; perhaps it has not even really begun yet. The amendment to immigration law, which came into effect in 2000 after the election of a new Left government in 1999, marks a turning point. It softened the policy of ius sanguinis (that is, established membership in the German nation over generations) as a requirement for being legitimately German. Since the amendment, further steps in this direction have been taken.Germany’s new self-image as a country of immigration can also be recognized in pedagogy, a field of study that teaches coming generations how to see the world. In its advanced theories, pedagogy departs from the model of integration and instead seeks to replace it with categories such as discrimination. “Those who speak of discrimination no longer investigate the integration deficits of minorities, but rather allow themselves to be confronted with minorities’ experiences of being discriminated against,” as Astrid Messerschmidt puts it: “In this case, other stories have to be told, stories from an immigration society that doggedly refuses to be one and in which immigrants are primarily perceived with respect to their need for help or the threat that they seem to pose or are recognized as an enrichment.”15 The “pedagogy of migration” that Messerschmidt sketches is schooled in postcolonial and critical theory and recognizes the subtle mechanisms of a microphysics of power. It is keenly aware of the inconspicuous demarcating of borders that occurs in everyday speech and action and is sensible to symbols that reproduce old patterns of perception—which brings us to the Humboldt Forum.The Humboldt ForumThe Berlin Humboldt Forum is a national cultural project (figs. 1–2). Located in the heart of Berlin’s city center on the boulevard Unter den Linden, it is ensured the largest possible public resonance.16 The Humboldt Forum is planned to showcase objects from the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz–Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), the Berlin exhibition (Kulturprojekte Berlin and Stadtmuseum Berlin), and the Humboldt Laboratory (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), all within the rebuilt Berlin City Palace. Although it is due to open in November, the exact plans for its ethnological exhibitions are not yet known. On the official website, the project is announced asa whole new cultural district [that] is being created in the very heart of the city. It represents an approach that brings together diverse cultures and perspectives and seeks new insights into topical issues such as migration, religion and globalization… . The Humboldt Forum creates spaces for encounters and exchange… . In combination with the collections located in museums on the neighboring Museum Island they will form a unique concentration of objects and artworks.17Figure 1. East and south façade of The Humboldt Forum in February 2019 © SHF / Stephan Falk.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 2. The Schlüter Courtyard in August 2018 © SHF / Stephan Falk.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAs one of the most important cultural political projects of the coming years in Europe, the Humboldt Forum invites severe criticism, which regularly rains down on it. Critique is ignited above all by the handling of the holdings of the Ethnologisches Museum. Until now, this museum has been located in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin far from the regular tourist routes, along with the Museum für Asiatische Kunst and the Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Museum of European Cultures). This museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst are set to be moved to Berlin’s city center, to one of the most visited places in the German capital. Significantly, the Museum of European Cultures will not be moving.The new valorization of the ethnological collections is fanning public debate. Postcolonial activists and scholars use the example of the ethnological collections in the Humboldt Forum as a possibility to ask urgent questions: How does German society deal with its colonial past? What is the future of the ethnological museum, an institution that was created in the nineteenth century out of the imperial spirit? And (how) can one continue to use collections founded in colonialism in the twenty-first century? What new methods and postnational perspectives are necessary to do this? For a number of years, these debates have been carried out in many countries, as in the dispute over the reopening of the Musée du Quay Branly in Paris in 2007. The Humboldt Forum is currently the most prominent example being used to discuss fundamental problems. “The problem,” says Zimmereris that the Humboldt Forum is still looking at a global issue through a national, a European, a Eurocentric perspective. It must tackle the task of changing its perspective; it must move away from the view of the world from Berlin and instead consider how this perspective emerged historically, what it wreaked, and that we live in a time in which the European permeation of the world is coming to an end and a reversal is taking place—politically but also intellectually.18Historical fundamental research—at least, this is what is felt in Germany—is required, particularly in form of systematic provenance research.Today the call for comprehensive provenance research, which has barely been applied to Berlin’s ethnological collections until recently,19 has thrown the entire Humboldt Forum project into crisis. In July 2017 Bénédicte Savoy, one of the most prominent art historians in Germany, resigned from the scientific advisory board of the Humboldt Forum because, according to her, it did not engage sufficiently with the colonial origins of the prospective collections. Savoy topped off her gesture of protest with an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in which she compared the Humboldt Forum with the reactor catastrophe in Chernobyl. The collections of the Humboldt Forum represented “300 years of collecting activity with all of the nastiness and hopes that are bound up with it. That is us, that is Europe. One could imagine so much if it wasn’t all buried under this lead, covered like nuclear waste just so that no radiation leaks out. The Humboldt Forum is like Chernobyl.”20 Savoy’s criticism met with great public resonance. It became the starting point of a gradually growing controversy, which has accompanied the Humboldt Forum project for about ten years. It reached its preliminary peak in November 2018 when Savoy, together with the Senegalese publicist Felwine Sarr, commissioned by the French president, suggested new rules for dealing with the colonial collections of French museums and demanded restitutions.21In Germany the criticism began with the demolition of the Palace of the Republic in 2006 to 2008—the seat of the so-called Volkskammer (people’s cabinet), the assembly of the GDR. This building was forced to give way for a new building whose façade copied the Palace of Hohenzollern, which was torn down in East Germany in 1950. These repeated acts of destruction and reconstruction are not only indicative for different policies of remembrance under distinct German regimes. Furthermore, the reconstruction today is highly contested because it implements a symbol of the former Prussian kings in the very heart of Berlin. The central argument of supporters of the reconstruction—a local initiative—is the location of the former palace in the architectural structure of the urban space. According to them, only with the old façade could the architectural ensemble be reconstructed and the original impression of this space reestablished. The critics, however, perceive this reconstruction as an epitome of restorative politics of history, with a backward orientation towards nationalism, rather than a progressive, cosmopolitan one. After the reconstruction had been decided, the question remained of what to do with it and how to fill it. During this time, the idea emerged to showcase different collections in the building, such as parts of the holdings of the Ethnologisches Museum.22 This unfortunate merging of the Prussian palace as a facade with objects, either looted in Africa during Germany’s imperial era or commissioned and bought by museums of the German empire, is at the heart of postcolonial criticism against the Humboldt Forum.The postcolonial initiative NoHumboldt21 has strong objections against the project, even calling for the planning process to come to a halt:We demand that the work on the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace be ceased and that a public debate is held: the current concept violates the dignity and property rights of communities in all parts of the world, it is Eurocentric and restorative. The establishment of the Humboldt Forum is a direct contradiction to the aim promoting equality in a migration society.23The activists from NoHumboldt21 consider the entire approach of the Humboldt Forum to be questionable because it perpetuates the separation of Europe from the rest of the world, thus uncritically reproducing colonial thought patterns. The most visible sign of this is the juxtaposition of the Humboldt Forum and Berlin’s Museum Island as places of non-European and European culture respectively. Both places—they are within sight of each other—are meant to establish a “dialogue between cultures.” Klaus Dieter Lehmann, president of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz from 1998 to 2008, described the relationship between the two institutions in 2007: “The Museum Island and the palace square will thus become a single intellectual entity of cultural heritage, cultural knowledge, cultural encounters, and cultural experiences. The Humboldt brothers stand for this worldwide dialogue.”24 The Museum Island would represent mainly European art, heritage from antiquity (with the Egyptian and prehistoric collections from all over the world in the Neues Museum or Islamic art in the Pergamon Museum), and humanism, thus reflecting Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideas of German humanism and the scientific system. The Humboldt Forum in the palace square would represent non-European art and foreign “cultures” as they were researched by Alexander von Humboldt. This supposed dichotomy—however challenged by the fact that museums of the Museum Island showcase objects from non-European countries as well (especially the Pergamonmuseum with the famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon)—was established by the founders of the Humboldt Forum as a rhetorical tool. It suggests a view of science as the innocent acquisition of new knowledge that was supposed to be unrelated to and therefore unblemished by the colonial period. Thus, it appalls the critics from NoHumboldt21, and it has, therefore, been modified by the founding directors of the Humboldt Forum as voices expressing criticism became louder. The connection to Humboldt as the namesake of the forum is seen as an impertinence because critics consider him to have been part of the colonial power system. According to the activists of NoHumboldt21, “the Prussian ‘who really discovered America’ who even stole buried corpses and shipped them to Europe, embodies colonial dominance” (“S”). The same goes for the Hohenzollerns and the building that represents them, which, according to the critics, symbolizes an unbroken representation of power:For the descendants of the colonised, both national and abroad, it is particularly disrespectful, that this should take place in the resurrected residence of the Brandenburg-Prussian monarchs. The Hohenzollerns were primarily responsible for the enslavement of thousands of people from Africa as well as genocides and concentration camps in Germany’s former colonies.[“S”]In the eyes of NoHumboldt21, the core problem is the collections from the colonial period. They make two charges that go beyond the specific case in Berlin. Firstly, they assert that exhibitions showing these objects reproduce colonial patterns of representation and perpetuate the Western view of the “other.” They state:As already was the case during those times when “exotic curiosities” were displayed in the “cabinets of wonders” belonging to the Princes of Brandenburg and the Prussian Kings, the Berlin Palace–Humboldt Forum will apparently serve the purpose of developing a Prussian-German-European identity. This concern is in fact directly opposed to the aim of promoting a culture of equality in the migration society and is being pursued to the detriment of others. The supposed “stranger” and “other” will be constructed with the help of the often centuries old objects from all over the world, and the extensive collection of European art on Berlin’s Museum Island will be put to one side. In this way, Europe will be constructed as the superior norm.[“S”]Secondly, they ask who holds the property rights over ethnological objects? Who can legitimately (which is something different than legally) claim the right to call these objects his or her own and freely dispose of them? And for what purpose can he or she do this?By taking the credit for these objects, the city of Berlin receives material benefits as well as intangible advantages up until the present day. We demand the disclosure of the ownership history of all the exhibits as well as adherence to the UN Resolution which is unequivocal regarding the “repatriation of cultural artifacts to countries which have been the victims of expropriation.” The dialogue concerning the future homes of the plundered art and the colonial loot must be sought with the descendants of the artists and the legal owners of the exhibits. This is particularly important regarding the stolen human remains, which are currently to be found in the possession of the “Preußischer Kulturbesitz” foundation.[“S”]It is interesting that NoHumboldt21 is not a purely German initiative; rather, international interest groups gathered under the umbrella of NoHumboldt21 and signed a common letter of protest—groups like Afrosvenskarnas riksförbund (the National Association of Afro-Swedes), ArtAfrica from Portugal, AfricAvenir or Asamblea Popular del Pueblo Juchiteco from Oaxaca, Mexico. It is an international network that operates on a global level, eager to make an impact on the national cultural politics. The debates surrounding the Humboldt Forum follow a global logic of recognition of minorities who, thanks to social media, can position their concerns such that they transcend borders and become efficacious actors in formerly purely national affairs. For Germany, this means that topics are suddenly being placed on the national agenda that until recently were comfortably ignored.Nowadays, the entire Humboldt Forum project is suspect, caught in the shadow of colonialism, even though the ethnological collections make up only a portion of the holdings on display. Horst Bredekamp—one of the three founding directors of the Humboldt Forum alongside Neil MacGregor (the former director of the British Museum) and Hermann Parzinger (Director of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz)—complained that the discussion is becoming too one-sided: “It is not the appreciation of objects from foreign cultures, but rather the hypostatized guilt of owning them, that is currently the focus… . [In Berlin] for the first time, … non-European cultures [would be] elevated in the heart of a nation in a magnificent way, as it has never been done in another place and as it probably will never be done again.” Worryingly, Bredekamp finds that what he calls “precolonial collection history” is being ignored. Since the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Bredekamp asserts, there has been a scientific interest in foreign parts of the world that was not motivated by power and politics: “The debilitating suppression of the precious category of thirst for knowledge, curiositas, as a basic requirement for any empathy towards the foreign pointedly assumes that anyone who learns a foreign language is on the brink of occupying the capital of the country in question.”25 In this context, Bredekamp reminds us of the universalistic conception of ethnology as recently sketched out by Han Vermeulen.26 He also references the chinoiseries of the eighteenth century in the Berlin collections, which were gathered together in appreciation for Chinese art.A New Culture of Remembrance and Cultural HeritageIn regard to the question of why colonial history is catching up with us now in particular, the debate about the Humboldt Forum is noteworthy in many regards. First, the activists attempt to shift the coordinates of the German culture of remembrance, for which colonialism was at most a side note—a perspective based on the argument that the German Reich’s colonial possessions were of little importance and its phase of colonial expansion too short. The new discussion of colonialism, however, is no longer primarily focused on the German colonial period as a historical event. These years are only the concrete starting point. Rather, the term colonialism means an intellectual concept that provides a specific perspective on the world. It is a code for the fundamental thought patterns and forms of discrimination that stretch from the past into the present. They are tightly bound up with the colonial (economic) system: racism, stereotypes of “foreign” cultures, and theories of modernization (the advanced Global North versus the traditional Global South).27 In the present, the prominent symbol of the Humboldt Forum offers the chance to powerfully catapult the topic into public discussion.It is natural to assume that this launch became possible only after the perspective on the Holocaust changed.28 At the same time that the postcolonial dynamic was on the rise in Germany—after the turn of the millennium—the German culture of remembrance began to differentiate itself. Initially, this was still done in close connection with the topic of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. After the reunification in 1990, Germany experienced a second wave of remembrance that attempted to prominently place the victim discourse—often expressed in the concepts Bombenkrieg (bomb war), flight, and displacement of Germans—alongside the perspective of the perpetrators, framed in the code words of Auschwitz and Hitler. In the meantime, historical research developed a new orientation. In the 1980s, historians were mainly arguing about whether Hitler or the German society were responsible for the Holocaust; today some of them write a different history of the everyday life and a history of mentalities of the Thi