Germany as Immigration Society and Postcolonial Theory

Colonial 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,

Zimmerer’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.¹⁰

This 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.¹¹

These 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 Forum

The 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 as

a 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.¹⁷

As 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 Zimmerer

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.²¹

In 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:

The 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:

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:

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?

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 Heritage

In 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 Third Reich. This form of history analyses the larger catastrophe alongside the smaller, everyday courtesies of the “Wohlfühl-Diktatur” (feel-good dictatorship) to its Aryans. It devotes itself more strongly to comparative genocide studies and is highly interdisciplinary and internationally oriented and integrates other events. For this comparative research, the Holocaust is the most prominently marked example from a long history of the kind of state-organized mass violence that had already occurred in the colonies.²⁹ All those mechanisms and excesses of violence that are past but still reverberating are relevant for a culture of remembrance arising out of such a history. They mark structural phenomena such as anti-Semitism, opportunism, the bureaucracy of violence, racism, and other forms of discrimination that have forcefully shown themselves in the past but continue, regardless of the era, to represent a potential danger to people.

For comparative genocide studies, the Holocaust is no longer incomparable. In Germany it nevertheless remains the benchmark against which all forms of excessive use of violence are compared. The rhetoric of the politics of remembrance, which is now grasping at German colonial heritage, is the result of intensive Holocaust research. In this context, “an arsenal of concepts and norms developed” by which other violent conflicts can be retrospectively interpreted and morally classified.³⁰ In this arsenal, both of the grand moral narratives that Charles Maier marked out as lessons from the twentieth century for the present intertwine: the Western narrative of the Holocaust and the gulag on the one hand, and the postcolonial narrative of “observers from outside the Atlantic world” on the other.³¹

The rhetoric of these moral narratives is—and this is my second point—one of a universalistic human dignity. This rhetoric submits to international standards, argues morally, and, in the case of the Holocaust, became especially conspicuous around the turn of the century.³² The culture of remembrance that emerged from these narratives is no longer founded purely within the nation-state; rather, it follows international communication processes. That national ties and traditions are growing weaker “does not in any way suggest that the era of the nation-state is over. Rather, it suggests that the nation-state’s hegemonic reign as the central producer of meaning has come to an end. National memories are now mixed with collective memories culled from other, collective expressions of solidarity such as ethnicity, gender, and religion.”³³

Not only does the Nazi era form the context of the history of remembrance in which postcolonial perspectives in Germany must participate, but it is also responsible for the emergence of the museum as the place where these processes of negotiation of a new view of history are currently being carried out. Looted art and remains from Nazi experiments on people that were held in the collections of natural history, ethnological, and medical history museums, where no one gave a thought to their origins, were the starting point.³⁴ In Germany, the problem of provenance became virulent in the context of art looted by the Nazis. In 2012, a large inventory of alleged Nazi-looted art in the possession of the descendants of the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt fanned the flames of the restitution debate. Since then, provenance research has become an eminent political topic in Germany. In 2015, the research center Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation) was established specifically for this purpose in Magdeburg, and money has been invested in diverse provenance research projects in (art) museums. Meanwhile, the federal government has broadened this engagement to include colonial collections in German museums.

Within this context, pressure on ethnological museums is increasing. Just one hundred years after the end of the German colonial period, their collections became subject to scrutiny; the museums were held responsible for what they owned, and their presentations and exhibits were mistrustfully eyed as discriminatory. The most important task of the Humboldt Forum, Savoy tells us in her interview, is “the clarification of provenance. This costs a lot of money; it’s a thankless task… . But without this research, no Humboldt Forum and no ethnological museum can be opened today… . I want to know how much blood drips from a work of art, how much scientific ambition it holds, how much archeological luck.”³⁵ In Germany, the Humboldt Forum is simply the most well-known example. Ethnological museums in Leipzig, Bremen, and Stuttgart also have to justify themselves. Spurred into action by the political nature that this topic suddenly acquired, many museums intensified and systematized their provenance research in order better to assess which objects were contaminated by colonial pasts.³⁶ Some restitutions have also taken place. For example, human remains from Berlin and cultural artifacts from Stuttgart were returned to Namibia. Prior to this, in 2013, the German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund) published guidelines for dealing with human remains in museums. A further set of guidelines for collections from colonial contexts was released in 2018, a reworked version of which appeared in May.³⁷ The latter shows how complex the material is in the German case, as many objects did not come into the museums directly through colonial conquest but rather via the art market, research expeditions, or as gifts from collectors. For many of these objects, particularly those not from Africa or not dating from the nineteenth century, blanket assessments are difficult because they were collected during periods when distinctly different norms governed everyday behavior. Are they guilty or contaminated in general, or can they be believed to be innocent until one can prove specific instances of misconduct? And how must one deal with such people or objects today? Can one still exhibit them without getting one’s hands dirty? Every era provides its own answers to these questions. Answers that differ according to event, region, and temporal distance from the occurrence. In the context of the Humboldt Form, we are only now negotiating the answers to these questions.

These processes of negotiation are—thirdly—not only guided by moral reasoning but also pay heed to economic and political interests. They target property and sovereignty over meaning. Often it remains unclear where moral concerns end and self-interest begins. On the other hand, what is certain is that debates over (national) cultural heritage become more intense depending on the property rights involved. Cultural heritage has made regions attractive to tourists and has been beneficial for the historical identity building of states in times of increasing obsession with history.³⁸ Ultimately, this concerns the question of whether or not the old European idea of ownership of cultural heritage from all over the world can endure.

In Europe, we are just starting to enter a new phase in which claims to ownership of things that came to museums or archives under morally questionable circumstances must be fundamentally reevaluated.³⁹ With regard to international law, this would mean abandoning the concept of intertemporal law. This principle states that claims to ownership are judged according to those laws that were valid at the time of acquisition. Up until now it has only been overridden in exceptional cases, for instance in the case of restitution demands related to the Nazi era as put forward in the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art (1998). For the big museums, this concept’s abandonment would have serious consequences, as they could no longer be sure of their biggest attractions. Would the bust of Nefertiti have to leave the Neues Museum in Berlin, or would the Benin Bronzes have to move out of different European museums? Such restructuring would radically alter both the self-image of museums and their passed-down ways of dealing with cultural heritage, as Moira Simpson showed with a view to American museums and their negotiations with native peoples: “Curatorial staff are re-examining museological practices and the legitimacy of their possession of materials which previously were held and displayed without question as to property rights, authority or wishes of those from whom they were taken. They are having to address questions of ownership, care, display, and interpretation.”⁴⁰ These questions are anything but simple to answer because the allocation of property rights is usually complicated.

Questions concerning ownership of cultural property are currently one of the hottest cultural-political topics in the world. In Germany in 2015, disputes over laws for the protection of cultural property turned bitter; these laws are meant to offer the possibility of preventing nationally valuable cultural heritage (above all art) from being sold outside the country. And with the discovery of the Gurlitt collection in 2012, questions about the restitution of allegedly Nazi-looted art became a topic for public discussion far beyond Germany.

Since then, the discussion surrounding cultural assets originating from contexts of injustice has reached several European countries, impelled by the Humboldt Forum controversy and the Sarr and Savoy report on colonial objects in French museums. This report was presented to the French president in November 2018. It traces back to a promise made by Emmanuel Macron in a speech in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, in November 2017:

The Sarr and Savoy report goes even further. It demands the return of all objects belonging in Mali, Cameroon, Senegal, and former Benin from French museums (archives, libraries, and private collections are excluded). Particularly affected is the Musée du Quai Branly, which houses approximately seventy thousand of the ninety thousand objects in question. The report references only the regions which were formal colonies occupied by French troops and from which art was stolen. According to Sarr and Savoy, the art robbery was not merely a side effect of military conquest but rather followed its own logic. Museums tasked the military and its art experts to acquire certain objects for their collections in Europe. Military conquest and cultural appropriation went hand in hand: “The acquisition of cultural objects and resources and their transfer to the capitals of Europe were in fact at the heart of—and not at the margins—of the colonial enterprise” (RA, p. 13). The signature mark of the colonial acquisitions in these four countries, which both authors consider to be fundamentally permeated with violence, leads to the demand to evaluate these objects differently: “Acquisitions of cultural heritage should be considered within a different category: that of transgressive acts, which no juridical, administrative, cultural, or economic apparatus would be capable of legitimizing” (RA, p. 8). There can be no moral justification for such acquisitions, neither in the nineteenth century nor in the present. The only fitting response is to return the objects to their countries of origin as soon as they are claimed, even without further provenance research.

By and large, Sarr and Savoy’s argument aims at a new concept of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage should not be sorted into its respective national containers in an attempt to turn back time; instead, the objects should be made universally accessible, especially outside of Europe:

At the core of this understanding are two ideas. First, restitutions should symbolize the fact that France is serious about its reappraisal of its colonial guilt and involvement. Second, dialogue must be initiated so that new, permanent, and equal relationships can be established. The return of collections is merely the first and highly symbolic act of a “new relational ethic”: “Compensation here consists in offering to repair the relation” (RA, p. 40). The returned objects should set out the conditions for new cultural contacts and communication. They must become witnesses of an interdependent, hybrid culture that yokes together French and African people and histories in a new way. The authors understand culture “in the dynamic sense of an elaboration and a construction, of cultural mixing and hybridizations” (RA, p. 44).

This report, which caused a great stir in France, also triggered action in German cultural policy and ethnological museums.⁴³ Both ministers of state for culture, Monika Grütters and Michelle Müntefering, formulated a new governmental position shortly after its release. Their position shares many of the arguments offered in the French report:

In concrete terms, they demand greater willingness on the part of museums to carry out restitutions, especially in cases involving human remains. They urge open access to museum inventories through digitization and international dialogue with the countries of provenance. The result of which should be an emphatically international cultural policy. Nonetheless, as opposed to France, the German government cannot issue museums with directives. This is due to the fact that cultural sovereignty lies with the sixteen federal states and proprietorship of the collections with the state, city, or municipal authorities. For this reason, the declaration of the minsters of culture (Kulturminister) of the sixteen federal states and the two ministers of state from March was a more significant step. This declaration aimed at “creating the conditions for the repatriation of human remains … and of cultural assets from colonial contexts whose appropriation was no longer legally and/or ethically justifiable.”⁴⁵ Germany is thus the first country in Europe to commit itself to return colonial objects (how many remains to be seen). Two weeks before this declaration was published, Baden-Württemberg had returned a bible and a whip to the family of the former Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi—a pioneering feat with symbolic effect, as they were the first cultural artefacts form the colonial period (beyond human remains) that a German museum restituted to an African country.⁴⁶

But even before these most recent political statements, the discussion about holdings from the colonial era had become highly controversial in German ethnological museums.⁴⁷ These museums have long engaged in provenance research in order to be able to understand their collections better and to do them justice. But it is only now—in the context of the controversy surrounding the Humboldt Forum, the art historical discussions of restitution, the recent restitution report from France, and the reactions in Germany—that this topic is becoming explosively controversial. Since then, the burden on proof now lies elsewhere. Hitherto, only those pieces for which a specific context of injustice was known or for which restitution claims were made were considered controversial. Now, ethnological museums are expected to verify that everything they own from the colonial period is free from objections.

However, this seems impossible in the context of the large holdings of depots. In contrast to masterpieces that are tended by the art market, there are hardly any gapless provenances in ethnological depots. Ethnological collections contain not only artworks and well-known relics but also (and mostly) shoes, hats, traditional costumes, cult objects, or boats with (usually) only little market value but sometimes high cultural value. How can one trace the tracks of a fetish from the 1900s that came into an ethnological collection through an anonymous donor or as part of the estate of a collector? Provenance research is very time-consuming. For this reason, the current debate comes down either to avoiding such research in particularly clear-cut cases or carrying it out as quickly as possible so as to avert the impression that the problem is being evaded.

Seen from a scholarly point of view, there is more to it than just restitution (which for Sarr and Savoy is merely the starting point for a new relational ethic among equals). It is about a better understanding of collections in order to provide historical explanations for the foundations of how we see the world today. What networks were and are objects bound up in? How did knowledge circulate with and within these objects? Who collected them and to what end? And which narratives did they serve? Such a perspective on collections would tell a new story about the (anthropological) humanities. It would rob them of a piece of their scientific innocence because it would pose uncomfortable questions about academic responsibility and instrumentalization. In this light, the name Alexander von Humboldt would no longer stand for an admirable thirst for knowledge alone. It also represents the exercise of colonial power at the expense of colonized peoples.⁴⁸ It is precisely this ambivalence that is typical for colonial structures, and it is this ambivalence that must be endured, it seems. Yet, ambivalence troubles and challenges pleasing and coherent narratives. A perspective on ambivalence results in complex histories set in contradictions that cannot always be resolved.

Cosmopolitan Culture of Remembrance

For the moment, one can only anticipate the upheavals that the current postcolonial wave in Germany could unleash. We do not yet know its full effects. The museum is only its exemplary battleground. Within the walls of the museum, the self- and world image of German society are contested. These historical narratives, however, no longer address allegedly homogenous listeners. Rather they must reach people both with and without a migration background (and international tourists) knowing and interpreting German history in their own way.

For this reason, it is very likely that a cosmopolitan culture of remembrance is taking the place of a genealogical culture of remembrance. The cosmopolitan culture of remembrance, as defined by Levy and Sznaider, is no longer based on the fundamental idea of a generational blood relationship between all. Rather, it is grounded in a postcolonial framework and formulates its demands for the national narrative of history particularly regarding the ethnic and religious diversity of contemporary society: “Thus, cosmopolitan memory also means recognizing the history (and the memories) of the ‘other’ and integrating them into ones’ own history.”⁴⁹ Its goal is not to replace the Holocaust as an important site of memory but rather to support the culture of remembrance that developed after Auschwitz with additional, complex memories and to look at the Nazi era from a new perspective. The cosmopolitan culture of remembrance draws its lessons from German history, not only from the Holocaust, but also from questions like: How could discrimination have become the norm in a Nazi society without the majority protesting? What hierarchies between ethnicities and forms of marginalization created in colonial times continue to have effects to this day? As Dana Giesecke and Harald Welzer write: “Aside from being more appropriate given the current perception of reality, this readjustment has the advantage that students from other cultures can relate to it through living the experience of everyday marginalization.”⁵⁰ Such a culture of remembrance tends to be integrative rather than exclusive. It also includes those who came to it later.

In the 1980s, the genealogical culture of remembrance of the Federal Republic crystallized in two large national historical museums: the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn. Thirty years later, it could be the ethnological collections displayed in the Humboldt Forum that lead the way to a cosmopolitan German culture of remembrance. The Humboldt Forum puts topics fitting for a phase of self-discovery of an immigration country on the public agenda. The content of the exhibitions and collections is a trigger for wide-reaching processes of reflection that are aimed at the German immigration society and at its culture of remembrance.