A comment on the current debate around the Humboldt Forum in Berlin
Martin Porr
After a long period of relative obliviousness, an extensive public debate has recently erupted in Germany about the significance and role of ethnographic museums and, more broadly, the colonial dimensions of Germany’s past and present. For decades, public debate about historical responsibilities, effects and trajectories were dominated by the Holocaust, the atrocities under the Nazi regime and during the Second World War. The centenary of the beginning of the First World War in 2014 has contributed towards a shift away from this focus and other events in Germany’s past are now receiving more attention. This shift now includes a renewed interest in Germany’s colonial past (see e.g. Hamburgs postkoloniales Erbe). The Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin ran, for example, a high-profile exhibition on the topic from October 2016 to May 2017.
Martin Porr
After a long period of relative obliviousness, an extensive public debate has recently erupted in Germany about the significance and role of ethnographic museums and, more broadly, the colonial dimensions of Germany’s past and present. For decades, public debate about historical responsibilities, effects and trajectories were dominated by the Holocaust, the atrocities under the Nazi regime and during the Second World War. The centenary of the beginning of the First World War in 2014 has contributed towards a shift away from this focus and other events in Germany’s past are now receiving more attention. This shift now includes a renewed interest in Germany’s colonial past (see e.g. Hamburgs postkoloniales Erbe). The Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin ran, for example, a high-profile exhibition on the topic from October 2016 to May 2017.
In this way, public debate in Germany is now linking up with developments that have been a focus in other countries for some time, particularly within the academic fields of social anthropology, cultural studies and archaeology.
