The dilemma about human remains in German museum collections – 03/14/2024 – Science

“Protectorates” is how Germany euphemistically called its colonies, which became its “property” between 1884 and the end of the First World War. Unlike France, the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, the country was not among the colonialist powers. However, their conduct in the colonies in Africa or Asia was far from gentle, as witnessed by the many human remains that still inhabit the collections of German museums and universities today.

In museum jargon, they are designated “subjects”, to express the respect and consideration due to the individuals whose skulls and bones rest in the institutions’ basements and storerooms. The term aims to soften the brutality with which they were stolen and trafficked to Germany during the colonial period.

Many are victims of executions, who are then dismembered, cleaned and sent to European headquarters as trophies. Only the Charité University of Medicine, in Berlin, keeps 106 of these “human remains” in its deposits, from Africa, Oceania, Asia and North America. Gradually they have been examined, and their origin determined, in the context of provenance research.

However, between 2011 and 2019, investigations only resulted in nine returns, reports the Charité Museum of History of Medicine. Unlike other institutions, which partly document their pieces from the colonialist context on the internet, the Charité’s deposits remain a “black box”: “We do not make photos available until we know where the human remains come from”, explains employee Judith Hahn.

Berlin, capital of “headhunters”

This is precisely the question: how did the “subjects” end up in Berlin? From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, the German capital was a center for anthropological research, “also simply due to the fact that some of the craziest collectors worked here”, comments Africanologist Andreas Eckert, from Humboldt University.

Scientists Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) and Felix von Luschan were among those studying the remains in Berlin in order to substantiate their “race theory”. “There were lists, who was going to travel to the region, for example to German South West Africa [atual Namíbia]I received orders.” These resembled supermarket shopping lists, with specified quantities, with skulls being “the most requested body part”, explains Eckert.

Based on the size of their heads, German scientists aimed to prove that non-European people belonged to inferior “races”. Africa was considered terra nullius, “no man’s land”, just like other continents. This absurd idea of ​​a continent without history emerged in the 17th century, with the beginning of slavery, little changing in later times.

In his inaugural address at the University of Jena in 1789, even a great writer like Friedrich Wilhelm Schiller referred, without distinction, to “uncivilized” regions outside Europe: “Some fought with wild animals for food and shelter,” he pontificated. , with contempt.

Like so many others, the German poet did not want to know about the high civilizations that, millennia before him, had lived and left impressive testimonies on distant continents. This vision was perpetuated for centuries: “The notion dominated that [outras] cultures had less value, and that slavery would free them from even worse conditions”, observes the Africanologist.

Still in 1937, the philosopher Gottfried Hegel wrote, in his famous treatise on the continent: “Africa is not a historical part of the world, it does not manifest movement or development.” Thus, this high culture, made up of 54 nations, 2,000 languages ​​and several thousand peoples, enormously different from each other, was ignored.

Against such a background, it was no problem for the colonial masters to bring “constantly new material” from the occupied territories to the headquarters, Eckert notes. But how is it possible to return this macabre legacy now? And is it desirable?

Fears of the return of the “bad spirit” of colonialism

Employee Judith Hahn defines the Charité’s procedure as “proactive”: anthropological studies began in 2010 to determine the age, sex and possible illnesses of the remains in the collection of the Museum of History of Medicine. However, more than a century later, it is almost impossible to determine where the remains originate and associate them with a specific individual.

It was not possible to geographically locate 46% of the bones. In cases where this was possible, 71% come from Africa and Oceania. This first assessment will be the starting point for further research and the return of the remains.

However, the case of the “S Collection” by Felix von Luschan (1854-1924) illustrates well the unexpected difficulties that this task presents: from 1885, when he began working for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, the Austrian anthropologist and ethnologist gathered 6,500 skulls from all over the world, including the then German colonies.

For decades, almost no one knew of its existence, it was considered destroyed, and it was only found in 2017 in the basements of the Charité, in a deplorable state.

“Several skulls had a note affixed to it that read ‘Tanzania’. But, as this country name has only existed since 1964, the label must have been made in the then GDR [República Democrática Alemã].” In the end it was found that many of the skulls actually came from present-day Rwanda, at the time also part of the German East Africa colony.

Notes were falsified with the express purpose of making money, for example, if Luschan had ordered bones from a certain ethnic group in Berlin and was paying more for them.

Like several of his colleagues, Andreas Eckert assumes that there are many more trafficked remains in German institutions: “We estimate around 20,000 bones, in addition to those that, over time, ended up being buried.” In other words, in a relatively short period of time, gigantic quantities of human remains were introduced into the country.

In addition to the difficulty of identification, the Africanologist mentions another problem: “In certain regions there are those who say: ‘Now you want to get rid of the thing, but we don’t necessarily want it.'” Some even fear the return of a “bad spirit”, a bad spirit, reminiscent of the dark days of colonial domination.