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Luf boat 1903
Photo: Richard Parkinson / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, SPK / Ethnologisches Museum
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Aly, the famous last boat from the South Sea island of Luf will soon be on view in the Berlin City Palace - and, according to Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters, will make this place shine in the first place.
In your new book you describe the brutal German colonial rule in Oceania using this boat as an example.
Who is right?
Aly:
The travel boat is beautiful and a very important, yes shining world heritage site.
But why is there only one example of this type of boat left in the world?
The answer leads to a dark chapter in German colonial history.
Götz Aly
Photo: Steffen Jänicke / DER SPIEGEL
Götz Aly
, 74, is a journalist and historian and best known for his research and books on anti-Semitism and National Socialism.
In his new book he turns to a different topic: the German colonial past in the South Seas and how it lives on in German museums.
SPIEGEL:
Is it scientifically permissible to reduce the history of an era to a single object?
Aly:
The Luf boat is pars pro toto.
The island of Luf, like many other islands in the South Pacific, was a paradise until the colonial rulers came.
They invaded the human communities living there with all possible force, subjected them to their commercial interests and destroyed the existing culture.
SPIEGEL:
According to your research, can the travel boat still become a main attraction in the city palace?
Aly:
It's been in the castle since 2018.
It is the largest exhibit, so the wall was only closed later.
You'd have to tear down a wall to get it out.
It is not impossible.
SPIEGEL:
The President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation responsible, Hermann Parzinger, emphasized at the time that the boat was no longer needed as soon as it was completed and that it was never launched on the island of Luf due to the population decline.
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The Luf-Boot at the old location in Berlin-Dahlem: »The disguising of the questionable origin must stop«
Photo: Stefan Müchler / SPK
Aly:
Unfortunately, he didn't know who was responsible for the dramatic decline.
Because German merchants let the inhabitants of the Hermit Islands, to which Luf belongs, dive for mother-of-pearl and scrape copra from coconuts - and woe, they defended themselves against forced labor and the destruction of their living environment.
In 1882 German marines from the warships "Carola" and "Hyäne" murdered part of the population of Luf, they burned all the huts and boats, which led to mass deaths.
Before the Germans struck, about 400 people lived on the island of Luf, which is only six and a half square kilometers in size, of which only a few survived.
SPIEGEL:
The Luf boat was built around 1890/95, and it was brought to Germany in 1903.
What does it mean from today's perspective?
Aly:
Appropriately explained, this boat, made into a museum object, leads right into the middle of German colonial politics, to the punishment orders of Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and to the cruel treatment of the people in the German "protected areas".
In addition, this boat is the last testimony to a great culture.
It can carry 50 people, cruise against the wind and is seaworthy.
There is an idea of the vehicles with which the most remote South Sea islands were settled many 1000 years ago - at a time when people still lived in caves in today's Germany.
There is no proof that the boat was lawfully acquired.
SPIEGEL:
Compared to other European powers, the Germans have grabbed a particularly large number of objects in the colonies.
Where does this German obsession with collecting come from?
Aly:
The ethnographic research made colonization seem like a scientific project.
Special instructions were issued to the Navy on how to collect cultural assets on the occasion of so-called punitive expeditions.
Military doctors often became amateur ethnologists and amateur anthropologists.
The merchants discovered the line of business "Curiosities of primitive peoples".
SPIEGEL:
When the German colonial rulers tried to justify their destructive approach "scientifically", that speaks for a guilty conscience.
Aly:
Without a doubt.
In order to calm their conscience, the often predatory collectors liked to claim that they would save the evidence of perishing cultures.
This form of justification continues to this day.
But the so-called rescuers themselves belonged to the European shock troops of cultural devastation.
There were even "smoking schools" so that people could get addicted, and then trade objets d'art and coconuts for very bad, very cheap tobacco.
SPIEGEL:
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation has repeatedly claimed that the boat was acquired by the merchant Max Thiel, the then head of the trading company Hernsheim & Co. in the South Pacific.
"Acquired" sounds like a serious purchase.
Aly:
There's no evidence of that.
Eduard Hernsheim put it in his memoirs: "The boat passed into my hands." What did not "pass into other hands" in the colonies and later in totalitarian European states?
This is not how you describe a fair acquisition.
Incidentally, in 1882 Hernsheim had requested Bismarck to take punitive action against the Luf people.
He had declared the people there to be a "horrible gang" that had to be "pacified" by force.
SPIEGEL:
Doesn't a fundamental distinction have to be made between looting and buying objects?
As is often emphasized by today's owners, there were also barter deals.
Aly:
When Germans paid, it was with glass beads, hand mirrors, old red ties, and later with knives and nails, but in the South Seas it was mostly with inferior tobacco of the "niggerhead" variety.
It is hard to believe that Hernsheim even set up "smoking schools" so that people could become addicted and then exchange art objects and coconuts for very bad, very cheap tobacco.
SPIEGEL:
The Berlin museums acquired 65,000 objects from the South Seas, including canoe decorations, sculptures, hatchets, necklaces and much more.
Should all of these objects be returned?
Aly:
In my book, I advocate first of all telling the respective colonial story of the objects on display.
In the case of the Luf-Boot, the curators working at the Humboldt Forum can start with it tomorrow based on my external provenance research.
You should make yourself honest.
The visitors should not simply delight in the exotic of the "primitive peoples", but get to know the remnants of a high culture and its destruction by German and European colonial rulers.
SPIEGEL:
Are you saying that the foundation is deliberately hiding the history of origin?
Aly:
I read through the inventories of the Berlin Ethnological Museum on the South Seas, a total of seven handwritten volumes.
It's very quick.
Much repeats itself.
It is noticeable that in the publicly accessible database of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which by no means contains all the pieces, a "punitive expedition" to the "expedition" is trivialized, since a Max Braun is listed as a collector and is not told that he is underpaid master of the gunboat "Möwe" was, the collector Jakob Weisser served in a similar capacity on the gunboat "Hyäne", when an auction house in London that regularly brought colonial looted goods under the hammer becomes "Collector Webster".
SPIEGEL:
And do you think that is intent?
Aly:
At least it exposes a tradition of not wanting to know.
Behind this is the often unspoken attitude: If you start at a corner, where does it end?
SPIEGEL:
Are there any requests for return from the descendants of the Luf residents?
Aly:
As far as I know, there are no such demands.
Today's Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest countries in the world.
The National Museum in the capital Port Moresby is poorly equipped.
But that can change.
My book is due to be translated into English soon.
The inventories should also be made available in English so that they can be read more easily by the descendants of those who were once robbed.
SPIEGEL:
In your book you mention your great-great-uncle, who, as a military chaplain, was involved in the so-called occupation of German colonists. An island was even named after him. How did your family talk about this island of Aly?
Aly:
As a child I heard that our family owned an island in the South Pacific, that sounded half anecdotal, half fairytale.
My great-great-uncle wanted to travel the big wide world as a young man.
The best way for him to do this was with the help of the Navy.
He gave his Protestant blessing to the so-called protected positions in South West Africa, on Zanzibar and in New Guinea.
The regions of the world declared to be colonies were also mapped and given German names.
Smaller islands were named by officers and ship pastors and doctors of the same rank.
SPIEGEL:
So he was one of the perpetrators.
Aly:
German historiography often tends to distance itself coolly from the perpetrators and to identify quickly with the victims.
Both are wrong.
It is important to find out who the perpetrators are, especially if you have private documents.
The military chaplain Gottlob Johannes Aly did not shoot, but he considered colonialism to be completely normal and thought that "people of the most primitive kind," he put it, "should be won over to the gospel."
A generation change is often necessary for a change in mentality at the political top, if we don't burden Ms. Merkel with this in the last few months of her term of office.
SPIEGEL:
You are known for your studies of Nazi history.
Do you see a connection between colonialism and National Socialism?
Aly:
Just so much: Even in the shadow of the Decolonize movement, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and Islamism flourish.
In addition, there is a tendency in these circles to wrong equations and to a commemorative competition.
This is the current page.
On the other hand, racism and so-called racial theories undoubtedly developed in the context of colonialism.
Of the many colonial powers, however, only one power, namely Germany, which had quickly lost its colonies, went to the mass murder of European Jews.
The reasons for this are complex and contingent in nature.
I don't want to deal with this topic in an interview.
SPIEGEL:
Why didn't you address the issue of colonialism earlier?
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Title: The magnificent boat: How Germans stole the art treasures of the South Seas
Editor: S. FISCHER
Number of pages: 240
Author: Aly, Götz
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Aly:
When I visited the boat in the Berlin Ethnological Museum with my children in the 1970s, I never wondered under what circumstances it got there.
I was also awakened by the ever-growing debates about German colonialism.
It was and is almost always about Africa, but not about the colonial acts of robbery and murder in the German South Sea colony.
This blind spot in the colonial-historical debate, the Luf-boat I know so well and the family connection motivated me to write my book.
SPIEGEL:
In France, Emmanuel Macron is campaigning for reappraisal and restitution, while Chancellor Angela Merkel is noticeably silent on these issues.
Aly:
A change of generation is often necessary for such a change in mentality at the political top, if we don't burden Ms. Merkel with this in the last few months of her term in office. But the ethnological museums cannot wait any longer. You have to quickly end the concealment of the predominantly questionable origin of their showpieces and exhibits. The topic of colonialism must be shown to the interested public directly through the history of individual exhibits - that would do the Humboldt Forum to honor. As soon as the process of self-enlightenment has started, the questions of restitution and the distribution of the existing holdings will arise anew.
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