As of: March 17, 2024, 6:58 p.m
By: Dirk Walter
Comments
Press
Split
“No pardon will be given, no prisoners will be taken,” was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s announcement when he sent German troops into the Boxer War.
Contemporary drawing.
© akg-images
When Germany had colonies, countless researchers fanned out: They didn't just steal art and jewelry from native peoples.
But also human body parts: skulls, skeletons, mummies.
Two Munich collections are now asking themselves: What to do with these legacies?
Munich - On the first floor of the Anthropological State Collection on Munich's Karolinenplatz, director Albert Zink sits at a conference table.
He takes a lot of time, the topic is important, he says.
It had been “pushed aside for a long time”.
And that efforts will be made to return sensitive finds “from colonial contexts”.
“We have to take action on our own initiative and not wait until someone demands something,” emphasizes Zink.
60,000 human skeletons are kept in the State Anthropological Collection.
Whenever an archaeological excavation takes place in Bavaria, bones found end up in the collection's depot in Aschheim-Dornach.
The oldest date back to the Neolithic period.
Bavarian bones – but not only.
The state collection recently compiled an inventory of “human remains from colonial contexts” for the first time.
The impetus for this came from the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK) of the states.
33 institutions in Germany searched through their holdings - they found around 17,000 human remains, the technical term is “human remains”.
In Munich, in addition to the Anthropological State Collection, the Five Continents Museum, the former Ethnology Museum, also reported problematic finds.
Therese brought this mummy with her to Bavaria from South America.
© Götzfried
Historian Holger Stoecker from the Department of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Göttingen examined the holdings on behalf of the State Collection.
Stoecker reports that most of the collection was destroyed by bombs in 1944.
Nevertheless, there are a large number of colonial relics.
The oldest is the skeleton of a Homo sapiens, around 20,000 years old, which was excavated in 1913 in the Oldoway Gorge in the north of what was then the colony of German East Africa (today Tanzania) by a German geologist and brought to Germany.
The so-called OH1 (Oldoway Hominid 1) is “an incredibly important find for the entire human evolution,” says collection manager Zink.
In the collection, Stoecker also found the skull of a Navajo, which was taken from the zoological (!) collection in 1980.
The skull was probably stolen around 1850 when the then US government annexed the Navajo area.
Here too, says Zink, “our goal must be to give back.”
However, contact with today's Navajos has not yet been made.
You need time, says Zink.
Chinese in the Boxer War were executed - then sent to Munich
The origin story of ten facial impressions from China sounds even more blatant.
Facial impressions are made of a type of plastic and are of no value to today's science.
They come from Chinese who were executed by the German colonial army during the so-called Boxer War from 1899 to 1901.
“The heads were sent to Munich and processed into specimens there,” writes Stoecker in a statement for our newspaper.
The impressions were then made.
My news
A four-year-old has a tumor in his head – parents ask for help reading
Serious accident on Kandahar piste: local races close to tourist, but skis get caught
“Nobody wants her”: Mira is not allowed to be placed in Bavaria read
Huge expansion: A8 is to become six lanes – the Federal Nature Conservation Union is examining complaints
“Very terrible accident”: Young man dies – first aiders have to be looked after read
Solemn roll call: Füssen soldiers leave the 23rd Mountain Infantry Brigade
Countless researchers and private scholars grabbed what they could in the colonies.
One of them was Therese of Bavaria (1850-1925), who was often uncritically celebrated as a strong Wittelsbacher, and who returned from a trip to South America with two mummies in her luggage.
They date from the Inca period and are now in the State Archaeological Collection, which did not take part in the KMK survey.
The history of 42 casts of Namibian people goes back to the Nazi era.
The German sculptor and self-taught ethnologist Hans Lichtenecker made it in the 1930s.
Lichtenecker was on the way to create an “archive of extinct races”.
The researcher smeared plaster on the faces of Africans from the Nama, Herero and San tribes without asking them, i.e. “in forced situations,” as Stoecker writes.
Lichtenecker followed in the footsteps that Eugen Fischer, a so-called racial hygienist who was affected by the Nazis, had laid in 1908 with research into “racial crossings” in what was then German South West Africa.
The racial biology background of the research dismays him, says collection director Zink.
Here, too, the question arises as to whether Namibia should receive these impressions.
There have been no inquiries so far.
Victims were also searched for in prisoner of war camps during the First World War
The collecting mania of racist researchers is also documented during the First World War.
They probably swarmed into prisoner of war camps: There are casts of Africans that are “suspected to come from prisoners of war in the First World War who were interned in German prisoner of war camps as soldiers of the French colonial army,” writes Stoecker.
There are also 21 plaster casts that probably come from Austrian prisoner of war camps.
The Five Continents Museum also hoards problematic items.
Around 75 mummies and mummy parts from pre-Columbian South and Central America and Southeast Asia are kept there.
140 skulls and skeletal parts also come from the 18th to 20th centuries; 40 percent were brought to Munich from the former German colonial areas.
They are almost exclusively “culturally processed human remains,” reports Clarissa Bluhm from the museum’s press office.
Out of respect for the dead, they would not be shown publicly.
What to do with these relics?
Zink only manages the state collection on an interim basis.
He is actually the head of the South Tyrolean Archeology Museum in Bolzano, which houses and also exhibits Ötzi.
There are also voices today who reject this for reasons of piety.
When it comes to human remains from the colonial era, the case is clear: all sides emphasize that exhibiting them is out of the question.
As an “immediate measure,” Zink ordered that all colonial relics be kept separately.
Until then it is decided what will happen to them.
So far, such a legacy has only been returned once: in 2019, the Five Continents Museum returned the mummified body of an indigenous Australian to his descendants.
There are currently no further requests for returns, reports the spokeswoman.