Case study 1: German Colonialism: Fragments Past and present
German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present exhibition at Deutsches Historisches Museum 14/10 2106 to 14/5 2017
German Colonialism is a historical exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. It deals with the history of German colonialism, examines the ideologies of European superiority that underpinned colonial thinking and explores how this thinking impacted and affected Germany’s role in both World Wars and its lasting impacts on Germany and former German colonial territories today. According to Ulrike Kretzschmar, acting president of the museum, Germany’s colonial history has for a long period of time ‘occupied a subordinate place in the memorial culture of the Federal Republic of Germany.’ (1) Memorial culture (Erinnerungskultur) refers to ways German scholarship and politics seeks to centre or emphasize remembrance and acknowledgement particularly of the crimes and atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. There has been a renewed focus on Germany’s past as a colonial power following public debates which led the German government to in 2015 finally term the killing of the Herero and Nama in 1904 in then German South West Africa (present day Namibia) as genocide. (2) The exhibition is part of an effort to bring further awareness and knowledge about German colonialism into public consciousness.
The exhibition includes photographs, objects and posters spanning form early colonial periods to black identity in Germany today. The description at the beginning of the exhibition frames how the visitors are meant to interact with the sources; explaining how the objects, photographs and writings preserved from the period were archived and produced by German colonial power and so are neither an objective representation of life at the time, nor does it include voices of the peoples oppressed by colonial power. German Colonialism is then not just an exhibition of history but of historiography; a post-positivist look at how we tell history and why it matters. The exhibition draws clear lines between the race ideologies and pseudoscience that emerged in the colonial period and the persecution and genocide of Jewish and Romani people during the Nazi regime. It shows how Hitler’s government used propaganda to create a sense of nostalgia around Germany’s lost glory days which primed the German population to be more susceptible to the idea of lebensraum; that Germany should invade surrounding countries because of Aryan Germans’ right to land and resources. The exhibition demonstrates the importance of a critical lens to one’s own history, by showing how a misremembering (Nazi propaganda) can be used to further nationalistic and xenophobic ideologies. The exhibition uses form to help visitors question the sources they are presented with. They exhibit a statue of Hermann von Wissman, former governor of German East Africa (present day Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda) that was stood at University of Hamburg until it was taken down due to students protest. Instead of standing it up, like you would normally view a statue, it is exhibited lying vertical on the floor, still covered in graffiti from the protests. In this way he exhibition subverts the original meaning of the object and frames how the visitor should question historical narratives presented to them.
In my own work I am interested in the idea, presented by the exhibition, that the stories culture tells itself about itself and the ways these stories are framed, form contemporary national identity and through that have a profound impact on political discourse and policies. I am interested in exploring how nostalgia can be harmful because it represents a rewriting of history to serve dominating political narratives. I see this play out both in a European context with the rise of far right parties in Denmark, The Netherlands and France, and in the states with the election of Donald Trump. The exhibition has helped my way of thinking about current political climates and my own role within them. I am inspired by how the placing of objects was used to subvert their meaning for example through the statue, which had inspired me to think about ways I can transform examples of speech or oppression into pieces of art. The broad lines drawn by the exhibition between our past and present has inspired me to think about cycles in history and how these can be represented in abstract ways through space, speech and sound.
1) Ulrike Kretzschmar, ‘Foreword’, in German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2016) pp. 10-11 (p.11).
2) German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present, p. 257.