How Germany is handling human remains in museum collections

Germany once euphemistically called its colonies, which it held from 1884 until World War I, "protectorates."

Germany's colonial power never reached the extent of countries such as France, Britain or the Netherlands, but its colonial rule in Africa, Oceania and Asia was no less brutal. That's evident in the numerous human remains dating from the colonial era that are still held in the collections of German museums and universities.

Colonialists committed horrific crimes

Those remains are largely skulls and bones, many from the bodies of people who were executed. They were dismembered, cleaned, and sent back to Germany as trophies.

Berlin's university hospital, the Charité, has 106 such human remains in its depot. They came from people in Africa, Oceania, Asia and North America. As part of current provenance research, they're being examined more closely and their origins are being documented.

But in response to a query from DW, the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité said only nine items were restituted between 2011 and 2019 as a result of these investigations. And while other museums document some of their exhibits from colonial contexts online, the depots of the Charité in Berlin remain under wraps. "We don't make any photos available until we know where the individual human remains come from," employee Judith Hahn told DW.

Berlin was considered the capital of 'skull collectors'

And that's precisely the point: How did the items end up in Berlin? The German capital became a center of anthropological research at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, "simply because some of the craziest collectors worked here," Andreas Eckert, a professor of African Studies at Humboldt University, told DW.

The scientists Rudolf Virchow and Felix von Luschan examined the remains in Berlin in order to draw conclusions in support of their so-called "racial science."

"There were order lists: If it was clear that someone was going to the region, for example to German South West Africa (now Namibia), they would receive an order," says Eckert. These requirements were similar to a shopping list for the supermarket, including specific quantities. At the top of the list were skulls. "They were the most requested body parts," he adds.

That's because the German scientists wanted to use comparisons of head size to prove their assertion that non-Europeans belonged to an inferior "race." Africa, as well as other continents beyond Europe, was considered "terra nullius," or no man's land.

The absurd concept of Africa as a continent without a history emerged in the 17th century with the beginning of slavery and barely changed over the following decades. Even a great German poet such as Friedrich Wilhelm Schiller spoke in general terms of "uncivilized" areas outside Europe in his inaugural speech at the University of Jena in 1789.

Cliché of Africa as place of misery continues

"Some still wrestled with wild animals for food and shelter; for many, language had barely risen from animal sounds to intelligible speech," he said disparagingly. Like so many others, Schiller refused to acknowledge the advanced civilizations that had lived on distant continents thousands of years before him and had left behind impressive evidence. That view continued for centuries. "The idea prevailed that the cultures were inferior and that slavery would free them from even worse conditions," explains Eckert.

In the early 19th century, philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel wrote in his famous treatise on the African continent: "Africa is an unhistorical continent; it demonstrates no movement or development." He simply ignored the fact that Africa is a continent with its own advanced civilizations, some 2,000 languages and countless ethnic groups that differ enormously from one another. Against this background, it was not difficult for the colonial rulers to "constantly bring new material" from the occupied territories to the capital, says Eckert. But how can this dark legacy now be returned — and is that even desirable?

Restitution of a dark legacy of the colonial era

Judith Hahn from the Berlin Museum of Medical History says the approach by the Charité is "proactive." Anthropological examinations of the skulls were started in 2010 to identify the ages, genders and any possible diseases.

But more than a century after they were looted, it is almost impossible to determine the origin of the remains and assign them to individual people. Forty-six percent of the human remains cannot be geographically assigned. Of the remains whose origin is known, the majority (71%) come from Africa and Oceania.

A study carried out by the Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts is intended to serve as a starting point for further research and restitution of human remains.

But restitution can be difficult, as Eckert illustrates by citing research into the skull collection of Austrian anthropologist and ethnologist Felix von Luschan. He worked at the Berlin Ethnological Museum from 1885 and collected 6,500 skulls from all over the world, including from former German colonial countries. The collection has been in the custody of the Charité since 1948.

As Eckert says, "There were a number of skulls with a note on them saying Tanzania. But that country name has only been around since 1964, so the sign must have been written in the former GDR. And in the end, it turned out that many of these skulls actually came from German East Africa, which is now Rwanda."

Research into origins proves difficult

The professor says that notations were apparently deliberately falsified for financial gain — because, for example, von Luschan ordered the skulls of people belonging to specific ethnic groups, for which he paid more than for others. For decades, this collection was believed to have been destroyed. No one knew it existed until it was discovered in the basement of the Charité in a disastrous condition.

Eckart is not alone in his assumption that many more human remains are held by German institutions. "It's estimated there are some 20,000 bones," he says. "In addition, there are those that have been buried over the years. So you can imagine that a vast quantity of bones were brought to Germany in a relatively short span of time."

He adds that along with the difficulty of determining their provenance comes another problem: "In some regions, there are people who complain and say: 'You want to get rid of this stuff now, but we don't really want all of this.'" Some fear that the remains are too reminiscent of the dark days of the colonial era, and should not be returned.

This article was originally written in German.