Thuringia
Uni Jena returns bones from Hawaii: heritage explored
02/10/2022, 6:25 p.m
In Thuringia, too, the question of colonial heritage in museum or university collections is becoming more important. At the University of Jena there was now an extraordinary return.
Jena (dpa/th) – In the course of processing the colonial legacy in Thuringia, bones from Hawaii were returned to the University of Jena. The skull bones were given to the Jena evolutionary researcher Ernst Haeckel on a trip to Italy in 1860. Visibly moved, a delegation from the US state accepted their ancestors at a ceremony at the university on Thursday. “This is the most important step in healing,” said Mana Kamoali’i Caceres of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs delegation. But it is not the last step.
Haeckel had received the bones as a gift from the doctor Edmund von Bartels on a trip to Messina in Sicily and had taken them to Jena. How they came into Bartels’ possession remained unclear. However, there is no doubt that they were illegally abducted from Hawaii by Europeans during the colonial period, the university said.
Thuringia’s Secretary of State for Culture, Tina Beer, asked the representatives from Hawaii for forgiveness. University President Walter Rosenthal said: “The return of the iwi kūpuna to their homeland cannot undo this historic wrong, but it can be a first step in healing it.” iwi kūpuna means “bones of the ancestors” in the language of the indigenous population.
The historian Kim Siebenhüner from the University of Jena said: “In Thuringia, research into the colonial legacy is just beginning.” Corresponding coordination centers were recently created at the Universities of Erfurt and Jena and at the Thuringian Museum Association. The working group “Colonial Heritage and Anti-Racist Education” was founded at the University of Jena. Beer also emphasized that research on the colonial past had only picked up speed in recent years. “Its a lot to do.” This does not only affect the metropolises.
Since the debate regarding the Berlin Humboldt Forum and the handling of objects from colonial contexts, both Siebenhüner and the Thuringian Museum Association have observed increased public interest in the subject. The art and exhibition center in Berlin with exhibits from Asia, Africa, America and Oceania had come under criticism even before it opened in September 2021. Among other things, it was regarding the Benin bronzes, which were considered looted colonial art and were to be exhibited there.
This shows in an exemplary way that every museum and every collection in the Free State has to critically examine and process these objects, said Siebenhüner. Together with the Erfurt historian Christiane Kuller, she promoted the establishment of the university coordination office.
In Thuringia there is still no overview of how many objects with a colonial past are actually dormant in the inventory. This is where the coordination offices want to start. The museum association is currently evaluating a survey of around ten percent of the museums in the state. The results are to be presented at a conference in early April. In addition to objects or human remains with a colonial past, this also includes art looted by the Nazis or pieces from the GDR era. While more research has already been done on objects from the Nazi era, there has so far been hardly any funding for research on colonial origins.
“If you want to do it in detail, then that’s decades of work ahead of us,” said the President of the Thuringia Museum Association, Thomas T. Müller. The majority of museums in Thuringia have fewer than five employees – there simply isn’t enough time for provenance research. Provenance research examines the origin of cultural assets.
The director of the Friedenstein Castle Foundation in Gotha, Tobias Pfeifer-Helke, said: “I think, or no, I don’t think so, I know that the museums have to have these debates. That it’s good for the museums. That they are committed to it also have to ask.” The handling of collections and holdings changes from generation to generation. The Museum Association sees it too. In the long term, for example, it would be desirable for all exhibited objects to be clearly named as to the context in which they came into the museum.