History, Restitution, and the Politics of Moral Retrospection
Egon Friedell once formulated a striking thought concerning the inherent incompleteness of historical scholarship. When asked why historical research can never yield stable or definitive results, he did not point to the past, but to the present. Because the present is in constant flux, our view of the past necessarily changes with it. From this, Friedell concluded—at least in essence—that it is a constitutive feature of historiography that it must be rewritten again and again. History is not unstable because it progresses morally, but because its epistemic standpoint is never fixed.
Against this background, recent developments surrounding the so-called Translocation Project at the Technical University of Berlin deserve closer examination. We ourselves were involved in this project as providers of concrete factual information and historical documents from Africa, researched on site, among other places in Lomé, Togo. Yet all of the information we supplied was subsequently ignored entirely in the course of the project’s work.
The project’s protagonists were well aware of the ways in which national museums in West Africa—most notably the National Museum of Mali—had exported high-ranking cultural objects to the West. These included terracotta sculptures over a thousand years old from the Djenné-Djeno cultures, objects listed on UNESCO’s so-called “Red List.” Originals were declared to be copies, and export permits were issued with little hesitation.
Exported by permission of the National Museum of Mali 2001.
This process did not follow the frequently invoked narrative of an African “gift culture.” Rather, many West African national museums, faced with the sheer abundance of existing objects, had little interest in maintaining museums modeled on Western institutions and housing tens of thousands of artifacts—such as the Humboldt Forum, with its approximately 75,000 objects.
Instead, these practices operated within traditions with a long history in Africa itself. In most cases, it was Europeans, not Africans, who expressed interest in the objects. Acquisitions were often conducted on an equal footing between African actors and European buyers.
The events of 1897 constitute an exception. They raise, above all, questions of international law and are less a genuine subject of art history. Yet law itself, as Gustav Radbruch famously observed, is ultimately “congealed politics” and thus subject to the same historical transformations as historiography. Both art history and legal history are defined from the standpoint of the present.
If, however, any serious engagement with the past in its own historical logic is lacking—particularly with regard to what was considered lawful at the time—then judgments rendered post festum become problematic. What remains, in such cases, is morality. But morality is not a scientific category. In this sense, the advocates of “reparation,” that is, “restitution,” appear less as scholars than as political actors. In this particular case, they were predominantly female politicians—a circumstance that opens up another, not uninteresting topic, which can only be hinted at here.
Regardless of who orchestrated this political staging, one might, following Ludwig Marcuse’s History of an Outrage, speak of a “history of shame.” Once “old white men” are induced to feel ashamed like children, they can easily be led to perform acts of penance—including the purchase of modern indulgences. Historically speaking, this has always been an extraordinarily lucrative business: sixty-one million euros for a new ethnological museum in Hamburg as a reward for exemplary “restitution”; 2.5 million euros for a Leibniz Prize; four million euros, allocated under the banner of a feminist foreign policy, for the construction of a new museum in Nigeria to house the Benin Bronzes donated by German museums.
As with other circus acts—one might think of the classic “sawed-in-half woman”—a lingering unease nevertheless remains. Something about it does not quite add up. The audience knows, at least intuitively, that the woman has not truly been cut in two. Illusion thrives on distraction, moral excitation, and collective participation.
Simone de Beauvoir, an icon of emancipation, wrote as early as 1946: “If women were given the choice between profession and motherhood, they would choose motherhood.” From this perspective, one might say: it was not the magician who sawed the woman in half, but de Beauvoir—and with lasting effect.
And yet, there was something curiously fascinating about observing this feminist circus on the historical stage between Europe and Africa. Viewed with temporal distance, and perhaps even with a certain ironic leniency appropriate to my age of seventy-seven, one will remember its protagonists less as contributors to scholarship than as participants in a revealing moral-political spectacle of the present—one that presented itself as justice for the past.
wj
Endnotes
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On the Provisionality and Situatedness of Historical Knowledge
Egon Friedell’s A Cultural History of the Modern Age (Munich, 1927–1931) repeatedly emphasizes the inherently provisional character of historical understanding, a position later theorized more systematically by Reinhart Koselleck in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Frankfurt am Main, 1979). Both authors insist that historical meaning is necessarily constituted from the standpoint of the present rather than discovered as a fixed property of the past. -
West African Museum Practices and the Circulation of Cultural Objects
On the export of archaeological and ethnographic objects from West African national museums, including items listed on UNESCO’s Red Lists of Cultural Objects at Risk (since 2000), see Roderick J. McIntosh, The Peoples of the Middle Niger (Oxford, 1998), and UNESCO documentation on vulnerable object categories. These lists are advisory rather than legally binding and serve primarily as risk indicators within the international art market. -
Museum Models, Abundance, and Structural Asymmetries
For critical reflections on the applicability of Western museum models in African contexts, see Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (Paris, 2018). While advocating restitution, the report itself acknowledges fundamental structural differences between African and European traditions of collecting, storage, and display. -
1897, Law, and Retrospective Judgment
The British punitive expedition against Benin in 1897 is discussed extensively in Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums(London, 2020). On the historicity of law and its dependence on political contexts, see Gustav Radbruch, Legal Philosophy (Stuttgart, 1956; first published 1932), where law is conceptualized, in substance, as “congealed politics.” -
Morality, Scholarship, and Political Performance
On the necessary distinction between scientific analysis and moral evaluation, see Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1919). For the dynamics of moral outrage and shame as social and political forces, see Ludwig Marcuse, A History of Outrage (Frankfurt am Main, 1960), as well as historical analyses of the indulgence trade, e.g. Bernd Moeller, Germany in the Age of the Reformation (Göttingen, 1977). -
Illusion, Gender, and Symbolic Acts
Simone de Beauvoir’s remarks on women, work, and motherhood—formulated in the mid-1940s and later reframed in The Second Sex (Paris, 1949)—are cited here in a paraphrased and diagnostically descriptive sense. On illusion as a performative practice sustained by collective consent, see Karlheinz Lüdeking, The Aesthetics of Appearance(Munich, 2003).