The Hamburg “Völkerkunde Museum” around 1920. In the past ten years, visitor numbers have dropped sharply. Could this also be due to the renaming to “MARKK,” a name that few people can understand without explanation?
In her inaugural address as director of the MARKK museum seven years ago, Barbara Plankensteiner outlined the museum as a place of transformation. Let us take a closer look at the words with which this “place of change” was introduced. She speaks of “heritage,” “process,” “experience,” and a “reflexive form of discourse.” At first glance, this sounds like a standard institutional self-presentation. Yet anyone who listens more carefully will recognize the mechanisms Theodor W. Adorno described in his Jargon of Authenticity: a language that feigns depth and reflection, foregrounds morality, and subtly displaces responsibility without clearly defining what is meant.
A key passage reads:
“We work with a heritage that was created within a colonial mindset … this distinctive typography … lives up to our claim to establish ourselves as a reflexive form of discourse.”
The very first word—“we”—is striking. It signals collective responsibility and cohesion. Adorno would call this a classic example of the Jargon of Authenticity: it conveys moral and intellectual depth without concretely explaining what “heritage” actually entails. The term is deliberately vague and morally charged—an invitation to accept institutional self-reflection as a given.
The clause “created within a colonial mindset” shows how historical critique is incorporated—but cautiously. The museum itself remains outside the line of criticism; responsibility is shifted onto abstract structures. Colonial history is acknowledged, yet the institution is protected by form and tone.
The reference to “distinctive typography” is also revealing. Here, form replaces concept. Typography and design are meant to make reflection and discursive capacity visible: one can perceive depth and self-critique without these being analytically substantiated. Adorno would have immediately recognized this as a hallmark of the jargon: appearance and tone suggest a substance that does not need to be proven.
Finally, the statement continues: “… lives up to our claim to establish ourselves as a reflexive form of discourse.” Reflexivity is asserted, not demonstrated. It is made visible, morally and aesthetically charged. The tone conveys openness and modernity, while language itself substitutes for analytical rigor. The audience is left with the impression that the museum is progressive, self-critical, and open—regardless of how this is actually implemented in practice.
Plankensteiner’s speech illustrates how museums continue to construct their moral and intellectual legitimacy through language. They employ a modernized Jargon of Authenticity: friendly, progressive, design-conscious—yet relying on the very same mechanism Adorno identified decades ago. The challenge for listeners remains to distinguish between what is claimed and what is analytically substantiated. Language can suggest depth; design can signal reflexivity—but those who look closely will recognize the difference between aspiration and substance.
In my emails to Plankensteiner and to other representatives of this proclaimed “change,” such as the Digital Benin project, I repeatedly attempted to initiate a dialogue—without success. Either there was no response at all, for instance when I proposed introducing a comment section or discussion forum on Digital Benin, or meetings were postponed for months and ultimately for well over a year. Despite the significant public interest in the issue of “translocation,” communication is understood only in a one-sided way. It is not merely the Jargon of Authenticity that manifests itself in language, but also the old ex cathedra stance of an authoritarian scholarship that has re-emerged—once again instructing, but allowing no questions.
This attitude even culminated in a gallery window of ours being smeared with slogans reading “Making Euro with Colonialism,” presumably by a so-called “decolonial” organization. At the same time, our business cards and flyers were torn up and stuffed into our mailbox together with printed material from that organization. When today we bring artworks from Lomé—acquired entirely legally from private collections—to Berlin, make them accessible to the public, exhibit and sell them, critics should be aware of how the global art trade actually operates on a large scale. Such works are exhibited in renowned institutions where there is often not even a remote risk that anyone will seriously inquire into their provenance. There is scarcely a single artwork in our museums that did not arrive there through trade—and this trade has, and continues to take place, for the most part “on equal footing,” especially when one considers how deeply African cultural institutions themselves are entangled in these commercial networks.
1.Barbara Plankensteiner Pressekonferenz: Neues Corporate Design für das Museum am Rothenbaum
2. Adorno, Theodor W.: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Frankfurt a.M. 1964,
3. Jargon Der Eigentlichkeit - Zur deutschen Ideologie - Ein Vortrag von Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno’s critique of the Jargon der Eigentlichkeit remains instructive for contemporary museum and institutional discourse, where terms such as “authenticity,” “dialogue,” “encounter,” or “mission” often function less as analytical categories than as ritualised markers of ethical legitimacy. Detached from concrete historical analysis or institutional self-implication, such concepts risk operating as auratic placeholders whose authority derives from tone rather than argument. In this sense, the language of reflexivity and transformation may itself become an administered rhetoric—one that stabilises institutional self-image while rendering critique predictable and thus manageable.