Before my mother first took me - at the age of ten - to the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology, I had already encountered another museum whose significance has largely faded from public memory: the Museum Godeffroy. My knowledge of it did not originate in a museum visit but in a company monograph of the Hamburg shipping family Johan Cesar Godeffroy, which I discovered while browsing through my father’s books on Hamburg history. Alongside images of sailing vessels and early steamships (some of which also hung as naively painted portraits on the walls of our home), the book depicted objects brought back from Oceania, which Godeffroy had imported alongside colonial commodities. These items were not incidental curiosities but formed the core of a systematic collection. Godeffroy even published his own scholarly journal; particularly impressive specimens entered the museum’s holdings, while duplicates were sold on.
After the bankruptcy of the Godeffroy firm, the question of the collection’s future arose. That it was not preserved as a coherent institution in Hamburg but instead dispersed across various locations, with Leipzig later becoming a focal point, marks an irreversible loss. One of the few who fully grasped what was at stake was Justus Brinkmann, then director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Brinkmann, who would later play a key role alongside Felix von Luschan in the acquisition of the Benin Bronzes, argued forcefully for keeping the collection intact. He understood that not only the objects themselves but also the institution itself possessed historical value: the logic of its arrangement, its modes of collecting, and its implicit worldview.¹
In this context, a thought associated with the conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers becomes particularly illuminating. Broodthaers proposed that museums themselves should be declared museal objects and "frozen at a specific point in time", constitutionally protected from even the smallest alteration. The museum would thus cease to be merely a site of display and become an exhibit in its own right, functioning simultaneously as object, medium, and subject of reflection. Applied to the Museum Godeffroy, this idea reveals what was lost. A “frozen” museum, anticipating later forms of institutional critique articulated by artists such as Broodthaers, would today represent an invaluable object of research. It would allow us to study not only the collected artefacts but also the epistemic conditions of their collection: the worldview of the collectors, the classificatory systems of the nineteenth century, and the self-understanding of European actors at the height of global expansion.
Instead, little remained of the spirit of one of the earliest ethnological museums. The institution itself was dissolved, leaving behind dispersed objects stripped of their original context. With this dissolution disappeared the possibility of productive historical distance, a distance achieved not through moral condemnation but through analysis.
Against this background, contemporary debates on postcolonial theory and museums acquire particular urgency. In his book Postcolonial Myths: Tracing a Fashionable Narrative, Matthias Brodkorb identifies a phenomenon that has become increasingly visible in recent years. Parts of postcolonial theory, he argues, have shifted from being analytical tools to functioning as moral scripts. What once sought to illuminate the legacies of imperial power has, in certain cultural spheres, solidified into a narrative with predetermined roles: Europe as the perpetual perpetrator, the non-European world as the perpetual victim, and Western cultural institutions as penitents performing symbolic acts of repentance.
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in German museums. Exhibitions increasingly begin with gestures of remorse. Restitution, often justified and necessary, is no longer treated primarily as a historically grounded negotiation but as a ritual act of purification. Visitors are invited less to understand the past than to participate in a form of secular absolution.
The irony lies in the fact that the canonical figures of postcolonial theory, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Homi K. Bhabha, were masters of nuance. They embraced contradiction and resisted universal explanations.²/³ Yet some contemporary applications of postcolonial theory appear to reject precisely this complexity. Acknowledging, for instance, that slavery was a global institution or that non-European societies possessed their own hierarchical power structures is quickly interpreted as an attempt to relativise European responsibility. In reality, it is simply an attempt to avoid telling history in a one-dimensional way.
Brodkorb’s critique is therefore not directed at postcolonial studies as such, which remain indispensable, but at their transformation into a form of moral orthodoxy that resists questioning. When a conceptual framework becomes sacrosanct, dissent ceases to be an intellectual contribution and is instead framed as an ethical failure. Under such conditions, curiosity, the essential precondition of historical inquiry, quietly evaporates.
It is noteworthy that Brodkorb is not a professional historian but someone who only recently entered an ethnological museum for the first time. Paradoxically, this outsider perspective sharpens his insights. The questions he poses are not institutionally routinised, and precisely for that reason they are articulated with striking clarity.
The current debate also reveals a troubling distortion of historical judgment. In Hamburg, for example, proposals have been made to symbolically overturn the monumental Bismarck statue near the harbour as an act of decolonisation, despite the fact that Bismarck himself had long opposed German colonial ambitions. Elsewhere, the restitution debate is extended to include Napoleon’s art looting in Europe, conflating it with the moral postulate that African art does not belong to us. Such analogies generate moral certainty where historical differentiation would be required.
It is precisely here that the true potential of museums becomes visible: not in their constant adaptation to present sensibilities but in their relative immutability. A museum that exposes its own historicity confronts us not only with the past but also with the changing nature of our own perspectives. Those who deny this shift and instead replace earlier viewpoints wholesale with contemporary ideology confuse historical reflection with moral self-assurance. Something fluid and revisable is transformed into something rigid and unequivocal.
Seen in the light of figures such as Justus Brinkmann and institutions like the Museum Godeffroy, it becomes clear what is lost when museums are not taken seriously as historical documents in their own right. A warning is written on the wall, not against critique, but against certainty.
Postkoloniale Mythen: Auf den Spuren eines modischen Narrativs. Eine Reise nach Hamburg und Berlin, Leipzig, Wien und Venedig
by Mathias Brodkorb | 7 May 2025
Footnotes / References
1 Richard Hertz, Das Hamburger Seehandelshaus J. C. Godeffroy und Sohn, 1766–1879, Veröffentlichungen des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, vol. 4 (Hamburg: Hartung, 1922).
2 Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
3 Homi K. Bhabha, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World(London: Routledge, 1981).
4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
5 On institutional critique:
– Daniel Buren, writings on the museum as an invisible frame.
– Hans Haacke, analyses of museums as political and economic institutions.
– Michael Asher, works exposing institutional conditions of exhibition practice.