Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum by Katrin Sieg (review)

When the Ethnographic and Asian Museums opened their doors in the west wing of Berlin's Humboldt Forum on 23 September 2021, the public gained access to approximately ten thousand objects from around the world. At the same time, the public also gained front-row seats to one of the largest and most controversial ethical reckonings in the history of the German museum landscape. Yes, the reconstructed baroque facades of the building have been a bone of contention for decades, but, more importantly, some of the museums' most famous objects—including the famous Benin Bronzes—were procured from European colonies during periods when Germany and other nations used violence, coercion, and even genocide to maintain their colonial power. How can a museum ethically display a collection of items that represent horrific crimes that resonate into the present time? Are museum exhibits only another kind of cruel exhibitionism, a continuation of the horrors of colonialism? Or is it possible to imagine a museal experience that could allow "a more humble, self-reflective, mournful take on colonial ruination?" (3)

This is exactly the question Katrin Sieg asks in Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, her ambitious and spectacularly thorough interrogation of exhibits in several German museums and their European counterparts. In order to approach the question, Sieg carefully reevaluates the Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism, decentering the role of the nation as the arbiter of memory. While the European Union has failed again and again to create antiracist policies and undermine the neoliberal inheritance of Europe's colonial history, she argues, she sees "Europeanization" as a necessary condition for "decolonizing postnational community" (11). This community is not a faraway, impossibly abstract ideal, but a reachable, flawed but improving civil society that devotes the necessary energy to central antiracist tasks such as learning, unlearning, self-reflection, and mourning. Sieg provides an optimistic ideal: more than a reification of old ideologies, museums can provide "alternative visions of economic justice and political equality in the global system" that have the potential to "open [ … ] visitors' imagination to envisioning different futures" (139).

While the opening of the Humboldt Forum has inspired many books about Germany's museal reckoning with colonialism, Sieg's book stands out from the crowd in two significant ways. First, she carefully opens a dialogue with an impressively numerous and diverse group of theorists, activists, and artists who approach the problem of colonialism from many different and complex viewpoints. Working to move beyond what Ides-bald Goddeeris describes as a "comfortable compromise" in museum culture that "acknowledges mistakes, but continues to paint an overall positive portrait of idealist colonizers," new theoretical impulses seek to overturn the power differentials "between curating and curated cultures" (59, 35). Museums must learn to recall and recognize trauma, make space for mourning, and provide "flashes of insight into subaltern histories and resources for living otherwise" (24). Such flashes will necessarily undo the comforting teleological temporality of the narrative of progress and make disturbing connections between the colonial past and the racist, unjust moments of present-day Europe.

Another way that Sieg's book stands out from other critiques of colonialist museum culture has to do with her careful and exhaustive explorations of specific museum exhibits, including the permanent exhibit of the German Historical Museum, the Immigration Museum in Paris, the Maritime Museum in Flensburg, and the Royal Museum of Central Africa (now the Afrikamuseum) in Belgium. How can displays, individual artworks, and spatial interventions interrupt the well-worn paths through European colonial history? Sieg provides her readers with excellent examples of the work of unofficial and official initiatives and the mind-bending work of contemporary artists from around the world.

One of the nicest things about Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum is that even though Sieg sets up a complex history of colonialism and engages with many difficult theoretical discourses, her book includes many accessible passages that are appropriate for use in undergraduate courses...