Initial check for provenance research on suspicions with regard to colonial contexts at the Museum Aschersleben, the Städtisches Museum Halberstadt and the Museum Wolmirstedt

For the first time, the Museumsverband Sachsen-Anhalt e. V. organized an initial check of colonial contexts with three museums in the state to identify non-European collection holdings for suspicions of colonial contexts. Three city museums with ethnological holdings - the Museum Aschersleben, the Städtisches Museum Halberstadt and the Museum Wolmirstedt - were project partners. Provenance researcher Christian Jarling, who worked on the project, has written up relevant results in three comprehensive individual reports.

The initial check is a method for the search for Nazi looted property that has been tried and tested by the Museum Association. Now, by means of the "Initial check colonial contexts", collection convolutions of small museums were also researched, where it was to be examined whether an in-depth research of the circumstances of the acquisition in colonial countries of origin and the translocation to Germany was useful. For museums, the history of collections, local history and the reappraisal of traces of the colonial period are particularly important. But preparations for transparency about object holdings should also be made during the initial check in order to be able to evaluate colonial contexts from multiple perspectives and to strengthen mediation work.

1. Museum Aschersleben

The heterogeneous holdings in the Aschersleben Museum include, after recording in the initial check:

(3) About 250 ethnographic objects (weapons, clothing, jewelry, basketry, instruments), mostly from the former German colonial territories (100 mainly from New Guinea, about 120 from Cameroon and German East Africa),

(4) approx. 50 East Asian (Japan and China) and Mexican handicraft objects, which may also have reached Aschersleben as merchandise or souvenirs,

(3) ca. 25 excavation finds from Mexico, Peru and Mongolia as well as

(4) About 30 zoological objects, mainly animal skulls.

In the Museum Aschersleben 25 excavation objects from Peru and Mexico as culturally sensitive and 220 ethnological objects from Cameroon and New Guinea as historically sensitive and a human remain are to be researched in depth. The focus is on two potential object donors: Curt? von Hagen (1859-1897?, from 1893 in New Guinea as administrator of various plantation companies, from 1896 in New Guinea general director for the New Guinea Company), Wilhelm Lederbogen (1870-1948, 1897-1898 teacher in Togo and Cameroon) and Johannes Umlauff (trade in naturalia). For the colonial revisionist-propagandist colonial department of the museum, Franz Goepner (museum volunteer from 1934, director from December 1937) and Martin Schmidt (1863-1947, geologist) specifically acquired botanical, ethnographic, and zoological objects from the former German colonies from about 193 8 until 1944 (closure of the museum), the incoming documentation of which does not exist at the museum.

2. Halberstadt Municipal Museum

The 26 finds in the Halberstadt Municipal Museum were made between 1870 and 1900 and come from Asia, Africa, Oceania and South America. Presumably, they were brought to Europe during the colonial period. Who brought them to Halberstadt and whether they were legally acquired remains unclear even after the initial check. More in-depth research is to be considered for four objects, as they have been classified as culturally and historically sensitive due to their use in presumably religious practices as well as their possible context of removal.

The initial check contributed significantly to the reappraisal of the museum's collection and exhibition practices from 1905-1946, even though no objects from these contexts appear to be in the holdings any longer. Relevant to this are the museum's collection department known as the "Collection History and Art of Foreigners" 1905-ca. 1928, the exhibition of the German Colonial Society 1909/10-1920s? years at the museum, a colonial exhibition at the district administration office 8/08-xx/10/1933, and confiscated objects from the Halberstadt Association of Former East Asians and Africans (1946).

3. Museum Wolmirstedt

In the course of the land reform, the "Africa Collection", originally comprising 449 individual items, came to the Wolmirstedt Museum in 1946. Christian Jarling has assigned 235 objects of the collection that still exist today and for the first time made a geographical classification to the origin and discovered inscriptions as well as checked the titlings in the inventory book with the objects before eyes. The fact that this collection originated in a colonial context could be determined during the initial check. The biography of the former owner, Arnold von Eltz (1856-1896, 1885-1896 officer in German East Africa and district captain at Lake Niassa), is now known. Five objects could be classified as culturally sensitive. The project has established contact with a descendant of the von Eltz family. The circumstances of the "pickup" in 1946 and the colonial context in German East Africa could thus be shed some light.

© Museumsverband Sachsen-Anhalt