University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum
Katrin Sieg
You don't have access to this book. Please try to log in with your institution.Log in
Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum examines efforts by European museums to investigate colonialism as part of an unprocessed past, confront its presence, and urge repair. A flurry of exhibitions and the overhaul of numerous large museums in the last decade signal that an emergent colonial memory culture is now reaching broader publics. Exhibitions pose the question of what Europeans owe to those they colonized.
Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum shows how museums can help visitors mourn historic violence and identify the contemporary agents, beneficiaries, victims, survivors, and resisters of colonial presence. At the same time, the book treats the museum as part of the racialized power relations that activists, academics, and artists have long protested against. This book asks whether museums have made the dream of activists, academics, and artists to build equitable futures more acceptable and more durable—or whether in packaging that dream for general audiences they curtail it. Confronting colonial violence, this book argues, pushes Europeans to face the histories of racism and urges them to envision antiracism at the global scale.
Fig. 5. A visitor looks at exhibits related to the Herero Massacre during a press preview of the new exhibition: German Colonialism: Fragments of Its Past and Present at the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) on October 13, 2016, in Berlin, Germany. Permission by Getty Images/Carsten Koall.