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It is no coincidence that the director of the Humboldt Forum Foundation first leads his visitors into the cellar.
Hartmut Dorgerloh seems a bit worn out in the days before the opening of the new building on Berlin's Schlossplatz.
He smuggles one group of journalists after the other through his house, which was built by the Italian architect Franco Stella.
People had waited on the south side of the 180-meter-long concrete building, which is clad here and on two other sides with a historicizing facade.
The brightly lit, unadorned corridors lead to the 30-meter-high reception hall, where the bombast of the reconstructed Eosander portal competes with the rigorous avoidance of the grandeur of the Stella grid.
But before you want to take one side, you have to go down to the basement.
"It is not a castle" is the flirtatious mantra Dorgerloh, who, as the former director of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, wants to shed the castle robe.
His sentence is perhaps the least true in the basement.
But here it encourages the director to make it clear again and again that one is not in a rebuilt Prussian residence, but in a place of constant transformation.
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An archaeological trail through the Berlin underground was laid out under the foyer.
In addition to the foundations of the Renaissance palace that the Hohenzollern had built, there are still older remains of a Dominican monastery, but also rusted machines of the heating system that Kaiser Wilhelm II had built into his palace.
Finally, the holes for the explosive charges that were placed under the castle walls at Walter Ulbricht's behest in 1950 in order to blow up any memory of Prussia were also preserved.
View into the foyer of the Humboldt Forum
Source: © SHF / Alexander Schippel
Dorgerloh isn't unhappy that his house is such an odd hybrid.
If the backdrop were really historically consistent, he told WELT AM SONNTAG, then he would see the discussion space, which he interprets the Humboldt Forum, endangered with great international attention.
And now, when at least three sides of the capital have a castle in their midst, as the bitterness of the opponents of the castle has given way to disillusionment and the "phantom pain" of losing the castle, as the reconstruction initiator Wilhelm von Boddien once put it, is slowly subsiding, now the need for discussion will be greater rather than less.
Because from today the purpose of the house, decided by the Bundestag as well as its shape, should finally become clear: namely to be a forum.
Humboldt Forum: Online opening on December 16, 2020
So it is very sad that the structurally largely completed Humboldt Forum can only be opened with a digital ceremony on the evening of December 16, 2020.
The corona pandemic understandably delayed planning.
And so Germany's longest awaited cultural institution remains a building site.
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There are still a few shortcomings to be fixed, but a helmet no longer has to be worn.
But many of the exhibition rooms in the Humboldt Forum are still empty.
The already completely furnished special exhibition that wants to attract children to the house seems particularly orphaned.
The cultural history of sitting is to be experienced here.
And Dorgerloh's hope, who initiated the exhibition, is that it will not keep the young visitors on the benches, but rather encourage them to participate.
Even if children's exhibitions are mostly on the margins of the program of such institutions, they can be understood in the Humboldt Forum as a motivation that this building must be filled with life in order to function.
That it is a hands-on company.
That it does not get an identity through its backward-facing shell, but through the possession of its visitors.
Hartmut Dorgerloh, General Director of the Humboldt Forum, in the children's exhibition
Source: dpa
This is one of the reasons why you can see quotes from the Palace of the Republic, which once stood at this point, in the brightly lit hallways, corridors and stairwells.
In retrospect, the multifunctional building, in which the People's Chamber of the GDR met, but also where the population could meet for bowling, is gladly glorified.
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And it should be noted that Dorgerloh, who is endowed with a sense of humor and witty ridicule, is willing to clear up transfigurations in every respect.
The popular candlesticks from “Erich's lamp shop” can now glow in the most commercial merchandise areas of the Humboldt Forum.
Caesar was also a Hohenzoller
Dorgerloh had the oldest sculptures of the dynasty set up for the Prussian admirers.
The Amsterdam sculptor Bartholomeus Eggers was commissioned in the 1680s to sharpen the profile of the Hohenzollerns who had settled in Brandenburg.
So he made statues of eight electors of the line and added a few historical emperors to aesthetically authenticate the descent: Caesar, Constantine and Charlemagne belong, so to speak, to the family of the Friedrichs, Johanns and Joachim von Brandenburg.
They once stood in the Alabaster Hall and the White Hall of the Berlin Palace.
In the absence of the means and the will to reconstruct the interior of the residence, they are now allowed to bask in the cleaning light of a landing.
In contrast, a black flag occupies a majestic place in the functional building, the address of which the “Stiftung Zukunft Berlin” of the former Berlin Senator Volker Hassemer demonstratively wants to rename Nelson-Mandela-Platz 1.
The huge bronze sculpture by the artist Kang Sung-koo rises up between the escalators, squeezes under the ceiling and yet stands at half mast.
It is a beacon for the actual topic in the Humboldt Forum, which will ultimately also decide its fate as an institution: the examination of racism and European colonial history, in which Germany also played an essential role.
The Humboldt Forum, which will show large parts of the ethnological and non-European collections of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, has for years been confronted with the question of how it intends to present the sensitive pieces in a contemporary way without being able to answer them so far.
A few days ago the Nigerian ambassador in Berlin disrupted preparations for the opening.
Nigeria reclaims Benin bronzes
Yusuf Tuggar announced via Twitter that he had forwarded an application for restitution of the Benin bronzes in a formal letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel and Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters and was now waiting for a response.
Not for the first time.
The Federal Government as well as the SPK have so far withdrawn to a "willingness to dialogue".
A spokesman for the Minister of State for Culture explained to WELT that the letter, which was received and answered in 2019, was not attached to an “official request for return from the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as is customary according to current and widely practiced diplomatic practices”.
The fear of setting a precedent also speaks from this formulation.
Three looted art bronzes from Benin in the Museum of Arts and Crafts (MKG) in Hamburg
Source: picture alliance / Daniel Bockwo
Many objects from the colonial era are suspected of being looted art or of having come into museum possession under circumstances that have not been conclusively examined or adequately explained.
The famous Benin bronzes are a paradigm for the dilemma of the ethnological museums.
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Let us remember: In 1897 Ovonramwen, Oba (king) of the Edo people in West Africa, who were not only artistically highly developed, had a delegation of the British occupiers stopped.
Eight people died in the process.
The colonists promptly launched a campaign of revenge in which countless people lost their lives and the historic Benin city was devastated and destroyed.
Thousands of art objects, including around 4,000 figuratively designed bronze reliefs and heads, were looted.
Many came straight to the art market in London.
Because museums as well as private collectors wanted to have these treasures.
But Felix von Luschan in particular, the then director of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, was downright obsessed with the Benin bronzes.
He made every effort to acquire as many as possible.
This explains the large number of Benin bronzes still preserved in German museums today.
But the ethnological collections of France, Great Britain and other European countries also own the stolen goods, whose legal owner Nigeria sees itself as the legal successor of the Kingdom of Benin.
But apart from declarations of intent that returns are “not excluded”, not much has happened in Berlin.
Instead of restitution, it usually means provenance research.
All eyes are now looking at the Humboldt Forum and are eagerly awaiting the exhibitions, the physical opening of which can take months or years.
Can ethnology still be exhibited?
How can one exhibit ethnological collections, morally contaminated and possibly legally incriminated artifacts?
Can they even be exhibited?
Can you keep them even though the countries of origin show more than just interest?
European museums are no longer better positioned in terms of exhibition options and securing exhibits.
Nigeria in particular has a new argument to reinforce its return claim: a few weeks ago, the British star architect David Adjaye presented the plans for the Edo Museum of West African Art, which is to be built in Benin City by 2025.
The almost natural, historically certified place for the bronzes.
But whether it is the best place has to be discussed.
Because the calculations of guilt and atonement, restitution and reparation are not that simple.
Take Nigeria, for example: tens of thousands have been taking to the streets in Lagos and all over the country for months.
They are not protesting for the return of art objects, but against government repression, corruption and police violence.
There were many injured and also dead - state terror against their own people.
But, do such transgressions of today speak against reparations for historical misdeeds?
Nothing has awakened museums from their sleep like the study by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, which calls for objects from the colonial era to be returned to their countries of origin almost unconditionally.
That too would have to be discussed in public instead of in the SPK offices.
Rear view of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin
Source: © SHF / Christoph Musiol
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With the corona pandemic, the Humboldt Forum received its last grace period.
But behind closed doors one question is getting more and more question marks: How open can the institution become?
How much can it really become a forum, as Dorgerloh also mantra-wise formulates it?
And that hardly depends on whether it is built in a baroque palace or in a concrete castle of rationalism.
It stands and falls with how eloquently there is a room for debates and how solid the walls are.
The fact that Hartmut Dorgerloh, as director of the Humboldt Forum, signed a plea for the “Initiative GG 5.3 Open-mindedness” a few days before the digital opening, which the Bundestag classed as anti-Semitic, leaves room for doubt.