Debate about Horst Bredekamp: This is how identitarian ethnology is

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On March 8, the feature section of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ) published an article by the Berlin art historian Horst Bredekamp on the debate about how to deal with Germany's colonial heritage.

Under the lurid headline “Fanatics of Purity”, he polemics about the question posed in the opening credits, why the identity mania is our greatest threat.

In spite of everything, the former founding director of the Humboldt Forum also makes a few points.

Bredekamp worries about the wrong ways of a “structurally anti-Jewish” post-colonialism, which uses left rhetoric, “but is driven by principles and goals that are diametrically opposed to the definition of what can be considered 'left' politics”.

He analyzes the weak points of populist identity politics: "The empty phrases of self-determination were and are the means of coercion of totalitarian access to language, history and the future."

He supports his research that there was also a liberal and anti-racist ethnology in the colonial power Germany, in whose tradition the Berlin Ethnographic Museum was built at the end of the 19th century.

Bredekamp complains that his successor institution is now viewed as a “stronghold of looted art” and he fears “the extinction of an anti-colonial tradition in which the Humboldt Forum was and is willing to place itself”.

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At the end of the madness that Bredekamp diagnosed, there is not “an enlightened multicultural reality”, but “the purity of an orientation that is as clean as it is inhuman.

The unspeakable aspect of the identity lies in the mercilessness in which the ethnic groups and their cultures are separated from one another. "

In short: the professor emeritus at Humboldt University Bredekamp fears nothing less than a cultural relapse into a long-lost illiberalism to transcend one's own determination and oneself. "

The fact that Bredekamp brings these points together with the defense of Wolfgang Thierse, who has been a supporter of the idea of ​​a politically independent Humboldt Forum since the 1990s, and the rescue of social democracy, and that historically ethnological collecting is an anti-imperial rescue act of cultural property, has to be far beyond the goal rate shot out.

This is because his text, which is worth considering, provided points of attack that lead away from the critical examination of his arguments.

Bredekamp in the Twitter Shitstorm

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The editor-in-chief of the art magazine "Monopol" Elke Buhr tried a gloss in which she accused Bredekamp that in the end "everything was brought together, the looted art debate equated with identity politics and the anti-Semitism allegation stacked on top.

Instead of providing their own arguments for the matter, she moved on and compared Bredekamp and Thierse with the Muppet Show grumblers Waldorf and Statler, a joke with a rather long old-white man's beard.

The shit storm for Bredekamp on social media was not long in coming.

And here too: a lot of identity-violated vanity and an inappropriate tone that discredits the sender for a factual debate.

Giving “such types” a stage, tweeted Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, director of the State Ethnographic Collections in Leipzig, Dresden and Herrnhut, was “somehow weird”, even on International Women's Day.

In his text, Horst Bredekamp instrumentalizes the Jewish scientists Franz Boas and Aby Warburg for his own purposes: "A philosemitic romanticization that is used as a narrative to frame postcolonialism as structurally anti-Jewish is, to put it mildly, Monty-Python-esk," says Meijer -van Mensch in another post on Twitter, which the director of three museums considers to be a "full-time job".

Too many men on women's day

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Also Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, predecessor of Meijer-van Mensch in Saxony and director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne since 2019, and Viola König, director of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin from 2001 until her retirement in 2017 and thus the conception of the Humboldt -Forums involved bump into each other at the time of publication on Women's Day.

König also tweeted her outrage that Bredekamp only referred to male scientists in his text.

In a comment in the “FAZ”, Patrick Bahners immediately takes up these collegial reactions.

They “confirm the suspicion expressed by Bredekamp that in the culture war over the colonial past, the politics of symbols completely replaced the dispute in the matter”.

He wonders what would have been going on if “a professorial Horst” had talked about a museum woman in disparaging language.

Unfortunately, Bahners made a serious mistake, at least for the Twitter bubble.

He called Mrs. Snoep with a wrong first name.

And so the network would rather giggle about her disparagement as "Nadine" than about her arguments.

In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, Snoep had also shot sharply.

In Germany, contrary to Bredekamp's assessment, there were hardly any anti-colonial collectors, his text was rather an example of “white fragility”, the author a case for psychoanalysis.

The historian Jürgen Zimmerer, who researches Hamburg's (post-) colonial history, falls in the same direction.

For a long time he has considered Bredekamp to be resistant to advice, yes, "unteachable".

Waiting for the Humboldt Forum

The sad thing about the debate is that it takes place online and not in museums.

The Humboldt Forum in particular urgently needs to demonstrate to the public how it intends to shape the discourse on colonial collections and post-colonialism.

The other ethnological museums should also open their depots.

Above all, however, politicians have to make long overdue decisions instead of dragging them off:

Should artefacts from the former colonies be returned to the countries of origin on a large scale, as recommended by scientists Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr in their pioneering study?

Or are they better off here, as suggested by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, for example.

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A radicalization can be observed in the proxy debate in the media, which continues to advance.

In the museums, the institutionalized post-colonial shame of the collections seems to have given way to disgust at the objects.

Some museum directors prefer to work with copies or propagate the return via the detour of a performative discussion, as in Dresden, where the Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh reported the famous Benin bronzes from the Museum of Ethnology as missing on posters.

They may be missing in West Africa, but their whereabouts are known.

They - and hundreds of thousands of colonial objects - lie in the showcases or, even worse, in the evidence rooms of many German and European museums.

Until their whereabouts are decided, they should be shown, not hidden.

Above all, they must be placed in the context of the explosive post-colonial discourses.

It is the task of art historians, ethnologists and museum directors not to defame one another in a substitute theater of war.