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Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) - The Baden-Württemberg museums are taking further steps to digitize their collections with colonial objects and thus advance provenance research on cultural assets from Africa or Asia.

The Museum Natur und Mensch Freiburg wants to record objects of African origin in its ethnological collection, as the museum director Tina Brüderlin announced according to the Ministry of Science.

In Ulm, the museum there is planning to digitize around 120 objects from a colonial context.

The Mannheim Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim (rem) are also coming to terms with the colonial era.

They want to digitally record the colonial-era collection bundles "Bumiller" and "Thorbecke", which contain objects from Africa, and make them publicly accessible.

"The preparation of colonial collections is an important and urgent task which municipal museums can only cope with with additional funding," says rem General Director Wilfried Rosendahl.

According to Wednesday, the state supports the three municipal museums with a total of around 96,000 euros in the digital processing of their collections.

The funds come from the millions with which the origin and acquisition history of objects in the collection is to be researched.

"Baden-Württemberg can and would like to be a pioneer in coming to terms with the colonial era and its consequences," says Science Minister Theresia Bauer (Greens) in support of the new projects.

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On the way to nationwide provenance research, the return of a whip and a Bible to Namibia in February 2019 caused a stir and motivation.

The two items once belonged to Hendrik Witbooi, who led the Nama uprising against the German occupiers.

Witbooi (1830-1905) is revered today as a Namibian national hero.

Both objects had been kept in the Linden Museum in Stuttgart for more than 100 years.

This was the first time that Baden-Württemberg returned colonial cultural assets from Africa.

In the opinion of art historians, numerous other objects in the ethnological collections have found their way into museums illegally or at least in an ethically questionable manner.

The Stuttgart Linden Museum, one of the most important ethnological museums in Europe, is considered a pioneer in provenance research.

The museum holdings can be accessed virtually via a presentation and communication platform, among other things; it is networked, explained and questioned.

Detailed information, interesting stories and background information on the objects are also presented under the title “Digital Collection”.

In provenance research, experts try to clarify the origin of the exhibits and archive holdings of their houses.

The aim is to either return or buy cultural goods that were wrongly acquired by today's standards of value or to enter into joint collaborations.

To do this, the experts check the information available in their stores, such as input dates and the prices at which the pieces were purchased.

A tedious detective work, because the pictures or sculptures usually passed through several hands, were exchanged or sold at auctions.

Linden Museum