display
Berlin (dpa) - In the debate about the Benin bronzes in German museums that were considered looted property from the colonial era, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas advocated restitution.
"A sincere treatment of colonial history also includes the question of the return of cultural goods," said the SPD politician on Wednesday in Berlin, according to the Federal Foreign Office.
"It's a question of justice."
The Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, made up of federal and state governments, paved the way for possible return of the controversial Benin bronzes on Wednesday.
"The state and federal representatives on the Board of Trustees agree to come to a solution in the case of the Benin bronzes that also considers the return of objects as an option," said a message after a meeting of the committee in Berlin.
The President of the Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, was commissioned by the Board of Trustees, together with the directors of the other ethnological museums in Germany that keep the Benin bronzes in their collections, “to develop a strategy for a common approach to dealing with the Benin bronzes develop whose acquisition circumstances, according to today's assessment, are to be regarded as injustice contexts ».
It was emphasized that the Board of Trustees has to decide on returns.
display
According to Maas, the federal, state and local governments have set clear goals with common key points.
"Creating the necessary prerequisites for this with international partners is a task that the Federal Foreign Office has set itself," said Maas.
"In the case of the Benin bronzes, we are working with those involved in Nigeria and Germany to create a common framework."
It is primarily about the museum cooperation with the planned Museum of West African Art in Benin City.
According to museum experts, Benin bronzes that still belong to the holdings of German museums could be presented there as loans or restitutions.
Most recently, the head of the cultural department, Andreas Görgen, was in Nigeria for talks on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The role of foreign policy and cultural policy is to “create a basis on which the museum's experts can exchange ideas about which objects, in which forms of representation, and what the museum's concepts look like,” said the Foreign Office.
The federal government is planning a way of international museum cooperation, which should perhaps be a future model for the question of how Germany is helping to build cultural infrastructure in other regions of the world.
"We are part of a larger development in which we should help create cultural infrastructure in countries from which we have properties in Germany," it said.
For some years now there has been a greater speed in building cultural infrastructure in Africa.
«This movement will not stop.
Our attempt is to be a constructive part of it. "
display
Benin bronzes can be found in numerous German museums.
The current debate is mainly about the planned presentation in the Berlin Humboldt Forum.
The Ethnological Museum has around 530 historical objects from the Kingdom of Benin, including around 440 bronzes.
Most of the objects came from the British looting in 1897.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210324-99-956533 / 3
Humboldt Forum