The agreement on the transfer of ownership of the Benin bronzes to the Nigerian state, which is to be signed on Friday by the German Foreign Minister, the Minister of State for Culture and Nigerian representatives at the Federal Foreign Office, is not a loss-making deal for the German museums.
It's a liberation.
They give the museums the opportunity to think about a new presentation of the bronzes without having to fear protests from activists or cross-shots from politicians.
This applies in particular to the institution that owns most of the approximately eleven hundred Benin pieces that came to Germany, the State Museums in Berlin.
When it was decided twenty years ago to move the ethnological collections from Dahlem to the Humboldt Forum, the debate about looted art from Africa and its return to the countries of origin was just a flash of lightning on the horizon.
In the meantime it has become clear that ethnological objects from the time of high colonialism can no longer be exhibited in this country without asking about their acquisition history and without at least considering restitution.
The opening of the east wing of the Humboldt Forum with the new permanent exhibition of the State Museums is now planned for September, in which a selection of Benin bronzes will also be on display.
The director of the forum, Hartmut Dorgerloh, has made no secret of the fact that he is concerned about this presentation.
Those concerns should be settled by Friday's signing ceremony.
The Benin bronzes from the German museums then belong to the state of Nigeria, which also decides how many of them remain in Germany on permanent loan.
There is talk of a third or a quarter of the current holdings, ie three to four hundred objects, on the quiet.
Some of them could stand undisturbed in the Humboldt Forum in the future, others in Cologne, Hamburg, Leipzig and Stuttgart.
But this is only the beginning of the new German Benin glory.
Because the ethnological museums still have no real idea how to exhibit the bronzes that have been generously donated to them in the future.
In order to get there, they would finally have to abandon the unrealistic notion that ethnology has nothing to do with history.
They would have to understand the art of the Kingdom of Benin as well as the relics of other cultures as a result of historical developments - the slave trade, colonial conquest, but also territorial wars within individual regions.
Only then could they make the objects speak in the way that today's viewers expect.
Ethnology has the duty to enlighten itself historically.
She should start doing this immediately.