Abstract: The Prussian cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), with its museums, libraries, archives, and research institutes is the largest cultural institution in Germany. SPK is responsible for several important projects of restoration, for example on the world-famous Museum Island in Berlin, where the master plan museum island is already ongoing for more than two decades. Another prominent project is the Humboldt Forum, a cultural center for the cultures from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. Meanwhile, Museum Island, with its collections showing the cultural development from antiquity to the nineteenth century in Europe and the roots of European culture in the Near East, the Humboldt Forum is complementing the historical center of Berlin as a real place for world cultures, adding to Museum Island the collections from the non-European cultures. The presentation of these collections in the Humboldt Forum meets new expectations and challenges. To recognize the colonial history of these collections and the collecting institutions, we must conduct postcolonial provenance research to identify looted artworks that have been taken by force. This leads immediately to the question of proper restitution practices for museums with ethnological collections in general. Examples from Africa, from Asia and also from America illustrate how we decided to proceed in resolving these difficult questions, and which lessons we learned from these cooperations. Restitution never can be the end of a story; it should be the beginning of it. Through multiple transcultural cooperations with partners from all over the world, including Indigenous communities, we succeeded in developing new paths into a common future, characterized by trust, participation, and learning from each other. We are convinced that the lessons learned from the Humboldt Forum can help us in developing a new relation with the Global South.
Hermann Parzinger (Mon,) studied this question.