Dhe Bavarian Prime Minister is said to have received a sinister Twitter message these days. “We have the Zugspitze. No police!” The top of Germany’s highest mountain lies in a safe in Leipzig. At least that’s what Bastian Sistig says, a member of the artist group “Para”, which is currently holding an art event in Leipzig’s Grassi Museum. It’s about the Zugspitze and Kilimanjaro, about colonialism, looted goods and restitution. The stumbling block is a summit stone of Kilimanjaro. And if you order a duplicate of this summit stone for 20 euros, you can firstly save the Zugspitze and secondly help to clean up a colonial crime. But one after anonther.
The author of these lines climbed Kilimanjaro in 2014 and researched the curious story of the summit stone for this part of the journey: 133 years ago, the Leipzig publisher’s son Hans Meyer stood on Kilimanjaro in what is now Tanzania, then part of the German East Africa colony, and rejoiced : “With the right of the first bidder, I christen this hitherto nameless peak of the Kibo, the highest point on African and German soil: ‘Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze’.” He packed a stone from the summit and gave it to Kaiser Wilhelm II install the stone in the New Palace in Potsdam. There he was lost, the background is unclear. But there was a second summit stone or a second half. This private Meyer stone remained in the family, most recently with Wolfgang Benn, a great-grandson of the Leipziger. And through the report in this newspaper, the group of artists came across Benn, contacted him and asked about the stone.
Shadows of the Past: On the way to the top of Kilimanjaro
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Image: Barbara Schaefer
Benn had sold the stone to an antiquarian bookshop in Austria in 2019 after initially offering it to the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation (SPSG). But they offered too little money, says Sistig. The press office confirms that the stone was offered to the foundation, and that both monument preservation and historical reasons spoke against the purchase, “especially against the background of the colonial context of the object, as well as the price the seller was asking for”. Reinhold Messner has also expressed an interest in buying the stone for his museums, says Sistig. “Para” members drove to the antiquarian bookshop Kainbacher in Baden near Vienna, which had bought the stone and the Meyer estate from Benn. “The antiquarian wanted to sell it on the open market, we negotiated for a long time.” Originally he wanted 250,000 euros for this Meyer’s stone. “We were able to convince him to let us buy it for 40,000 euros.”
2000 Replicas of the Summit Stone
Now “Para” wants to return this stone, the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, to Tanzania with “Moving Mountains”, “which the colonial geographer Hans Meyer dragged to Germany in 1889”. According to Sistig, “Para” has made contact with state authorities in Tanzania, with civil society and with artists. Finally, the Kilimanjaro Regional Council made a recommendation to the central government in Dar es Salaam to officially reclaim the stone.
This is how the art collective started its “participative restitution project”. For this purpose, “the building fabric of the Grassi Museum will be removed in order to produce replicas of the stone from the material”. The ethnological museum, “which keeps the stolen objects from colonized societies”, becomes the “raw material for restitution”. In other words: a pillar – “not a load-bearing one” – is crumbled, casts of the summit stone are made from the material. To do this, they made 3D scans of the stone at the Austrian antiquarian and used them to make silicone molds. They want to sell 2000 pieces, at 20 euros each. And buy the original with the proceeds.
The replicas are sold at 20 euros each. With the proceeds you want to buy the original.
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Image: PARA
To give the campaign even more emphasis, the Zugspitze came into play, today the highest mountain in Germany, while Kilimanjaro was then considered the highest elevation in the German Empire. Sistig explains: “The three of us took the cable car up early in the morning. Then we climbed up the piece. The highest point is not the summit cross, but a little further. We used a hammer and chisel to knock out a six centimeter piece. We chose bad weather. Only two weather technicians were upstairs, they weren’t interested in us. But we can be seen on the summit webcam.” The Zugspitzspitze is in the safe in the museum. “Sure, that’s looted, but there’s one more thing that doesn’t matter here in the museum,” says Sistig.
Two Tanzanian artists, Rehema Chachage and Valerie Asiimwe Amani, are taking part in Leipzig with a video and an audio installation. They reflected on the echoes of the void caused by colonial exploitation. It was particularly important to them “that the stone is purchased at a maximum of the purchase price for the purpose of returning it. So no more producing white profits in Europe!” In the end, the Kili Stone should go to a museum in Moshi, in the Kilimanjaro region. But that doesn’t exist yet. “We will pick up the stone in Austria. Either we bring him to Tanzania. Or our contacts from there can come and pick it up. We haven’t discussed that in detail yet.” And as soon as the Kilimanjaro summit has found its way home, the Zugspitze will also get its summit back. Promised.