In 1896 a so-called Colonial Exhibition took place in Treptower Park in Berlin. The term Völkerschau was also common. You could marvel at people from Africa there, which is roughly how you have to name the visitor’s interest. In purpose-built, supposedly authentic scenery villages, “everyday” life could be seen, people cooked and danced for the Gründerzeit audience, who could take a walk through a human zoo. The case of a young man from Cameroon has been reported. His name was Kwelle Ndumbe and he had somehow managed to get his hands on opera glasses. He now directed this towards his viewers, an intervention that can be read as a performance long before it became an art genre.
In Lars Kraume’s feature film “The Measured Man”, the 1896 exhibition is the starting point for a story that attempts to take a critical look at German colonialism. The focus is on Alexander Hoffmann, a young scientist who emulates his father, an ethnologist who died in Africa. At the university, however, he first encounters methods that show no interest in encountering other cultures. The dominant figure is a professor from Waldstätten (Peter Simonischek), who relies primarily on craniometry, an approach that is trivial from today’s perspective, in which skulls were measured in order to derive racist derivations from the corresponding digits.