Dhe Chief of the Herero, a Christian, had sold a piece of Herero land in present-day Namibia to the Germans in 1896. After that he expressed the desire to get to know the German Emperor as the supreme chief of his people. In fact, he was invited to Berlin and received by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Nobody could have guessed that just ten years later, Imperial Germany would commit genocide against the Herero and Nama. After the honorable audience, he and all the Nama accompanying him began the unpleasant part of their journey. The group had to make the current Berlin Colonial Exhibition in Treptow available for a few days. In a derogatory way. It was exhibited in a replica Herero village like in a zoo – and had to demonstrate manual work for the curious audience.
In addition, all Herero were subjected to a degrading biometric measurement. Craniology, the cataloging of skulls for the purpose of racial research, was fashionable throughout Europe in the late 19th century. Mostly it had the aim of proving the supposed superiority of the “white race” and the inferiority of all other “races”. The biometric measurement of the Herero was carried out by Felix von Luschan, a doctor and anthropologist who was recognized beyond the borders of Germany at the time.
120 years later it is restituted
A year later, in 1897, the British military invaded the Kingdom of Benin, expelled the king, destroyed all important buildings and stole the entire treasury of the royal family, a total of almost 4000 objects, including the busts that would become famous as the Benin bronzes. A small portion of the loot went to officers involved, and some items were dedicated to Queen Victoria. The largest part, however, was auctioned off in London in order to subsequently finance the British punitive expedition. Felix von Luschan traveled to Germany on behalf of Germany and bought a large part of the bronzes, most of which are now being returned to Nigeria more than 120 years later.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Nigerian Minister of Culture Lai Mohammed
Source: Britta Pedersen/dpa
Biometric measurements and looted art – the suspicion that this Felix von Luschan must have been a racist who was quite naturally convinced of the right of the supposedly superior Europeans to oppress and exploit foreign peoples is obvious. And in fact, a considerable group of anthropologists, explorers, archaeologists, and art historians were quite naturally convinced in this age of progress and discovery that they had a right to appropriation of the art treasures of allegedly historyless peoples. A number of disciplines and professions then unhesitatingly placed themselves at the service of ruthless imperialism.
Allegedly historyless peoples
In this case, however, it is much more complicated. Felix von Luschan did not believe in the supremacy of the whites, and he had the utmost respect for foreign cultures, both contemporary and ancient. He wasn’t alone in that. At that time, anti-Semitism was becoming more and more aggressive, and not only in Germany, and dreams of brutal colonial adventures became more and more sultry. But there was also a bourgeois intelligentsia that did not think of progress as imperial and rejected racism.
Among them was Felix von Luschan. He was born in 1854 in Hollabrunn in what was then the Austrian Empire. Although the family had not been raised to the nobility for long, they could look back on a long history. The name derives from the Bosnian town of Lužan, where Luschan’s ancestors lived until the Battle of Amselfeld in 1389. The father was court and court advocate. After graduating from high school, von Luschan studied medicine in Vienna. He was noticed early on as a multi-talent. At the age of 19 he became accountant of the Vienna Anthropological Society and prepared collections for the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873. Three years later, while attending the VIII International Congress on Anthropology and Prehistory in Budapest, he met the physician and liberal politician Rudolf Virchow – an acquaintanceship that lasted until Virchow’s death.
Commemorative heads of a king from an unknown workshop of the bronze foundry guild Igun Eronmwon (Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria, 19th century)
Quelle: dpa/Daniel Reinhardt
In 1885 von Luschan was appointed to the “Royal Museum of Ethnology” in Berlin, from 1904 he was director of the Africa and Oceania departments there. Since his student days he collected archaeological finds, later skeletons and skulls, in the end it is said to have been more than 6000. He travels again and again, including to Africa (he has never been to Benin, of course) and the USA, where he deals with the situation of the Afro-American population and racial discrimination. During the First World War – he is now a professor of physical anthropology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin – he becomes a member of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, which makes sound recordings in more than 250 languages and dialects in the POW camps. In general, he is a pioneer of phonography. On his last excavation trip in 1902, he used a portable phonograph and made surprisingly good recordings of Kurdish texts and songs. Among them the earliest acoustic evidence of a now world-famous melody – known to us as “Rasputin”, sung by Boney M.
Search for unity in diversity
Felix von Luschan measured thousands of dead and living skulls. The idea that there are inferior peoples was completely alien to him. He explored the differences in search of unity in diversity. He found the then circulating idea of an “Aryan race” based on the “Aryan language” ridiculous. And it became clear: That was “just as foolish as trying to talk about a long-headed language or a brunette grammar”. He radically rejected the anti-Semitism that was then spreading in a number of Berlin churches and at some professorships. As did Zionism, because because of the hostile environment, it saw no possibility of successfully establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
He could imagine the coexistence of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens as an “almost ideal symbiosis”, as “a complete merging of Christians and Jews”. In 1924 he wrote: “Just as there is no Indo-European or ‘Aryan’ race, there is no Jewish race; there is also no Jewish type, only a very general Oriental type, which, like the Jews, also includes Greeks and Armenians, and to a lesser extent many other Near East people.” The zeal with which many tried to identify “races”. and to create hierarchies, committed to a liberal concept of progress, he considered to be a contemporary folly. He did not live to see that he was wrong: he died in 1924.
His respect had limits
Von Luschan was unable to recognize the stranger in the other. What he said about it sounds like an acclamation to a regulars’ table of Germans who feel superior to other peoples: “All of humanity consists of only one species: Homo sapiens. There are no ‘savage’ peoples, there are only peoples with a different culture than ours. The difference between the various races, especially as regards moral qualities and intelligence, is not remotely so great as that between individuals of the same race.”
At the same time, he had no problem acquiring looted goods from Benin and withholding them from their rightful owners. Restitution: That was a thought that no one thought at the time. The respect didn’t go that far. In this respect, Felix von Luschan was a child of his time. All the more astonishing for the time in which he lived, how he appreciated this art: “The Benin works are at the highest level of European casting technology. Benvenuto Cellini could not have cast it better and no one before or after him, to this day.” Almost 100 years after Luschan’s death, most of the Benin bronzes are now going back to Africa.