Human remains from several museums and universities in Germany and Austria are to be handed over to the US state of Hawaii this week. The skulls and bones come from the Berlin Museum of Prehistory and Early History, among others. Hawaii had asked for the return.
On Tuesday, eight human skulls will first be handed over in Bremen, and on Friday the remains of 32 people will follow in Berlin, which will be received by a delegation from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, as the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) announced. Handovers are also planned in Göttingen, Jena and Vienna.
According to the statement, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) emphasized that the return must “have the highest priority” and explained: “Human remains from colonial contexts have no place in our museums and universities.” Colonial history left many wounds, and Germany must do its part to ensure that these wounds can be healed “by returning them, by consistently coming to terms with and confronting our colonial past, and through greater international cultural exchange,” said Roth.
Hawaiian delegation leader Edward Halealoha Ayau said, “We recognize the anguish of our ancestors and take responsibility for their well-being by bringing them home for reburial.” The remains will be buried in Hawaii as close as possible to where they were originally stolen from, he said.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK Foundation, announced that in order to enable further returns, he wanted to research the entire Luschan collection step by step. This was compiled by the physician and anthropologist Felix von Luschan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and acquired by the Charité in 2011. It originally comprised more than 6,000 skulls, of which around 5,500 are still in Berlin.
In total, the historical anthropological collections in the capital currently include around 7,700 human remains from almost all parts of the world. About 40 percent of them have a colonial acquisition background from the former German overseas territories in Africa and the Pacific region.