In mid-March, a national get-together in Berlin is being held to debate the question of collections originating from the colonies. Germany had taken the initiative in this approach, now revived by the controversy in France.
Concert in the courtyard of the building shortly to house the Humboldt Forum: a reconstruction of the former royal Berlin palace.
ARR
Reactivated in France by the report commissioned from Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, the restitution debate in Germany has rapidly spread beyond the context of African works to pieces from the colonies. The country's museums contain some two million works, a quarter of them in Berlin's collections. Long confined to restricted circles, the discussion on the appropriate treatment of this now embarrassing heritage is omnipresent in the media. It is particularly relevant to preparations for the opening of the Humboldt Forum, designed to exhibit ethnographic Prussian collections starting in the autumn of 2019. Named after two learned brothers from the Age of the Enlightenment, this multidisciplinary centre is housed in the extraordinary setting of a reinforced concrete main building taking on the size and appearance of Prussia's royal Berlin Palace, damaged in 1945 then dynamited by the East German Communist party. Intransigence In Germany, the report submitted to French President Emmanuel Macron was seen as divisive for both its content and the…
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