Museums are central to memory culture. Material culture can function as a surrogate for written history. Germany offers an intriguing example with a recent addition to its national museums: the Humboldt Forum. Housed in the reconstructed imperial palace, it has attracted much criticism, but has also sparked debates about Germany’s long-neglected colonial past. Current discussions have revealed the colonial worldviews behind ethnology collections now housed in the Humboldt Forum and the Museum for Asian Art, for instance. The custodians of the collections of antiquities on Museum Island across the road, however, have so far largely remained silent and aloof, as though they are uninvolved in this narrative. The conversation, it seems, has only just started, and the deeper one digs, the more issues emerge. What is also striking is the lack of engagement with something otherwise central to German memory culture: the question of Holocaust remembrance and how the Nazi era relates to these sites and museum collections. In this conversation, the classicist Jaś Elsner and Mirjam Sarah Brusius discuss memory culture in the Humboldt Forum and its surroundings. They explore it as a multilayered site where colonial collecting and scholarship, antiquity and its reception, (the lack of) Holocaust remembrance, and contemporary politics tacitly converge in complex and largely unresolved ways.
