In case no climber has noticed it on Germany’s highest peak: the Zugspitze has been missing the top, so to speak, for a few months. The artist collective Para wants to hold a press conference this Thursday to mark the reopening of the ethnological collections in the Leipzig Grassi Museum announce that last September they removed the top six centimeters of the mountain, just a few meters from the summit cross, with a hammer and chisel, in other words with a classic sculptural approach. The Zugspitze is no longer exactly the 2962.06 meters high that has been officially recorded so far, but only 2962. The purpose of the action is to take hostages in order to obtain the return of colonial booty.
Because in 1889 the Leipzig colonial geographer Hans Meyer, from the family that published “Meyers Konversationslexikon” and correspondingly well off, scaled Kilimanjaro, declared himself the first climber and, in turn, abducted a stone from Africa’s highest mountain. One can imagine this undertaking as classic colonial master behavior: Meyer not only climbed the sacred mountain of the locals and thus profaned it, he immediately declared it the new highest mountain “German soil”, because with its official height of 5895 meters it is approximately twice as high as the Zugspitze, and Meyer shouted “Hurrah” three times when he reached the top and christened the mountain Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze or Wilhelmskuppe. The fact that it is actually a crater mountain, i.e. a rather hollow crest, obviously neither bothered Kaiser Wilhelm II metaphorically at home in Germany nor interested in the details. Rather, he seems to have been flattered when Meyer officially gave him the “top of Kilimanjaro” as a gift in 1890. In any case, the stone that was taken along was incorporated under this name into the Grotto Hall of the New Palace in Potsdam. If it really was ever real lava from Kilimanjaro, it was replaced there over time by a chunk of completely different rock. Meyer had allegedly divided the lava stone beforehand and kept the other half. This is said to have been inherited as a paperweight in the family.
The Kilimanjaro peak, which has been degraded to a paperweight, is to be returned to Africa
This paperweight has now been put on the market by a descendant of Meyer. An antiques dealer from the Vienna area bought it. The German artist collective Para, on the other hand, claims to have been able to convince the antique dealer not to sell the piece for the 250,000 euros he was expecting, because apparently there is a market even for such things. But only at the purchase price, and that amounts to 40,000 euros.
It is now Para’s aim to raise this money and transfer the stone back to Africa. The Germans had previously informed the Tanzanian authorities of the matter. While the Tanzanian government has so far shown little interest in it and has in any case not made an official request for its return, according to Para, local authorities in the Kilimanjaro region have already spoken out in favor of the stone being returned. In order to achieve the goal, one is willing to return the Zugspitze peak for exactly this price, and in the end even to reattach it to the summit.
What will happen if Para doesn’t really “hurt” the museum?
At the same time, starting this Thursday, the “building substance” of the Grassi Museum in Leipzig is to be removed in a costly operation. The plan is to destroy a stone stele from the museum, which, according to a member of the group, would “itself become a raw material for restitution”. After that, the pulverized rock from Leipzig is to be pressed into the form of half the “Kilimanjaro peak” previously taken from the Viennese antiques dealer as a 3D scan and offered for sale in the museum. The press photos promise the use of jackhammers and laboratory-like manufacturing devices. This elaborate installation finds its framework in the reopening of the ethnographic collections, which after a long period of closure now also want to react to the new debate on how to deal with colonial booty.
The Hammer: Para on a destructive Zugspitze mission.
(Photo: Para)
In this context, the so-called Benin bronzes, many of which also came to Leipzig, are no longer to be exhibited, but instead a work by the Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh that deals with this topic. The ethnological collections, to which not least the colonial geographer Meyer made a significant contribution, can be found alongside other institutions in the building complex of the Grassi Museum. This is an expressionist building from the late 1920s, which is a listed building. However, a spokeswoman for the museum gave the all-clear on request: no monument-protected substance would be destroyed, but a stele that was added later, which once bore the bust of a former museum director, which was no longer felt to be contemporary in the house anyway.
Perhaps this all-clear runs counter to the intentions of the artists’ collective Para, whose representatives, in an interview with the SZ, rather wanted to invite the people of Leipzig to “destroy their museum”. the action should “hurt the museum”.
Cries of outrage, especially from the conservative side, would of course be very welcome to the group. This is expected from both Bavaria and Saxony and will also do what is necessary on excitement channels such as Twitter. In the end, it will probably also depend on the degree of this excitement whether enough funds can be raised on the other side to buy back and return the “Kilimanjaro peak”. It would probably be more difficult if the Bavarian nature park administration and Saxon homeland protectors were not interested in the post-colonial restitution campaign by the Para artists’ group. A lack of reactions and therefore perception are generally the Achilles’ heel of such artistic guerrilla actions, as was recently shown again when a Berlin artist who calls himself “The Wa” broke into the German Biennale Pavilion in Venice. So far, nothing more than a documentary photo tells of his exhibition of dog portraits in the style of Gerhard Richter, which was hung there both secretly and ambitiously on his website (the-wabsite.com).
“Raw material of restitution”: Jackhammers are also used.
(Photo: PARA)
Since the artist collective Para is pressing so many politically neuralgic points at once with its action, you should at least be able to rely on the active help of the Saxon AfD in this case.
The Grassi Museum in Leipzig opens its newly designed exhibition rooms under the title Reinventing Grassi on March 4th. On this day the PARA website “move-mountains.com” launched.