As of: 09/22/2021 2:36 p.m.
“We have blind spots”: Federal President Steinmeier has called for people to look into German colonial history. As colonial rulers, Germans also oppressed and killed people.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called for a stronger debate on German colonialism. “When it comes to the colonial era, we Germans who are otherwise so history-conscious have too many gaps,” said Steinmeier at the opening ceremony for the exhibitions at the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. “We have blind spots in our memories and our self-perception,” criticized Steinmeier.
The two museums are located in the newly opened Humboldt Forum, which was created in the partially rebuilt Berlin Palace. The exhibitions housed there also sparked a debate about looted art and German colonial history.
Completely forgotten about colonial times
With a view to this debate, Steinmeier warned that the resurrected castle must “also be a reminder and a reminder: of militarism and nationalism and of German colonialism”. In the “collective memory”, the German colonial era was “either glorified – or even more often completely forgotten”, criticized Steinmeier. But the injustice that Germans committed in colonial times is “our concern as a whole society”. Because in Germany there is also in the present “racism, discrimination, disparagement of supposedly foreigners – up to physical attacks and terrible acts of violence”.
Country with a migration background
However, people from all over the world are “part of our national identity, part of an active citizenship that intervenes in debates. They are not people with a migration background – we are a country with a migration background.”
He remains convinced that “we will only understand and overcome the deeper roots of everyday racism if we illuminate the blind spots of our memories, if we deal much more than before with our colonial history,” said Steinmeier.
Genocide in what is now Namibia
In this context, the Federal President also referred to the reconciliation agreement with Namibia. “There, in what was once German South West Africa, German so-called protection troops committed the first genocide of this bloody century at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Steinmeier. He hoped that the negotiations on a reconciliation agreement would soon come to an amicable conclusion.
At the end of May it became known that Germany would officially recognize the crimes of German colonial troops against the Herero and Nama ethnic groups in what is now Namibia at the beginning of the 20th century as genocide and apologize to the descendants of the victims. The reconciliation agreement also provides for German reconstruction aid amounting to 1.1 billion euros. The money is to be used primarily in the Herero and Nama settlements. The agreement between Berlin and Windhoek was preceded by more than five years of negotiations.
Criticism from the Tanzanian spokesman
The Berlin Postkolonial Initiative criticized the Humboldt Forum for showing cultural treasures from regions of the world “where colonial foreign rule made access to them possible in the first place”. The Tanzanian spokesman for the association, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro, said: “It is frustrating to know our stolen cultural treasures in Germany and other countries in the West. But it is an outrageous provocation and humiliation that they are now in the reconstructed palace of the Prussian without our consent Kings are issued. “