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Deconstructing Dinosaurs takes a fresh look at the history of the German Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1913), using recently uncovered sources to reveal how Berlin’s Natural History Museum appropriated and extracted 225 tonnes of dinosaur fossils from land belonging to modern-day Tanzania. It examines the colonial conditions under which the area’s inhabitants located, excavated, and prepared the finds and carried them out of the country’s interior to the coast. Once in Berlin, the fossils were transformed into valuable scientific assets and prize exhibits, foremost among them Giraffatitan brancai. This specimen, a prominent subject of provenance and restitution debates, is used to explore the colonial legacy of natural history collections and the social and political responsibilities of the museums that hold them.
Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s ...
"A major new history of how, between 1965 and 1985, African nations sought the restitution of works of art stolen during the colonial period, written by the most important and influential figure in the field"--
Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others is a thought-provoking collection that brings together a diverse range of contributions inspired by research from the "Hamburg's (post-)colonial legacy" research center. The authors explore new perspectives in provenance research by situating it within the broader contexts of global history, colonial history, and postcolonial studies. This volume goes beyond simply tracing the origins of objects, considering the significant impact on the societies from which these objects originate. It also critically examines how these objects were used in collections and museums and how the process of musealization shaped collecting practices. With its multiperspective approach, Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others encourages readers to reflect on the deep connections between past and present and to consider responsible ways of engaging with colonial collections.
Relying on internal sources, Wilfried Loth analyses the birth and subsequent development of the European Union, from the launch of the Council of Europe and the Schuman Declaration until the Euro crisis and the contested European presidential election of Jean-Claude Juncker. This book shines a light on the crises of the European integration, such as the failure of the European Defence Community, De Gaulle’s empty chair policy, or the rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, but also highlights the indubitable successes that are the Franco-German reconciliation, the establishment of the European common market, and the establishment of an expanding common currency. What this study accomplishes, for the first time, is to illuminate the driving forces behind the European integration process and how it changed European politics and society. “An enlightening work. Arequired reading for all who doubt the unfinished history of Europe.” – Rolf Steininger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “This book will become an indispensable standard work.” – Jörg Himmelreich, Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis. During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around ...
This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the international crimes committed in the Russia-Ukraine War, and the challenges of their prosecution and documentation. As the largest international armed conflict in Europe since World War II, Russia’s war against Ukraine has provoked strong reactions and questions about the post-1945 world order, the utility of the war, and the effectiveness of international criminal justice. Throughout the chapters in this volume, scholars and legal practitioners from Canada, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the UK, and the United States present the results of interdisciplinary research, insights from the perspective of other post-communist states, and first...
Including several contributions from an international group of historians and experts of international relations, this book analyses the relationship between the United Nations and European integration. The book, which covers from 1945 to the present, is organised into three sections, each dedicated to a different phase of the integration process, during which EU-UN relations had a different character. The essays of the first section deal with the 1950s and 1960s and show the active part played by UN bodies in shaping the integration process. In the second part, covering the 1970s and 1980s, it is the European Community which is shown to have had a visible impact on the life and the decision...
How can literary archives adapt to the challenges of the future? Literary archives are per se international because their subject is international. Literature does not end at the borders of its country of origin or its language. Hence, literary archives hold material that is not limited to a country or a language, although one country and language is usually dominant. It might even be the case that an archive has the official task of preserving the literary heritage of a specific territory and is funded for this purpose. How can we conceptualize literary archives in their regional and global frameworks and develop them further? To what extent does digitization foster international cooperatio...
“It could have turned out differently” – from this perspective, the volume looks at fourteen caesuras in German history between 1848 and 1989. Here the real and crucial historical events are considered against the backdrop of other historical developments that were always possible – developments inherently present in decisive, often dramatic turning points. In this way new light is shed on what is already known, the essential openness of history made evident. What would have happened if the East German security services had violently turned on the demonstrators in 1989? If the USA had dropped atomic bombs on Germany in 1945? How would Germany have turned out if the effort to establis...