“Troublesome Performers, Beautiful Fighters”: Bringing to Life the Kolonial-Ausstellung of 1896 at the Museum and Beyond

Abstract

In 2017 the exhibition ZurückGESCHAUT, produced by the district Museum Treptow in Berlin, made history when it partnered with antiracist organizations to tell the story of participants in a Völkerschau that had taken place in 1896. It was the first time that a German museum incorporated a critical view of German colonialism in its permanent exhibition and interwove local and global history. The exhibition inspired an artistic audio project, ZurückERZÄHLT (2019), and was subsequently revised (2021). The three projects grappled very differently with challenging source material, a set of anthropological photographs of participants. The article analyses the choices made by museum curators, activists, and artists who cooperated in these innovative, interlocking memory projects. It argues that the cooperation helped the museum relate the hard truths of colonial violence without reproducing that violence in the exhibition space.