Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum. By Katrin Sieg. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2021. 312 pages. $80.00 hardcover, $34.95 paperback or e-book.

Katrin Sieg’s latest book considers the role museums have to play in the work of decolonizing German and European history. It focuses on exhibitions at the German History Museum in Berlin and the House of European History in Brussels, contextualizing these detailed analyses through illuminating discussions of decolonial historiography, anti-imperial and anti-racist activism, and artists’ interventions in dominant (mis-)representations of the colonial past and persistent racism. Museums reflect how colonial history has come to take a more prominent place in public discourse in recent years, but Sieg questions the extent to which these institutions of cultural memory have used the “soft power” (40) that they wield to bring about meaningful change, not least because this would necessitate understanding of and challenges to their own implication in the power structures that decolonialization aims to undo. Sieg points to the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin as a prime example of museums’ ambivalent position in such discourse. Alert to museums’ “facile embrace of cultural diversity” and reluctance to acknowledge either “uncomfortable truths” or the need for “institutional change” (9), Sieg asks in her study whether they can become “allies” in contemporary struggles against the persistent force of colonialism, imperialism, and racism (36). Indeed, a key premise of the book is to consider whether museums succeed in going beyond a newly understood obligation to represent colonial history to demonstrate a commitment to decolonialization in the present. Crucially, Sieg points to the central, incontestable place of the Holocaust in both German and European memory culture as a significant obstacle to a more sustained engagement with colonial history and its legacy, something that the recent Mbembe Debate has thrown into sharp relief.

The book is divided into three sections, “Contestations,” “German Colonialism: Fragments of Its Past and Present,” and “Postsovereignty,” each of which contains three chapters (or in the case of the final section, two chapters and a conclusion). The first chapter provides a rich introduction to the politics of representing colonial history in the museum. Drawing on a range of influential voices and studies (Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Ariella Azoulay, Ann Laura Stoler, and Silke Arnold-de Simine), Sieg sets out a compelling argument for how and why museums are today bound to undertake the work of decolonization. This refers principally to the undoing of three key structures, namely: the linear time of Hegelian historiography according to which museums are conventionally structured, sovereignty (Sieg follows Butler in showing the need to think instead of “federated forms of sovereignty” and precarity, 30), and cosmopolitanism (challenging the production of what Tom Cheesman calls “cosmopolite fictions,” 33). In the second chapter, Sieg goes on to outline important activist interventions that have provoked museums to take up this work. One particular example of a challenge to conventional museum practices that has led to change is explored in detail in the third chapter: Colonialism in a Box was initiated in 2011 by a group of historians. Located within the German History Museum, it highlights the absence of colonial history from the museum’s permanent exhibition and encourages visitor scepticism about the museum’s own narratives. Colonialism in a Box paved the way for a temporary exhibition at the German History Museum dedicated to colonial history which ran from October 2016 to May 2017.

The next three chapters deal in detail with different elements of this exhibition, German Colonialism: Fragments of Its Past and Present. Chapter Four describes the museum’s focus on Germany’s colonial history (1885–1918) and demonstrates how the exhibition elicits in visitors acts of mourning, which “offer[] closure to the colonial past without forgetting or repressing it” (24). In Chapter Five, “Decolonizing the Metropole: Antiracism and Civil Society,” Sieg discusses the exhibition’s presentation of Black Germans’ struggles with persistent racism. While there is much to commend in this section of the exhibition, it falls short in a number of ways highlighted by Sieg. Chapter Six, “Imperial World Order, Elusive Sovereignty,” considers the exhibition’s focus on questions of imperial legacy and an anti-colonial world order through presentation of information on international law, development, and trade. For Sieg, the way the exhibition presents these issues highlights the neocolonialist force driving parts of the European project. The approach of the German Historical Museum is compared with two smaller regional exhibitions (at the State Museum of Lower Saxony and the Maritime Museum in Flensburg), which utilise film and installation to encourage humility in visitors as they encounter the same fraught questions.

Chapter Seven turns to the House of European History in Brussels to consider the “Europeanization of culture” epitomized in the museum (172) and how decolonization might be undertaken in an institution more overtly concerned with the European project. Against the backdrop of the much-criticized Musée de l’Europe exhibition Europe: C’est notre Histoire! (2007–8), Sieg discusses the permanent exhibition at the House of European History, which opened ten years later, and finds it dangerously reductive in its presentation of European history and sorely lacking in its presentation of colonialism and colonial legacies. Where the institution of the museum has been shown to struggle to engage in the work of decolonization, Sieg looks, in her final chapter, to artists to ask how they might work against or even with museums to bring about change. Sieg highlights the work of three artists, Dierk Schmidt, Heba Y. Amin, and Kader Attia, who have developed fascinating projects that respond to the persistence of imperial power structures and to the challenges of decolonization. Their reluctance to collaborate with or see their work absorbed into museums, where its potency might easily be lost, however, seems to mark the limit of museums’ potential to be “allies” in anti-racist, anti-imperialist projects. Meanwhile, the work included as part of the Museum Schöneberg’s Research Workshop on Colonialism (2017) provides an example of this boundary being overcome. Integrating elements of a collaborative project initiated by artists Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat and Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, the Schöneberg exhibition insists on a kind of refunctioning of what conventionally constitutes a museum exhibit. Sieg also teases out how all the artists discussed in this chapter have a particular interest in the archive as both material and site to which the museum is indebted, subverting the power relations it represents and reappropriating it for acts of creativity and contestation.

This rich and stimulating study balances hugely informative contextualizations with illuminating discussions of specific exhibitions: Sieg’s attention to gesture and posture yields especially insightful observations. It presents a significant amount of information—historical, theoretical, and analytical—in an admirably clear and accessible way, making this book an extremely important intervention in the fields of memory studies, museum studies, and decolonisation, but also a highly informative point of entry into current debates on sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and the politics of memory in the German and European context.