The question of returning cultural assets to their country of origin is a key issue right now for many museums and collections. The legal provisions in Germany and the European Union are clear for the present: Illegally obtained cultural assets must be returned. But that’s really where the problem begins: What acquisitions were legal? What took place within the legal framework applicable at the time? Yet before we can discuss and come to an agreement both legally and morally on the legality or non-legality of an item in our possession, we need to clarify where exactly it came from. To whom did it originally belong? For cultural assets from colonial contexts and periods particularly, researching the provenance of an object is anything but easy. Ethnologist Dr Larissa Förster from the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin studies these questions and has recently published a book on this topical debate together with Iris Edenheiser, Sarah Fründt, and Heike Hartmann. We quizzed her on the subject.
The interview was originally published in German and translated due to great response.