14403

The Middle East in German Museums

Julia Hauser

Kommentar

From the seventeenth century onwards, artifacts from and relating to the MENA region were brought together in German collections. In this class, we will focus, inter alia, on collections in Berlin, Dresden, Gotha, Karlsruhe, and Frankfurt/Main. We will look at how these collections came into being, and how they shaped the image of the region. Each participant will present and analyze one collection in a presentation, with the possibility of elaborating their analysis in a term paper. Since a reading knowledge of German may come in helpful in this class, we will form teams to help each other with these texts. We will read secondary sources on Germany’s political involvement in the region, colonialism and knowledge production, theoretical approaches from the field of museology and curation, and about the collections concerned; the latter of these texts may occasionally be in German. Our discussion of these texts and individual collections will revolve around the following questions: Which regions in Germany feature the most of these collections and why? Which political constellations and which motives led to the acquisitions of these objects? Who were the collectors? Which image of the region did the inclusion of these objects in German collections shape? Which new meanings did they acquire in the process, and which meanings got lost? Which epochs were represented the most in the collections, and which ones were left out? Which changes ought to be made in representations of the region in German museums? How can it feature in present-day German museums nonetheless, and to which end? Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Bodenstein, Felicity, Damiana Otoiu, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg, eds. Contested Holdings. Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return, Museums and Collections; 14. New York: Berghahn, 2022. Multaka. Treffpunkt Museum. https://multaka.de Willert, Sebastian. "The Invention of ‘National Antiquities’ in the Late Ottoman Empire. Archaeological Interrelations between Discourses of Appropriation, Preservation and Heritage Construction." Diyâr. Zeitschrift für Osmanistik, Türkei- und Nahostforschung / Journal of Ottoman, Turkish and Middle Eastern studies 2, no. 2 (2021): 304–328. Schließen