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Die globale Pflanzenwelt ausstellen. Vergangenheit und Vielfalt in botanischen Gärten

Sarah Ehlers diskutiert den Umgang mit kolonialer Vergangenheit und gegenwärtigen Krisen der Biodiversität in botanischen Gärten.

Die Geschichte botanischer Gärten ist eng mit dem Kolonialismus verbunden. Gleichzeitig finden sich weltweit vom Aussterben bedrohte Pflanzenarten heute vielfach in den botanischen Gärten im Globalen Norden. Lässt sich die Krise der Biodiversität gemeinsam mit der Auseinandersetzung über koloniale Vergangenheit angehen?

The history of botanical gardens is closely intertwined with colonialism. At the same time, many plant species threatened with extinction worldwide can now be found in botanical gardens in the Global North. Can the biodiversity crisis be tackled in conjunction with the debate about the colonial past?


“It’s time to decolonise botanical collections” erklärte 2020 Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science der Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, den berühmten botanischen Gärten im Südwesten Londons.[1] “Politicising plants” nannte dieses Vorhaben dagegen der britische konservative Think Tank Policy Exchange und forderte, Kew Gardens möge sich auf seine Kernaufgabe konzentrieren: Forschung und Beratung in der Botanik sowie die Bewahrung und Vermittlung der einzigartigen Sammlung.[2] Was sich für die britische Gesellschaft als einer der vielen Schauplätze der im Zuge der Black Lives Matter-Bewegung neu angetriebenen Auseinandersetzungen um die eigene Kolonialvergangenheit darstellte, bedeutete für die botanischen Gärten vor allem eine weitere Veränderung ihres Auftrags.

Für die Frage nach dem „Wert der Vergangenheit“ ist die Geschichte botanischer Gärten allerdings nicht nur aufgrund dieser Deutungskämpfe von Interesse: Botanische Gärten sind lebendige Sammlungen, sie gelten als lebende Speicher von Biodiversität. Vergangenheit ist in diesem Zusammenhang also nicht nur eine Ressource für gesellschaftspolitische Auseinandersetzungen, sie ist auch ein materielles Gut. Lebendsammlungen allerdings sind dynamisch und anfällig. Sie verkörpern eine vergangene Vielfalt und zugleich einen zeitgenössischen Verlust. Somit kommen botanische Gärten nicht umhin, damit verknüpfte heutige Probleme wie Klimawandel und den Verlust menschlicher Lebensgrundlagen zu thematisieren.

Botanische Gärten und ihr koloniales Erbe

Botanische Gärten gibt es seit dem 15. Jahrhundert. Ihre Geschichte ist eng mit der Geschichte der Botanik verknüpft, deren koloniale Prägung mittlerweile auch Thema einer ganzen Reihe von Studien ist.[3] Die Gründung der Gärten wurde vielfach von Universitäten betrieben, boten ihre Pflanzen, ursprünglich vor allem Heilkräuter, der Forschung und Lehre doch wichtiges Material. Mit Zunahme des Seehandels und kolonialen Eroberungen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert kam es zu einem Boom botanischer Gärten und sie wurden zum Knotenpunkt der transnationalen bzw. transkontinentalen Zirkulation von Wissen, Materialitäten und Artefakten. Nun war das Ziel, die Pflanzen der ganzen Welt zu vereinen, zu erforschen, zu klassifizieren und auszustellen. In dieser Praxis des globalen Sammelns und Repräsentierens waren sie Teil imperialer Netzwerke und vielfach in koloniale Praktiken eingebunden.

Botanische Gärten in den europäischen Metropolen schmückten sich nun mit mehr und mehr exotischen Pflanzen, für deren Gedeih im europäischen Klima man Glashäuser baute. In der Zurschaustellung tropischer Nutz- und Zierpflanzen warben die Gärten für koloniale Besitztümer, während der systematische Austausch von Samen, Setzlingen und botanischem Wissen für tropische Anbaugebiete den Kolonialismus wirtschaftlich unterstützte. Auch „Völkerschauen“, also die rassistische Zurschaustellung als „primitiv“ oder „exotisch“ stigmatisierter Menschen in Zoos und Vergnügungsparks seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert, wurden mit tropischen Pflanzen ausgestattet oder fanden teils selbst in den Gärten statt, wie etwa in Lissabon noch im Jahr 1940.

Das Biologisch-Landwirtschaftliche Institut Amani, vor 1910. Fotograf unbekannt. Wikimedia commons, gemeinfrei

Botanische Gärten gab es auch in den Kolonien selbst. In Kalkutta, Algiers, Amani (Tansania) und vielen weiteren Orten in den Kolonien legten Europäer ebenfalls Gärten an, um den Anbau von Nutzpflanzen wie Zuckerrohr, Kaffee, Kautschuk oder Sisal zu studieren und für weltweite Plantagenkulturen zu verbessern. Allein im Britischen Empire existierten im Jahr 1900 über hundert botanische Gärten in den Kolonien. Arbeit in den Gärten und in größerem Umfang noch auf Plantagen war von Gewalt und Ausbeutung der indigenen Bevölkerung geprägt und vielerorts, wie etwa in Ostafrika oder dem Amazonasgebiet, mit Systemen der Zwangsarbeit und Sklaverei verbunden. Bezogen auf die globale Vielfalt der Pflanzenwelt führte die Ausbreitung des Plantagensystems letztlich zur Ausrottung eines Großteils einheimischer Pflanzen. Ein Restbestand dieses verdrängten botanischen Artenreichtums findet sich heute wiederum in den botanischen Gärten.

Kew Herbarium, Pflanzenproben der Raphia australis, Ian Alexander, 2019: CC BY-SA 4.0, wikimedia commons

Auf zahlreichen Expeditionen sammelten Wissenschaftler neben lebenden Pflanzen auch Millionen von gepressten und getrockneten Pflanzenproben. Als „Herbarbelege“ lieferten sie der Botanik eine Fülle neuen Materials, das es zu beschreiben, klassifizieren und systematisieren galt. Diese Form der Aneignung lokaler Pflanzen und, damit verbunden, lokalen Wissens, beschreiben vor allem postkoloniale Initiativen heute als „epistemische Gewalt“, erschufen europäische Gelehrte wie Carl von Linné, Joseph Dalton Hooker oder Friedrich Welwitsch damit schließlich die Botanik als hegemoniale westliche Wissenschaft, die anderes, älteres und lokales Wissen über die Pflanzenwelt unsichtbar machte.[4] Obwohl sie vielfach auf lokale Expertise angewiesen waren, um die zu klassifizierenden Pflanzen überhaupt zu finden, ihre Merkmale zu verstehen und zu vergleichen, traten sie als „Erstentdecker“ auf und überschrieben indigenes Wissen und Traditionen in ihren Neubenennungen und Klassifizierungen.

Neupositionierungen: Biodiversität bewahren, Wissen kommunizieren

Seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts erfanden sich botanische Gärten neu. Angetrieben durch die Dekolonisation, geringere öffentliche Ressourcen sowie ein wachsendes Bewusstsein für den Verlust der Artenvielfalt geschah diese Transformation vor allem durch Druck von außen. Statt imperialer Repräsentation und Weltgeltung rückten Forschung, Wissenschaftskommunikation, Unterhaltung und Erziehung zum Naturschutz in den Vordergrund

Weltkarte der botanischen Gärten sowie der Biodiversitäts-Hotspots (Regionen der Erde, in denen eine große Zahl an endemischen Pflanzen- und Tierarten vorkommt und deren Natur in besonderem Maße bedroht ist) 2019, siehe: Westwood M, Cavender N, Meyer A, Smith P. Botanic garden solutions to the plant extinction crisis. Plants, People, Planet. 2021; 3: 22–32.

Auch globale Bezüge erhielten im diesem Zuge eine neue Funktion. Nachdem es jahrhundertelang vor allem darum ging, den Pflanzenreichtum der Welt nach Europa zu bringen, wogegen er im Globalen Süden den Monokulturen wich, ist heute der umgekehrte Transfer zumindest wichtiges Ziel botanischer Gärten. Aktuell sind etwa 40% der globalen Pflanzenarten vom Aussterben bedroht. [5] Die größte Biodiversität befindet sich dabei im Globalen Süden und ist folglich auch hier in größter Gefahr. Die meisten Botanischen Gärten befinden sich dagegen im Globalen Norden. Ihre Sammlungen bieten eine Chance: Im Gegensatz zu den meisten Museumsobjekten können lebende Pflanzen in fast allen Fällen vermehrt werden, sind also durch Stecklinge, Ableger oder Samen reproduzierbar. Sterben Pflanzenarten an ihren Naturstandorten aufgrund von Klimawandel, Landwirtschaft oder Verschmutzung aus, können die Gärten die bei ihnen vorhandenen Reserven für deren erneute Aussiedlungen vermehren. Pflanzenarten können so vor dem endgültigen Aussterben bewahrt werden.

Wenn es nun darum gehen soll, die koloniale Vergangenheit der Gärten mit aktuellen Herausforderungen zusammenbringen, stellt die Nutzung der Lebendsammlungen zur Förderung globaler Biodiversität eine wichtige Handlungsoption der Gärten dar, die anderen sammlungsführenden Institutionen wie Museen so nicht zur Verfügung steht. Dass Forderungen nach besserem Zugang zu den Sammlungen, mehr Information etwa durch Online-Angebote, Mitsprache und eine deutliche Verbreitung der Kooperationen mit Partnern im Globalen Süden diese Entwicklung begleiten, überrascht in diesem Zusammenhang nicht, zeigt aber, dass hier enormes Potential liegt.

Eine weitere Dimension von Handlungsmöglichkeiten betrifft die Ausstellungspraxis. Zahlreiche Botanische Gärten (wie beispielsweise Berlin, Adelaide oder Kew) versuchen, die Geschichte ihrer ausgestellten Pflanzen und Sammlungen kuratorisch zu integrieren. Schautafeln, Sonderausstellungen und künstlerische Interventionen in den Gärten selbst sowie digitale Angebote weisen auf die kolonialen Triebkräfte ebenso hin wie auf die Herkunft der Pflanzen, ihre Wege in die Gärten, ihre Verbindungen zu indigener Kultur in der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart an ihren Naturstandorten. Für diese Arbeit braucht es nicht nur Kooperationen mit den Herkunftsgesellschaften, es sind vor allem aufwändige Recherchen zur Provenienz der Bestände nötig. Diese Arbeit gleicht der mittlerweile breit etablierten Provenienzforschung zu künstlerischen, technischen und ethnologischen Kulturgütern aus kolonialen Kontexten an Museen in vielerlei Hinsicht: Die Entstehung der Sammlungen ist teilweise wenig dokumentiert, inwieweit die einzelne Inbesitznahme unter Zwang erfolgte, ist oftmals kaum einwandfrei zu belegen. Dennoch gelingt es diesen Forschungen vielfach, wichtige Kontexte der Beschaffung der Objekte und ihrer Transfers in die musealen Sammlungen herauszuarbeiten, die nicht nur für die Herkunftsgesellschaften, sondern auch für die Museumsgeschichte selbst erhellend ist.

Provenienzforschung zieht stets auch die Frage der Restitution unrechtmäßig erworbener Objekte nach sich. Hier ist die Rolle der Gärten eine Besondere: Die Reproduzierbarkeit der Pflanzen macht die Rückgabe einerseits sehr einfach. Andererseits braucht es für eine erfolgreiche Wiederansiedlung von Pflanzen in der Regel weitaus mehr als ein paar Samenkörner oder Setzlinge, müssen schließlich die umweltlichen Bedingungen für ihr Überleben wiederhergestellt werden. Statt einer Restitution ursprünglicher Pflanzenarten fördern botanische Gärten deshalb auch vielfach die Ansiedlung neuer Nutzpflanzen, die eine nachhaltige Landwirtschaft ermöglichen, wie etwa die von Kew Gardens geförderte Enset-Kultivierung in Äthiopien.[6]

Ausblick: Wert der Vergangenheit in Botanischen Gärten

Newton’s Apple Tree in den Cambridge University Botanic Gardens nach dem Sturm Eunice, 2022, credit: Sam Brockington

Im Lebendigen, so zeigen botanische Gärten, steckt stets auch die Vergänglichkeit: Nicht nur haben Pflanzen ein natürliches Lebensalter, sie lassen sich auch deutlich schlechter als unbelebte Kulturgüter schützen. Als etwa der Sturm Eunice 2022 den Isaac Newton-Baum des Botanischen Gartens Cambridge zerlegte – Spross des berühmten Baumes, dessen Apfel Newton zur Theorie der Gravität inspiriert haben soll – war für den Garten auch ein Publikumsmagnet und damit ein recht materieller Wert vernichtet. Und materiell im Sinne von monetär ist nicht nur die Unterstützung, die Re-Kultivierungsprojekte im Globalen Süden benötigen, sondern auch der aufwändige Betrieb der Gärten selbst. Dass die Kew Gardens in ihrem „Manifesto for Change, 2021-2030“ nach der Kritik ihre Sprache anpassten und nicht mehr von „decolonise“, sondern von “re-examine our collections” die Rede war, hat sicherlich auch mit der Sorge zu tun, in Zeiten knapper Kassen selbst zur bedrohten Art zu werden.


[1] https://theconversation.com/director-of-science-at-kew-its-time-to-decolonise-botanical-collections-141070 [15.10.2025].

[2] https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/politicising-plants/ [15.10.2025].

[3] Siehe stellvertretend: Banu Subramaniam: Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, Seattle 2024; Londa Schiebinger und Claudia Swan (Hg.): Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia 2005.

[4] S. bspw. Regula Flury  und Nina Schneider: Botanischer Nationalismus und Pflanzendiplomatie. Interview mit dem Künstler Uriel Orlow über seinen Werkzyklus Theatrum Botanikum, in: Widerspruch: Beiträge zu sozialistischer Politik, 37 (2018), 72, 75-85, 78.

[5] Alexandre Antonelli et al.: (2020). State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

[6] https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/ethnobotanical-insights-enset-ethiopia


Dr. Sarah Ehlers ist stellvertretende Leiterin des Forschungsinstituts für Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte des Deutschen Museums München. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind die Umwelt-, Wissenschafts-, Medizin- und Technikgeschichte in globalen und kolonialen Bezügen. 2025 erhielt sie das Leibniz-Cambridge Museum & Collection Fellowship.


Titelbild: Great Palm House, Kew Gardens (color engraving), ca. 1851-1855, Thomas H. Shepherd. Public domain, wikimedia commons

Visuelle Spuren kolonialer Vergangenheit und Stellenwert der Aufarbeitung kolonialer Bildarchive

Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui beleuchtet in diesem Beitrag, wie koloniale Bildarchive visuelle Spuren vergangener Machtverhältnisse bewahren und warum ihre Aufarbeitung heute von entscheidender Bedeutung ist.

In diesem Blogbeitrag wird beleuchtet, wie koloniale Bildarchive visuelle Spuren vergangener Machtverhältnisse bewahren und warum ihre Aufarbeitung heute von entscheidender Bedeutung ist. Im Rahmen dessen werden einige Fotografien aus der Zeit der deutschen Kolonialherrschaft in Kamerun präsentiert, um die Verflechtung von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart exemplarisch zu veranschaulichen.

This blog post examines how colonial image archives preserve visual traces of past power relations and why it is crucial to address them today. In this context, several photographs from the period of German colonial rule in Cameroon are presented to illustrate the intertwining of past and present.


Kolonialbildarchive spiegeln koloniale Wissensordnungen wider. In ihnen verdichten sich koloniale Blickregime. Die Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Archiven ermöglicht nicht nur den Zugang zu visuellen Spuren kolonialer Vergangenheit, sondern macht auch deren gegenwärtige Deutung aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven beispielsweise im Hinblick auf Restitution und ethische Verantwortung sichtbar. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der kolonialen Vergangenheit hat in den letzten Jahren an Aktualität gewonnen. Der Fokus dabei liegt zunehmend auch auf Artefakten, von entwendeten Kulturgütern bis hin zu visuellen Spuren. Fotografien der Kolonialzeit zeugen von der Tatsache, dass die Geschichte kolonialer Herrschaft in vielerlei Hinsicht eine Geschichte visueller Darstellung war.[1]

Wie andere europäische Nationen nutzte auch das deutsche Kolonialreich das Medium Fotografie, um seine kolonialen Bestrebungen zu verwirklichen und das eigene imperialistische Selbstbild zu verstärken. Besonders in Kamerun, das zwischen 1884 und 1914 unter deutschem „Schutz“ stand, sind umfangreiche Bildbestände entstanden. Zahlreiche bundesdeutsche Archive und Museen bewahren Kolonialfotografien aus Kamerun auf. Diese Fotografien bilden „Kolonialbildarchive“, d.h. die Gesamtheit aller Bilder, die dieser Kategorie zuzuordnen sind und den Weg in Archive und Sammlungen gefunden haben.

Heutzutage können „Kolonialbildarchive“ als Orte begriffen werden, an denen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit ineinandergreifen, als Räume, in denen Kolonialerinnerung und -kritik zugleich stattfinden. Fragen, die man sich diesbezüglich stellen kann, lauten: Welche Bedeutungen entfalten Fotografien im Spannungsfeld von visuellem Erbe und kolonialer Aufarbeitung? Wie sieht es aus mit den kolonialen Beziehungen in der Praxis von Museen und Archiven? Welche materiellen und kuratorischen Praktiken beeinflussen weiterhin die aktuellen Überlegungen im Umgang mit kolonialen Fotografien?

Für die deutsche Kolonialmacht in Kamerun waren Bilder ein wichtiges Instrument, um Wissen zu sammeln, Territorium zu kartieren und Macht zu inszenieren. Visuelle Aufnahmen dokumentieren eine Vielzahl von Themen, die von den Forschungsexpeditionen über die ethnografischen Studien und die kolonialen Verwaltungstätigkeiten bis hin zum Bau der Infrastruktur und den Momenten kolonialer Selbstrepräsentation reichen. Die bildlichen Darstellungen sowie die Beschriftungen der Bilder stehen beispielhaft für den Vorgang des Otherings, der das Deutsche Kolonialreich als “zivilisatorisch” und “technisch fortschrittlich” seinem “rückständig” erscheinenden kolonialen Gebiet gegenüberstellt.[2]

Koloniale Expeditionen im Bild: Erkundung und Besitzergreifung

Expeditionsfotografie in Kamerun erfüllte eine klare Funktion; sie sollte das unbekannte Territorium kartieren, sichtbar machen und damit für koloniale Herrschaft verfügbar halten.

Beschriftung: Mein Expeditionspersonal. Gehilfe, Polizeisoldaten, Köche, Boys, Dolmetscher, Arbeiter. Fotograf: Guillemain, Constantin. Portraitiert. Guillemain, Constantin (1873-1914). Aufgenommen etwa 1906. Ort: Kamerun. Signatur: 081-3200-38. Quelle: Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main.

Die Kameras der Forscher richteten sich auf Flüsse, Wälder, Dörfer und Wege. Bei den Expeditionen wurden nicht nur Landschaften, sondern auch Menschen und Dorfgemeinschaften dokumentiert. „Stammesführer“ oder „typische Vertreter“ bestimmter Ethnien wurden oft in inszenierten Posen abgelichtet, die den kolonialen Erwartungen entsprachen.   

Beschriftung: Mädchen der Hausa, die Tontöpfe tragen. Darstellung: Hausa. Fotograf : Rudolf Oldenburg, 1907/1913, Kamerun. Signatur: PhMAf 2100. Quelle: GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig.

Heute können diese Aufnahmen aus einer doppelten Perspektive gelesen werden: Einerseits liefern sie historische Hinweise zu Kleidung oder sozialen Konstellationen. Andererseits verdeutlichen sie, wie sehr der koloniale Blick das Bild bestimmte und dabei Stereotypen zugrunde legte. 

Ethnografische Studien: Körper im Fokus

Einen besonders heiklen Bereich der Kolonialfotografie bilden ethnografische Porträts. In vielen Sammlungen finden sich Reihen von Fotografien, auf denen Menschen frontal und im Profil abgebildet werden. Ziel war es, „wissenschaftliche“ Vergleiche zu ermöglichen, etwa zu Körper- und Gesichtszügen.

Beschriftung: Anthropometrische Aufnahmen eines Mädchens aus Bagam. Fotograf: Rudolf Oldenburg, 1907/1913, Bagam, Kamerun. Signatur: PhMAf 2553. Quelle: GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig.

Diese Praxis war Teil eines rassistischen Wissenssystems, das Menschen kategorisierte und hierarchisierte. Solche Aufnahmen sind heute belastete Quellen. Sie machen die Gewalt des kolonialen Blicks sichtbar: die abgebildeten Subjekte wurden auf ihre Körper reduziert und zu Studienobjekten degradiert.  

Infrastrukturprojekte: visueller Fortschritt und technische Errungenschaft

Neben Expeditionen und ethnografischen Aufnahmen wurden auch Infrastrukturprojekte intensiv fotografiert. Der Bau von Straßen, Eisenbahnen, Verwaltungsgebäuden oder Plantagen war für die Kolonialmacht nicht nur ein Mittel wirtschaftlicher Ausbeutung, sondern auch ein Symbol der „zivilisatorischen Mission“.

Beschriftung: Sanagabrücke, Kamerun. Ausgeführt von Gutehoffnungshütte Oberhausen, 1911, Nachlassgeber: Kühne, Ludwig. Herkunft: Schenkung Basfeld. Register-Nr.: FoA vi-KUE-GD199. Quelle: Frobenius-Institut für Kulturanthropologische Forschung Frankfurt am Main.

Kolonialfotografien von Brücken in Kamerun sind nicht nur Dokumente technischer Errungenschaften und architektonischer Leistungen, sondern inszenieren auch einen kolonialen Fortschrittsmythos. Allerdings verbergen sie oft die Ausbeutungsbedingungen, unter denen sie entstanden sind, nämlich Zwangsarbeit und damit einhergehende Gewalt.

Visuelle Selbstinszenierung und koloniales Selbstbild

Ein zentrales Motiv der Kolonialfotografie war die Selbstinszenierung der Kolonisatoren. Gruppenaufnahmen von Offizieren, Verwaltungsbeamten oder Siedlern zeigen, wie die deutschen Akteure sich selbst inszenierten: als Entdecker, als Herren über das Land, als Träger einer überlegenen Kultur.

Beschriftung: Besichtigung der Kameruner Nordbahn 1910/11. Fotograf: Herzog Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg. Afrika/Zentralafrika/Kamerun. Signatur: 2016.13:6. Quelle: MARKK Hamburg.
Beschriftung: Jagdszene mit Europäer 1911-1913. Fotografin: Marie Pauline Thorbecke. Afrika/West-Afrika/Kamerun. Signatur: FT531. Quelle: RJM, Köln.

Diese Bilder dienten sowohl privaten Zwecken – etwa als Erinnerungsfotos für die Familien in Deutschland – als auch einer breiteren Öffentlichkeitsarbeit. In Ausstellungen, illustrierten Zeitschriften oder Kolonialalben trugen sie zur Legitimation des kolonialen Projekts bei.

Aufarbeitung kolonialer Vergangenheit in Bildarchiven

Die Diskussion zur Kolonialaufarbeitung bildet seit einigen Jahren einen Bestandteil gesellschaftspolitischer Debatten. Als Kolonialaufarbeitung werden Prozesse bezeichnet, in denen Gesellschaften, Institutionen und Einzelpersonen die Kolonialvergangenheit kritisch reflektieren, ihre Folgen für Gegenwart und Zukunft untersuchen und nach Wegen für einen gerechten Umgang suchen. Ein zentraler Bezugspunkt der Kolonialaufarbeitung ist die Frage, wie mit Kulturerbe aus kolonialen Kontexten umgegangen werden soll.[3]

Archive und Museen, in denen koloniale Objekte und Sammlungen aufbewahrt werden, sind zu einem Spannungsfeld postkolonialer Debatten geworden. Denn bis heute ist die Tradition, andere auszustellen, stark kolonialistisch geprägt, sodass gerade hier Revisionen und Problematisierungen nahe liegen.[4] Der Anspruch dieser Institutionen ist es, Orte der interkulturellen Begegnung zu schaffen, an denen dem „Fremden“ mit Achtung und Respekt begegnet wird. Die postkoloniale Kritik richtet ihr Augenmerk nicht nur darauf, wie Kolonialfotografien als Trophäen des Kolonialismus fungieren, sondern auch auf die Grenzziehungen und Machtansprüche, durch die solche Exponate gekennzeichnet werden. Eine verantwortungsvolle kuratorische Praxis bedeutet, etwa am Beispiel der Abbildung „Anthropometrische Aufnahmen eines Mädchens aus Bagam“, die Instrumentalisierung der Abgebildeten zu thematisieren und Fragen nach der ethischen Zugänglichkeit sowie nach Kontextualisierung aufzuwerfen.

Die Auseinandersetzung mit Kolonialbildarchiven aus Kamerun eröffnet nicht nur Bildhistorische Perspektiven, sondern auch eine rechtlich-ethische Dimension, die auch im Rahmen historischer Gerechtigkeit verhandelt werden soll. Fotografien aus der Kolonialzeit in Kamerun entstanden in einem Kontext asymmetrischer Machtverhältnisse zwischen Kolonisierenden und Kolonisierten. Dabei wurden Menschen aus Kamerun oftmals nicht als Subjekte mit eigener Würde, Geschichte und Stimme abgebildet, sondern als Objekte kolonialer Kontrolle, als exotische „Typen“, als „Beweise“ für rassistische Ideologien oder als „Beute“ ethnografischer Sammlungen.[5] Entscheidend ist es, die historische Gewalt im Medium der Fotografie nicht zu verdecken, sondern transparent zu verhandeln und zugleich den Blick auf die abgebildeten Menschen als handelnde Subjekte ihrer Geschichte zurückzugewinnen.


[1] Jens Jäger, Fotografie und Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2009.  

[2] David Bate, Photography and Colonial Vision, Third Text 7 (1993) 22, 81–91.

[3] Margareta von Oswald/Jonas Tinius (Eds.), Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial, Leuven 2020.

[4] Nadine Kulbe/Theresa Jacobs u.a. (Hg.), Bildarchive. Wissensordnungen, Arbeitspraktiken, Nutzungspotenziale, Dresden 2022.

[5] Thomas Theye (Hg.), Der geraubte Schatten. Eine Weltreise im Spiegel der ethnographischen Photographie, München 1989.


Foto: Privat.

Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui ist Dozent (Senior Lecturer) für deutsche Literatur und Kultur im Fachbereich Fremdsprachen an der Pädagogischen Hochschule der Universität Maroua (Kamerun). 2025 war er Value of the Past-Fellow am IEG – Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte Mainz.


Titelbild: Beschriftung: Kamerun. Mongonge. Deutscher Forscher vor einem Fetisch (Holz, geschnitzt) am Dorfeingang. Foto: Unbekannter Fotograf, um 1900. Aufnahme-Nr: df-Hauptkatalog-0278656. 

The Dawn of animal life: quantifying the origination of animal mobility

In this contribution, Emily Mitchell considers how animals first started to move.

Der Fossilienbestand ist das wichtigste Archiv der Geschichte des Lebens. Er dokumentiert Prozesse der Evolution, Anpassung und Aussterben und ermöglicht uns zu verstehen, wie Revolutionen in der biotischen Komplexität zur Entstehung der Struktur und Funktion der globalen Biosphäre beigetragen haben.

The fossil record is our primary archive of the history of life, recording processes of evolution, adaptation, extinction, and allowing us to understand how revolutions in biotic complexity have helped to form the structure and function of the global biosphere.


Animals first evolved during the Ediacaran time period, around 600 million years ago. We can gain insights into their early behaviour by studying the feeding traces they left behind.

The Ediacaran and the dawn of animal life

The Ediacaran-Cambrian transition (‘ECT’) ~580-510 million years ago marks several fundamental step-changes in evolutionary history – not only is it where we first see animals appear in the fossil record, but we also see the origin of animal biomineralization (i.e., the first mineralized skeletons), the first evidence for movement, the appearance of sophisticated new animal feeding modes (including predation), and the first time that marine organisms began to burrow deeper into the sediment – a process frequently referred to as the ‘agronomic revolution’. Together, these changes form part of the evolutionary radiation of early animals, known as the Cambrian explosion, the roots of which are now known to lie in the late Ediacaran Period. 

Even within this broad context, however, the agronomic revolution has outsized importance – the mixing of sediment by animals (‘bioturbation’) in the present day is an important ecosystem engineering process that creates new habits or niches for other animals and also influences several crucial biogeochemical cycles in the oceans, thus helping to support and maintain seafloor ecosystems. Although this interval has been heavily studied in terms of the origin of new animal groups, comparatively little attention has been paid to the evolution of behavioural complexity. Not only can behavioural complexity sometimes reflect neurology – which has a poor preservation potential – but it can also capture ecology (e.g., movement vs. predation), and how animals interact both with their environment, and each other. The evolutionary history of animal behaviour is thus an invaluable window into the evolution of the biosphere, and one which can yield insights not recorded in body fossils. Fortunately, many facets of animal behaviour can be recorded as trace fossils, which are readily preserved in a large range of ancient sedimentary environments.

In this project focussed on understanding the origins of animal movement, I am working with Dr. Simon Darroch (Curator of fossil cnidarians, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum) on some key aspects of the agronomic revolution – specifically, trace fossils referred to as ‘treptichnids’. The term ‘treptichnids’ refers to a group of burrowing behaviours that appear over the ECT, and which are important for 3 reasons: 1) one specific treptichnid trace fossil – Treptichnus pedum – serves as a biostratigraphic marker for the base of the Cambrian Period worldwide; 2) treptichnids mark the first ‘complex’ behaviours known from the fossil record, and thus the very start of the agronomic revolution; and, 3) treptichnids show an increasing variety of burrow morphologies in younger and younger rocks, and thus offer a terrific opportunity to study the evolution of behavioural complexity

A trace fossil showing the foraging patterns made by an early animal looking for food in the seafloor sediment. Distance between photogrammetry targets: 4cm. 

During my research stay with Dr Darroch, we visited fossil collections housed at Senckenberg and Tubingen University, taking the first steps in a project that will develop novel quantitative metrics to quantify behavioural complexity. The insights gained during this exchange have stimulated new collaborative projects, with future graduate research planned between our groups.

Documenting early animal movement

We first focused on the collection of Dr. Darroch, who has been collecting treptichnid trace fossil specimens from Ediacaran-aged sediments in Namibia and the southwestern United States over the last ten years, and which are currently housed at the Senckenberg museum. For each specimen we took dozens of photographs from multiple angles so that we could then make 3D models of the fossil specimens, enabling us to see the subtle details of animals probing for food in the sediment. The pattern of the different probe marks are recorded, and so the different approaches to foraging for food are captured by this fossil. These 3D models can then be used to quantify the behavior captured in the resulting trace fossil dataset in two ways. First, the hundreds of specimens in the collections enable us to take a variety of different measurements that describe the morphology and movement of tracemaking organisms, including burrow diameter, depth, burrow sinuosity, probe angles (i.e., measured both laterally, and vertically), and probe density.

Prof. Dolf Seilacher’s collections at Tubingen University

After a fantastic first week in the collections of the Senckenberg Naturmuseum, we headed to Tubingen University to study material amassed by Prof. Dolf Seilacher, considered by many to be one of the founders of ‘palaeoichnology’ – the study of trace fossils. This is an exceptionally large collection (>500 specimens) of Cambrian-aged treptichnids from South Africa, Spain, Pakistan, and Arizona, curated by Dr. Ingmar Werneberg. The Seilacher collection has enabled us to characterize the different treptichnid species – including Treptichnus pedum – and so it is an ideal dataset to begin quantifying how the behavioural complexity of treptichnids evolved over the ECT. A key question in this regard is: did complexity evolve gradually over this interval, or via a series of step-wise ‘pulses’? The answer to this question has significance not only for how we identify T. pedum (and thus the base of the Cambrian) in sequences of rocks but also sheds light on the timing and character of the Cambrian explosion.

One of the many drawers in Tubingen full of a wide range of different trace fossils.

References

Cribb, A. T., C. G. Kenchington, B. Koester, B. M. Gibson, T. H. Boag, R. A. Racicot, H. Mocke, M. Laflamme, and S. A. F. Darroch. 2019: Increase in metazoan ecosystem engineering prior to the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary in the Nama Group, Namibia. Royal Society Open Science 6:190548.

Darroch, S. A. F., A. T. Cribb, L. A. Buatois, G. J. B. Germs, C. G. Kenchington, E. F. Smith, H. Mocke, G. R. O’Neil, J. D. Schiffbauer, K. M. Maloney, R. A. Racicot, K. A. Turk, B. M. Gibson, J. Almond, B. Koester, T. H. Boag, S. M. Tweedt, and M. Laflamme. 2021: The trace fossil record of the Nama Group, Namibia: Exploring the terminal Ediacaran roots of the Cambrian explosion. Earth-Science Reviews 212:103435.

Mitchell, E. G., S. D. Evans, Z. Chen, and S. Xiao. 2022: A new approach for investigating spatial relationships of ichnofossils: a case study of Ediacaran–Cambrian animal traces. Paleobiology 48:557–575.

Mitchell, E.G. and Pates, S., 2025. From organisms to biodiversity: the ecology of the Ediacaran/Cambrian transition. Paleobiology51(1), pp.150-173.

Turk, K. A., M. A. Pulsipher, E. Bergh, M. Laflamme, and S. A. F. Darroch. 2024: Archaeichnium haughtoni: a robust burrow lining from the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition of Namibia. Papers in Palaeontology 10:e1546.


Emily Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge and the Curator of non-insect Invertebrates in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. Her research investigates the role of ecological processes on evolution through deep-time, from the first animal communities of the Ediacaran 600 million years ago, to the present. Deep-time ecology looks at how ecosystems function and have evolved over the history of life on Earth.

@egmitchell.bsky.social


All pictures: Emily Mitchell.

Remembering What Was Forgotten: Language, Religion, and the City in Dinara Rasuleva’s Travmagochi

Diliara Brileva reviews Dinara Rasuleva’s novel Travmagochi (2025) which explores how memories of post-Soviet Tatar identity are shaped in the 1990s.

This blog post reviews Dinara Rasuleva’s Travmagochi (2025), a novel at the crossroads of fiction and autofiction, engaging deeply with the themes of memory and oblivion. It explores how language, religion, and the city of Kazan in the 1990s shape personal and collective memories of post-Soviet Tatar identity.

Dieser Blogbeitrag rezensiert Dinara Rasulevas Roman Travmagochi (2025), der sich, an der Schnittstelle zwischen Fiktion und Autofiktion, intensiv mit den Themen Erinnerung und Vergessen auseinandersetzt. Der Roman untersucht, wie Sprache, Religion und die Stadt Kasan in den 1990er Jahren die persönlichen und kollektiven Erinnerungen der postsowjetischen tatarischen Identität prägen.


WHOEVER WANTS TO, LET THEM REMEMBER.

(KTO KHOCHET PUST’ POMNIT.)

(Dinara Rasulеva, Travmagochi, p. 20)


To remember or not to remember – that is the question. But how can one recall, if the choice to forget has already once been made? The heroine of the novel, Dilyara, in Dinara Rasuleva’s Travmagochi (a title formed from the words “trauma” and Tamagotchi, the popular 1990s toy), lives in a parallel Berlin and finds herself working under a personified Death. Having once agreed by contract to forget her past, she nevertheless decides to reclaim it. And, despairing of remembering, she invents her past anew.

Cover of Dinara Rasulova’s book Travmagochi (shell(f), 2025).

The book was published in 2025 by shell(f), a digital and small-press publisher of Russian-language fiction, essays, autofiction, and cross-genre writing that explores the universal human experiences of coming-of-age, (metaphorical and literal) migration, loss, vulnerability, and professional or scholarly life. The novel stands at the intersection of fiction, autofiction, and memory studies and, given the near absence of academic work on Tatar memory in the post-Soviet context, represents an important contribution to the discussion of memory studies in this discursive field.

Since the novel is not an academic text, I will attempt to single out and discuss its work with memory in relation to language, religion, and space, separating fiction and the emotional, auto-therapeutic layer from the analytical layer. I will try to show how Rasuleva, through her novel, remembers while openly calling this process the construction of memory about language, religion, and the city of childhood.

If I had to answer in a single word what this novel is about, I would say it is about memory, oblivion, and the return of memory through recollection. In the book, this is the painful process of reclaiming one’s childhood and youth, family, native language, and “one’s own” religion, all rejected after the multiple trauma of losing loved ones.

The theme of death runs as a red thread through the entire novel. The narrative centers on the loss of loved ones, which marks the boundary between the heroine’s “past” and “new” life. Death appears both as a character, episodically taking the role of Dilyara’s superior, and as the emotional driving force of the plot: the book reads as a work of mourning for a threefold loss and as the point of departure for oblivion.

In the novel, the past takes on a corporeal form in the shape of a fantastical organ, the saq-soq bladder, in which traumatic memories are preserved and from which they are released. In Tatar folklore, however, Saq and Soq are twin brothers cursed by their mother to live as birds, condemned to eternal separation until the Day of Judgment. Rasuleva’s image of the “saq-soq bladder” seems to reimagine this myth: it functions almost like a repository of trauma, symbolizing the heroine’s deepest wound – the loss of her parents. The past must be released into the world, for it can no longer remain inside. Yet the question remains whether the past contains anything beyond personal trauma. At the same time, the layers of memory connected to the city as a stage, to language, and to religion form an entire field of inquiry.

Kazan

The work of memory takes place in Berlin, where the heroine of the novel begins a new life, having completely severed her ties with the city of her childhood and forgotten her past. That past, which Dilyara struggles to reclaim, is bound up with Kazan.

Panoramic view of Kazan with the Kremlin and Kul Sharif (Qol Şärif) Mosque.

Rasuleva does not say much about Kazan in the 1990s. What she describes are family and school, a childhood that unfolded during years of social upheaval. The behavior, attitudes, emotions of the characters, and even their words bear the imprint of the collective fear and hope that saturated the atmosphere of large cities in post-Soviet Russia.

The author introduces recognizable toponyms of Kazan – Gabishev, 8th of March, Safiullin, and Dauriya Streets, as well as Gorky Park. Yet the city reveals itself more through the spirit of the time than through concrete space. As a result, what emerges before the reader is the image of a large Russian city of the 1990s.

The heroine’s family is portrayed through the archetypal figures of the era: a father who “went into business in the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the ghostly free future flickered in neon, luring the ambitious and the reckless with its glittering lights” (Dinara Rasuleva, Travmagochi, p. 101); a mother, weeping and fearing the loss of their apartment; and a brother, drawn into the criminal underworld. Together, these figures recreate the atmosphere of social collapse and the criminalization of everyday life.

The pervasive fear and anxiety, yet at the same time the sense of freedom and hope, point to the collective experience of post-Soviet Kazan. In this sense, Rasuleva’s city can be read as a chronotope of post-Soviet childhood in Bakhtin’s understanding, a place where time folds in on itself, where the historical 1990s coincide with the heroine’s personal childhood, and where the city becomes a space for experiencing time.

Monument to Musa Jalil (Musa Jälil), the Soviet Tatar poet, located by the Spasskaya Tower of the Kazan Kremlin.

Language

The main emotional driving force of the novel, alongside death, is language, which restores the past. If death appears as a depressive, oppressive, and dark principle, then language, by contrast, is associated with the heroine’s brightest experiences. At the same time, the author demythologizes death, weaving it into everyday life as a way of coming to terms with its power. Memories of the Tatar language connect her to her deceased parents and grandmother: it is the language of home, of care, and of love. Yet within the text there emerges a contrast between the perception of the native language in the familial sphere and in the school setting, where its value is questioned. Thus, in the novel, language functions not only as a medium of memory but also as a point of conflict between the personal and the collective perceptions of it.

Throughout the book, the heroine quite literally tries to reclaim the lost language: she articulates words that come to her in dreams, relearning the sounds. Individual Tatar words and expressions, heard many times i n childhood, turn out to be hidden anchors of memory, holding within them what had seemed irretrievably lost: “…fragments of phrases in a strange, barely perceptible language began little by little to break through into her thoughts, as if a firmly forgotten past were seeping through accidental cracks.” (Travmagochi, p. 12).

Jar of wildflowers from Kazan, an associative image of childhood in the city.

Memories of the native Tatar language in the book are also tied to the experience of discrimination against non-Russian languages in the urban public sphere, even as Tatar remained the language of the family and traditional contexts. Such was the status of a native language for a child from a Tatar family growing up in an urban environment in the 1990s: a Tatar accent in Russian and the pressure to eliminate it, the lack of “prestige” in speaking Tatar, the constant demand to demonstrate flawless command of Russian. The child had to strive for exceptional literacy in order to avoid accusations of “not knowing the main language,” which were immediately followed by reproaches about “non-Russian origin.” Yet it is impossible to stop being who you are.

Through the heroine’s work with personal memory and trauma, a political dimension also emerges, likewise tied to language. The episode with a sticker in Tatar reading “millät betä” (“the nation is disappearing”; Travmagochi, p. 7), which Dilyara finds tucked inside a volume of Clarice Lispector in the pocket of an old coat, is placed at the very beginning of the book. Were it not for the text’s emotional focus on death, trauma, and loss, this episode could well have been given pride of place: it points to the loss of something native, bound up with language and roots.

The sharpest reference to the theme of disappearing languages appears in the figure of the heroine’s acquaintance, Lyokha, wearing a red shirt emblazoned with the words “The Komi do not believe in death” (Travmagochi, p. 115). This phrase, associated with the worldview of Finno-Ugric peoples, in the light of recent history inevitably recalls the self-immolation of the Udmurt scholar and activist Albert Razin, who in September 2019 set himself on fire in front of the State Council of the Udmurt Republic in Izhevsk as a protest against language restrictions. In this historical context, the slogan on a red background reads as a metaphor of political memory and interethnic solidarity in the face of the erasure of Russia’s indigenous languages.

Finally, the very choice of language in the novel and the way it is used underscore the author’s special relationship to language. To let a marginalized non-Russian language into a Russian-language text is to signal an emotional attachment to it. The main language of the work is Russian, with small but poetically expressive insertions of Tatar, English, and German. The Tatar fragments do not seek to conform to the norms of the modern literary language: they reproduce “childhood memory,” the pronunciation and intonations preserved in recollection.

Religion

Among all that was forgotten and later brought back in memory, religion holds an important place. It appears in a very specific form – in the spirit of what Adeeb Khalid has called “Islam after Communism” (2007). Kazan in the novel is not depicted as a center of religious revival, yet the reader senses how religion quietly and steadily makes its presence felt in the city and expands. “A mosque appeared right in the courtyard of the new house, behind the minimarket, and Father, out of convenience and proximity, seemed to start dropping in there little by little…” (Travmagochi, p. 44). Beginning in the early 1990s, Kazan itself gradually became dotted first with old, newly reopened mosques, and later with new ones. In the novel, the appearance of a mosque “behind the minimarket,” within the everyday reach of the heroine and her family, renders religion visible and almost (in the imagination) audible to the reader through the azan (call to prayer) that fills the city’s space.

Nevertheless, for Dilyara religion becomes an important part of her memories above all through the inner space of the home: the “golden picture with Qur’anic verses” hanging in the place of honor in the living room; the funeral meals (ash) with Qur’an recitation and the mutual distribution of sädaqa (voluntary almsgiving), a word the heroine remembered in childhood as sälähä; but most of all through the prayers she learned by heart with her grandmother. Recalling these key surahs and ayahs of Islamic practice, the heroine remarks: “It amazes me to think that these words have meanings. As a child I knew them as incantations; they did not need meaning.” (Travmagochi, p. 62). This is another feature of post-communist Islam: after decades of atheist practice, religion was remembered anew. Since the level of involvement of the Tatar Muslim population varied greatly, and not everyone wished to attend mosque or study Arabic, prayers were often transcribed into Cyrillic and circulated in pamphlets and small booklets. Pronunciation in such sources was approximate, and although the transcription was accompanied by a translation of the original sense, the texts were in practice memorized “like incantations.”

A view of a mosque under construction in the Aviastroitelny District of Kazan, marking the expansion of Islamic space in the urban landscape.

Another aspect, tied less to doctrine than to the broader sphere of religiously inflected tradition, is the memory of shame, understood as an important, and above all gendered, emotion of the heroine’s childhood. It stemmed from the way girls were raised, a form of upbringing that, after the Soviet decades, was no longer seen as explicitly religious but still carried its traditional moral force. “…Shame, shame, shame / It has always been there.” (Travmagochi, p. 106). The repeatedly invoked Tatar word oyat (shame), embedded in a Russian sentence, appears here as the recollection of a deeply imprinted feeling that seems to pulse through the text. It is untranslatable, inseparably tied to language and family. Recalling and reinterpreting this feeling in adulthood, Dilyara brings out new shades of meaning in it, extending even into the political.


And yet the result of the heroine’s work with the past remains unconvincing. She wavers and begins to question: “Is my past, too, nothing more than a roughly glued collage? Memory is full of holes and blurred fragments spoiled by time, like a scratched cassette tape. The pieces do not always fit together into a whole. What emerges crackles, flails, tries to cohere. But what if these are fragments of different mosaics?” (Travmagochi, p. 56).

As one reads, there inevitably arises the expectation of an allusion to the well-known passage in the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) about the mankurt, and yet it never appears. The mankurt is the image of a person who has forgotten the past, or more precisely, of one whose memory has been violently taken away. This figure has become so firmly embedded in the discourse and languages of the post-Soviet Turkic world that it has turned into almost a cliché. But the answer comes gradually: the mankurt, and the forgetting of one’s own past, is always about power, about the deprivation of will through the deprivation of memory. In Rasuleva’s novel, however, power and resistance do not become central themes; they remain part of personal memory rather than emerging as an explicit political discourse, as in the Tatar nationalist rhetoric of the 1990s.

In any case, the book becomes a valuable addition to the corpus of artistic explorations of memory and an important read for those engaged in the study of Tatarstan in the 1990s. And above all, to recall Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion from Wahrheit und Methode (1960): understanding presupposes a “fusion of horizons” between the interpreter and the text.


References

Aitmatov, Chingiz. I dolshe veka dlitsya den’ / The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980).

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960).

Khalid, Adeeb. Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (2007).

Rasuleva, Dinara. Travmagochi (2025).


Diliara Brileva is an associate researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin and affiliated with the A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She was a Value of the Past fellow at ZMO in 2023.


Title picture: Suyumbike Tower, Kazan.

All pictures by Diliara Brileva.

Between Sacredness and Bulldozers: The Struggle over Sulaiman-Too’s Cemeteries

Aksana Ismailbekova writes about the competing claims on Sulaiman-Too, the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyrgyzstan, and how memory and development clash in this context.

Sulaiman-Too in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, intertwines sacred space, religion, memory, and kinship. Cemeteries honor ancestors, transmit knowledge, and sustain community, yet state-led urban development threatens graves, exposing tensions between heritage, religious devotion, and modernization.

Sulaiman-Too in Osch, Kirgistan, verbindet heilige Erde, Religion, Erinnerung und Familien miteinander. Die Friedhöfe dort dienen der Ehrung der Vorfahren, sie vermitteln Wissen und stärken die Gemeinschaft, doch die staatlich gelenkte Stadtentwicklung bedroht die Gräber und offenbart Spannungen zwischen Kulturerbe, religiöser Hingabe und Modernisierung.


Sulaiman-Too (“Solomon’s Mountain”), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. For centuries it has been a pilgrimage site and sacred burial ground. Photo: Aksana Ismailbekova.

In Central Asia, as in many parts of the world, to disturb the dead is to disturb the moral order. Graves are not mere plots of land; they are nodes in a network of sacred relations. When the state burns or bulldozes cemeteries, it risks burning bridges of trust with its citizens. This intertwining of sacred space, memory, and community is not limited to cemeteries alone. It extends to other sites of devotion and pilgrimage, such as Sulaiman-Too, the sacred mountain which is located at the heart of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. The mountain is not only a geological landmark in the Fergana Valley, but also a spiritual place that has attracted pilgrims, saints, migrants, and ordinary believers for centuries. Sulaiman-Too was a site of ritual devotion. This mountain also has a reputation of being a holy place, hosting shrines, mosques, and sacred caves[1].

But Sulaiman-Too is also a place for the deceased relatives of many Osh residents. Since Soviet times, the mountain’s slopes are occupied by numerous cemeteries — the resting places of Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others who used to live in Osh and called this their home. Among the graves lie prominent Soviet-era singers, scholars, community leaders, and ordinary local people. The families of these people would get together during Ramadan to clean the graves, pray, and honour the memory of their ancestors. This commemoration is also an important family and religious ritual where all the family members within several generations would learn the importance of the remembrance of their deceased relatives, passing on oral knowledge about the names and lives of their ancestors that might otherwise be forgotten[2]. This is a key part of local kinship systems, linking past, present and future through social gatherings during Ramadan.

Yet, in recent years this sacred geography has collided with the ambitions of the current state. The recent cemeteries have been burned, graves dismantled, and bones exhumed in the name of urban development, road extension, and “green zones.” As the mayor of the city said ‘let us remove all the cemeteries in order to create a green zone to earn money from tourists’[3].

A Cemetery in Conflict

Local residents recall that during the Soviet Union, the state decided to use Sulaiman-Too for burials — partly due to a shortage of land, partly to free up fertile fields for cotton production. Between the 1960s and 1978, the southern cemetery was active; burials in the northern cemetery continued until as late as 2013. In total, more than a thousand people were laid to rest on the slopes.

By law, graves should not be reused or repurposed until at least 25–30 years have passed. Yet, according to residents, the state began pressuring families to relocate remains barely 13 years after the last burials. Bulldozers appeared. The mayor’s office spoke of re-cultivation, greening, and urban development[4].

Every year some tragic episodes occur where parts of the cemeteries are burnt in what are apparently wildfires. Official explanations point to climatic conditions and accidental fires. Some local residents, however, pin blame on a lack of water due to the state not maintaining irrigation systems, and others see it as an intentional attempt to clear space for new projects.

For many families in Osh, this was not only an outrage but a deep spiritual violation. As one elderly resident told me, “99% of those buried here are our ancestors. Some of the bones belong to people whose children and grandchildren are still alive, live nearby and visit them often. This place is sacred for Uzbeks, but also for all the peoples of Osh.”

Cemetries near the Sulaiman Mountain. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Three Days to Collect the Dead

In July 2025, the situation also escalated dramatically in other parts of Osh city, where the decision was to remove the cemeteries located near the local mahallas in order to widen the roads. Residents were told they had just three days to exhume their relatives and re-bury them elsewhere. Those who lived in Osh had to carry bones down the mountain and pay the required 3,000 som (30 Euro) fee for a new burial site[5]. But what about families who had migrated to Russia or Europe? Many could not return in time. Their ancestors’ remains were collected in heaps, with bones buried together in communal graves.

This rushed process left many residents in shock. An 88-year-old male informant, whose parents were buried on the mountain, recalled bitterly: “We have lived here for generations. How can they [the State] tell us our cemeteries must disappear? They want to make a park, a green zone. But our ancestors deserve peace. Let the deceased rest in peace, please!”

Development vs. Memory

The dispute over Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is not just about land. It is about ethnicity, such as Uzbek mahalla cemeteries versus the Kyrgyz state. It is also the clash between heritage and development, sacredness and business. The state envisions wide roads, recreational spaces, and tourist-friendly landscapes. But Osh residents envision continuity — a landscape where the living cares for the dead, where cemeteries signify communal identity, and inter-generational knowledge is transferred.

One of the most painful aspects has been the silencing of disagreement. Few locals dare to protest openly, fearing repercussions from the authorities. One man explained, “We cannot express our opinions, as this may lead to problems and pressure from the state.” Another added, “Please broaden the road on the other side of the road. But don’t disturb the graves.” Their requests, however, were ignored.

The cemetery of the Soviet deputy,Sultanov Kadyrmat, who used to be a member of national parliament. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Sacred Mountain, Global Heritage

The irony is that Sulaiman-Too is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its cultural and spiritual significance is internationally recognized. Tourists climb its trails, visiting sacred caves and shrines. Yet, the cemeteries — equally a part of its sacred landscape — are treated as obstacles to development.

For some locals, hope lies precisely in UNESCO. One community elder, Aziz, aged 76, expressed faith that international protection might shield their cemeteries: “UNESCO supported us before. They sponsored our houses. Tourists do not only come to see the mountain or the apartment blocks, but also to see the traditional houses of the people living there, their clothing, and their customs. Maybe they will protect us again.”

But UNESCO’s mandate is limited, and cultural heritage often becomes a battleground of selective preservation. Which parts of the past deserve saving? Which can be erased for the sake of “progress”?

Why Cemeteries Matter

To outsiders, it may be tempting to see cemeteries as replaceable, especially in crowded cities, such as Osh. Yet anthropology reminds us that cemeteries are not just about the dead — they are about the living. They are places where memory is protected, where families renew bonds across generations, where cultural identity is affirmed. This is the heart of the local kinship system, Islam and community.

It is precisely this deeper social and religious significance that makes current developments in Osh resonate with earlier historical struggles. There is a parallel between Soviet times and today: while burial rites were actively defended against state repression during the Soviet era, today they face new pressures—urban development and shifting social priorities—that threaten their continuity. In both cases, cemeteries symbolize a boundary for the community, marking a domain where religious identity and kinship ties must be protected. As Marianne Kamp (2010) argues, during the Soviet times death practices (i.e., performing funeral prayers) represented a kind of red line for Central Asians, and many were ready to defend them against the state at any cost, especially when other religious practices were repressed.[6]

Between Stones and Stories

The story of Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is unfinished. After the Soviet times, new state projects (i.e. between Soviet times and the current developments in Osh) threaten the graves every year. Each year, the state plans the expansion of roads against the quiet resistance of families. Meanwhile, tourists snap photos of the mountain, unaware that just beyond the trail lies a battlefield of memory.

As one local put it emotionally: “This is not only a cemetery. It is our history, our ancestors, our identity. To erase it is to erase us.”

The future of Sulaiman-Too will depend on whether development can learn to coexist with sacredness — whether roads and green zones can be built without uprooting bones. For now, the mountain stands as a reminder: heritage is not just about monuments, but about the fragile bond between the living and the dead.


[1] Liu, Morgan. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne. Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press.

[2] Ismailbekova, A. 2017 Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[4] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[5] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1101498778600604&rdid=bCohodiCTh5OaIFm

[6] Kamp, M. (2010) ‘Where did the mullahs go? Oral histories from rural Uzbekistan’, Die Welt des Islams, 50(3–4), pp. 503–531.


Aksana Ismailbekova is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. In 2025 she was a Leibniz — Newcastle University Fellow.


Title picture: Gateway to a staircase leading to a museum precinct on Sulaiman-Too mountain. Adam Harangozó, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Heritage Protection as Progressive Urbanism? Defending the Legacies of the Welfare State

John Pendlebury considers the progressive potential of the heritage of social housing.

Twentieth century workers’ and welfare state housing, often demonised, has increasingly been valorised as heritage. Does this have wider political relevance and potential in a time of housing crisis?

Die oftmals verunglimpften Arbeiter- und Sozialwohnungen des 20. Jahrhunderts erfahren eine zunehmende Wertschätzung als Kulturerbe. In Anbetracht der gegenwärtigen Wohnungskrise stellt sich die Frage, ob dies eine größere politische Relevanz und ein größeres Potenzial birgt.


Berlin Heritage

There are three World Heritage Sites in Berlin – can you guess what they are? You might expect to discover that, first, Museum Island and, second, the Palaces of Potsdam and Berlin are included on the list. But you might be more surprised by the third site – Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, six housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1933, principally from the period of the Weimar Republic. They are claimed to testify to innovative housing policies in a period when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally. Together they “contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes through novel approaches to town planning, architecture and garden design” also providing “exceptional examples of new urban and architectural typologies”, which “exercised considerable influence on the development of housing around the world” (Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, UNESCO).

A housing block in Siemensstadt by Hugo Häring, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

Housing Crisis

The heritage of social housing seems particularly important in a moment when the availability of affordable, decent housing is a crisis issue in many countries. Writing from a British perspective, twentieth century social housing before 1979 – and the election of the Thatcher government which heralded a radical break from post-war consensus politics – speaks to a period when there was a widely held political aspiration to provide decent and better housing for all. Whilst the results were mixed, the best examples, now often given heritage status, show a scale of ambition, generosity and social priority that is difficult to imagine in the contemporary world. In England the ‘Post-war listing’ programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases examples of such buildings are being formally protected as heritage. This opens-up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued within contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today?

The potential consequences of heritage protection for social housing – and its potential to contribute to more progressive urban outcomes – was the focus of my Leibniz Value of the Past Fellowship in June 2025 based at ZZF in Potsdam. The aim was to begin to extend the work we have undertaken in England (While and Pendlebury, 2025) to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare state architecture and its subsequent political positioning will show elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany are the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. And my first task, focusing on Berlin, was to try and understand something of the history and heritage status of the social housing in the city.

More Berlin Housing Heritage

Whilst Berlin’s history of innovation in social housing came to an abrupt stop under National Socialism, it returned with force in both Berlins in the 1950s. In West Berlin, this was exemplified by an international competition for the Hansa Quarter. The International Building Exhibition (INTERBAU) includes social housing blocks by eminent German architects, including the returning Walter Gropius as well as international figures such as Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, although perhaps the most famous consequence of the exhibition was built elsewhere – the Le Corbusier reworking of the Unite d’Habitation. The counterpoint in the east, with an equal level of ambition but very different architectural approach, was the monumental series of blocks aligned along Stalinallee (now Karl Marx Allee), influenced by socialist urbanism and classicism. The combined innovation of new social housing methods and typologies from east and west has led to unsuccessful attempts to be included on Germany’s tentative list of future World Heritage Sites.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall, the large-scale construction of social housing continued in new forms in both territories until the Wall’s fall. In part this took the form of large-scale peripheral estates. In the west these were pushed out to the south (Gropiusstadt) the west (Falkenhagener Feld) and most monumentally to the north (Märkisches Viertel). In the east the later peripheral estates were grouped around the areas of Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Hohenschönhausen. Although not yet generally defined as heritage, a few buildings in these estates have been given monument status. Alongside the construction of peripheral estates there were also redevelopment efforts of social housing in the inner city. The best known of these is the International Building Exhibition (IBA) which ran in West Berlin during the 1980s, using the concepts of “careful urban renewal” and “critical reconstruction.” International celebrity architects on this occasion included Rob Krier, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi, representing a distinct postmodern turn. Not surprisingly, some of these works now have heritage status.

Although German reunification and in the case of Berlin the “stitching back together” of a divided city is to be celebrated, reunification also led to the cessation of significant social housing building programmes in Berlin, albeit a decade later than with the conservative, neo-liberal political turn in the UK. The reasons for this are not simple, but initially housing demand was low, accompanied by high costs for reconnecting a city systematically severed for 45 years which led to the sell off of assets, including housing. Whilst in Berlin the provision of affordable housing today is perhaps less of a crisis issue than in many British cities, and London specifically, that there is a problem is clear. Despite its innovative and generous history of housing provision and a history of renting and protection for renters, Berlin has not been immune from global neo-liberal forces driving the commodification of housing. Do the protected legacies of earlier eras have any role to play in resisting these changes?

Heritage protection as progressive urbanism?

Historic building conservation is normally perceived as something conservative, rather than as a site of resistance in the city. However, preserved fragments of social housing stand as material testimony to periods when providing decent housing for all was a widely held political and social priority. Furthermore, protecting buildings for heritage purposes potentially challenges market hegemony, disrupting normal processes of capital accumulation. This may be part of the reason, along with a lingering antagonism to the material legacies of the welfare state (“concrete monstrosities”), why the government in England has distinctly cooled on extending protection to more postwar social housing in recent years. Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson is the most well-known casualty, making way for a high-density area regeneration programme. Furthermore, some of the estates in London that do have protection through listing have been fully gentrified through radical tenure changes. But in our article (While and Pendlebury, 2025), we argue there may be tactical possibilities for resistance, a basis for community engagement, and a more local and bespoke approach to regeneration.

The last block of Robin Hood Gardens in 2024, awaiting demolition.

And in Berlin?

It is difficult to resist the juggernaut of neo-liberal housing policies that in many countries have made our houses commodities rather than homes. However, my preliminary impression of Berlin in comparison to England is of a generous and independent approach to heritage listing, of an inspirational history of innovation and provision of social housing, of a tradition of renting and protecting renters’ rights and, importantly, of a history of civic mobilisation and resistance that cumulatively make me feel optimistic of the progressive potential of Berlin’s rich history of social housing in providing some resistance to these global forces.


John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation, Centre for Heritage, Newcastle University, UK. In June 2025 he was a Leibniz Value of the Past Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).


Title picture: A block by Wilhelm Büning in the White City Estate, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

All pictures in this contribution: John Pendlebury.

Preserving geodiversity of ore deposits for future research: a call for action

Stefan Peters looks at geodiversity and explains its importance for science – a comparatively neglected topic, considering e.g. ongoing discussions on biodiversity.


Commercial mining permanently removes vast volumes of rock from Earth’s crust. How can we strategically collect and document these geological materials to safeguard their scientific value for future generations? A retrospective look at samples gathered in the past.

Kommerzieller Bergbau entfernt dauerhaft große Gesteinsmengen aus der Erdkruste. Wie können wir diese geologischen Materialien strategisch sammeln und dokumentieren, um ihren wissenschaftlichen Wert für zukünftige Generationen zu bewahren? Eine Rückschau auf in der Vergangenheit gesammelte Proben.


One mid-sized mountain per year

Whether you will be reading this blog on your phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer screen, there will be several tenths of grams of rare earth elements, copper, and other heavy metals involved in the background technology enabling you to read it. Many of these elements are in high demand in industry – not only because they enable your phone to function, but also because they are crucial for infrastructure development of modern cities and for transitioning from a fossil fuel-based economy towards more sustainable alternatives [1]. The high demand for these metals in industry has led to a situation in which more minerals are being mined than ever before. In 2024, mining industry analysts estimated that there were around 20,000 active commercial mine sites worldwide, collectively responsible for the extraction of several tens of billions of metric tons of rock in a single year [2,3]. That is roughly equivalent to the volume of a mid-sized mountain such as the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak.

Commercial mine sites offer geologists exciting opportunities to study outcrops and collect rock samples that would otherwise remain inaccessible, as these rocks would not naturally be exposed at the Earth’s surface. However, the time window for collecting such samples is limited. By definition, commercial mining involves the excavation and processing of rocks for metal extraction. As a result, many geologically interesting rocks have already been permanently removed from the Earth’s crust (e.g., Fig. 1). While the loss of biodiversity from Earth’s surface environments has become a widely discussed topic in science and politics in 2025, the loss of geodiversity has received comparatively little attention.

Fig. 1 Gold-bearing conglomerate from the South Reef in the West Rand area, Witwatersrand Basin, South Africa, sampled from a gold mine in 1931 (collection: Museum of Nature Hamburg). The Witwatersrand Basin holds the world’s largest known gold reserves today, yet the geological origin of gold enrichment remains poorly understood. This particular sample originates from a geologically unique section of the Witwatersrand basin, from which all ore-bearing rocks have now been excavated and processed for metal extraction [1]. The sample thus offers geoscientists a rare opportunity to investigate this particular section of the Witwatersrand Basin today, despite not being able to sample it in the field anymore.

Past, present, and future of ore deposits in institute collections

As a curator at the Museum of Nature Hamburg, it is my job to safeguard a collection of 90,000 rocks and mineral samples and make them available for geoscientific research and education. But I am also passionate about preserving geodiversity for future generations of geoscientists. Given the current boom in the mining industry, I am particularly interested in collecting samples from ore deposits that are at risk of being lost to science forever. But how can we collect these samples in a way that allows future generations of scientists to make full use of them? Can we establish or improve a collection strategy by studying how ore deposits were sampled in the past, and by reflecting on how these samples were used for scientific research since?

With these questions in mind, I have studied the inventories of ore collections based at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences (University of Cambridge) and at the Museum of Nature Hamburg (Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change). Perhaps not surprisingly, I found that samples and their corresponding documentation frequently reflect the scientific Zeitgeist of the time when they were collected. For example, historic ore specimens collected in the 19th century often exhibit mineralogical peculiarities and are accompanied by descriptions of crystal forms and habitus types, but lack any geospatial information about where the samples were taken (e.g., Fig. 2a). Ore specimens collected later, in contrast, especially those gathered in the context of ore prospecting activities, tend to be more representative of local geology and are typically accompanied by geospatial information and genetic interpretations of the ore deposits (e.g., Fig. 2b). These different approaches to sampling at distinct points in history illustrate how geosciences evolved from a primarily descriptive science focused on cataloguing rocks and minerals 150 years ago, to a spectrum of hypothesis-driven geoscientific disciplines as we know them today.

Fig. 2 Typical examples of documentation associated with ore samples collected at different points in history. a) Entry for a historic lead (Pb) ore sample collected by J. Carne in the early to mid-1800s, recorded in an 1899 inventory by W.J. Lewis, who had acquired the specimen for the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. The description is detailed and strictly focused on mineralogical aspects of the sample, offering only a vague indication of regional origin (Cumberland or Cornwall?). b) Label accompanying the gold conglomerate sample shown in Fig. 1, collected in 1931 by the company operating the gold mine (West Rand Consolidated Mines Ltd). The label provides geospatial context of the mining area within the Witwatersrand basin from which the sample was taken (South Reef), including its orientation within the mine (East shaft, 6th level East).

Ore samples such as the specimen from the historic Carne collection in Fig. 2a still hold value for contemporary geoscientific research, particularly in the field of mineralogy. However, many other subdisciplines of geoscience increasingly rely on geological context and geospatial data. More recent samples with a higher degree of contextual documentation, such as the gold conglomerate sample shown in Fig. 2b, consequently tend to offer greater utility for addressing contemporary questions in geoscientific research, such as how the formation of ore minerals can be linked to tectonic or volcanic activity in a particular geological setting, and how tectonic and magmatic processes evolved over time. Placing ourselves in the shoes of a 19th century geoscience curator, this realisation reminds us that we cannot foresee the full range of scientific objectives future researchers may pursue. So how can we ensure that we do not miss out on crucial sample information and miss key sampling strategies for future research, when we incorporate new samples from ore deposits into our collection?

The Apollo samples as a precedent

Inspiration for answering these questions might come from an unexpected corner of the Solar System. During the era of the Apollo programme (1961–1972), NASA astronauts sampled approximately 380 kg of rocks and soils on the Moon. These samples were collected with few specific scientific objectives at the time, but with the clear intention that they should serve future generations of geoscientists – much like the purpose for which I argue ore deposits should be sampled today. During the Apollo programme, samples were therefore taken from a diverse suite of geological settings on the Moon, and each sample was photographed in situ before collection, labelled with precise geospatial coordinates, and was meticulously documented with notes on orientation and surrounding features (Fig. 3). Some samples were even sealed, frozen, or stored in vacuum or helium in vials that were first opened 50 years later [5]. Today, more than half a century since the Apollo missions, we know that this sampling approach has paid off: Geoscientists have made extensive use of the Apollo sample suite and continue to do so, often using analytical techniques that did not yet exist during the era of the Apollo programme. For example, the Moon was long considered bone-dry until, in the late 2000s, advanced analytical techniques revealed traces of water in Apollo samples that had previously remained undetectable. This finding fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the Moon’s formation, several decades after the samples were collected.

Fig. 3 Astronaut and geoscientist Harrison Schmitt collecting a soil sample on the Moon in 1972, equipped with a photo camera and sampling scoop (Apollo 17; Image courtesy of NASA and the Project Apollo Archive).

Collecting data beyond the object

In practice, curators of academic collections do not have the resources to implement an Apollo-style strategy for curating rock samples, particularly when aiming to sample many of the active mining sites around the world. But the success of the Apollo missions can serve as a reminder to collect and curate as much contextual information as possible alongside new ore samples. The most challenging aspect of this approach would be to record field information that seems scientifically irrelevant at present, but which might become important for research in the (far) future. This could include seemingly mundane details such as weather conditions, background mineral assemblages, or even logistical constraints during sampling.

As a concluding reflection, it is somewhat ironic to look to the Apollo programme’s lunar sampling practices as inspiration for preserving Earth’s geodiversity. New sample return missions to the Moon will likely take place in the upcoming decades, theoretically allowing robotic landers and astronauts to revisit and resample rocks from the original Apollo landing sites. By contrast, rocks from ore deposits on Earth, once excavated and processed for metal extraction, can never be sampled again. If these materials are not systematically incorporated into academic ore collections at present, together with the appropriate contextual information, they risk being lost to science and education forever.


Bibliography

[1] Gielen, D. (2021). Critical minerals for the energy transition. International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi.

[2] Jasansky, S., Lieber, M., Giljum, S., & Maus, V. (2023). An open database on global coal and metal mine production. Scientific data, 10(1), 52.

[3] Reichl, C., & Schatz, M. (2024). World Mining Data 2024. Federal Ministry of Finance, Austria.

[4] Pegg, C. W. (1950). A contribution to the geology of the West Rand area. South African Journal of Geology, 53(1), 209-224.

[5] Shearer, C. K. et al. & ANGSA science team. (2024). Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA): An Apollo participating scientist program to prepare the lunar sample community for Artemis. Space Science Reviews, 220(6), 62.


Stefan Peters leads a research group, curates a collection of over 90,000 rocks and minerals, and manages a 500 m² exhibition area at the Museum of Nature Hamburg – Mineralogy. He is also a guest lecturer in geochemistry at the University of Hamburg. In 2024, he was a Leibniz-Cambridge Museum & Collection Fellow at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge.


Title picture: A copper mine in Sweden, LOP Project.

On Peformances and Playing Cards

After attending Brecht’s ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in Berlin, James Harriman-Smith reflects on what performance is today and what it used to be.

What is performance? And what was performance? I came to Berlin to think about these questions and continue that thinking here with the help of a peculiar pack of cards and a trip to the Berliner Ensemble.

Was ist „Performance“? Und was war „Performance“? Ich bin nach Berlin gekommen, um über diese Fragen nachzudenken. Diese Überlegungen führe ich hier mithilfe eines eigentümlichen Kartenspiels und eines Besuchs im Berliner Ensemble weiter.


At the start of Barrie Kosky’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper at the Berliner Ensemble, a single spotlight picks out a pale face peeking through the sparkly stage curtain. This is the face of The Moon Over Soho (played by Josefin Platt). She begins to sing: ‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne…’ Recognizing the tune, the theatregoers around me begin to hum and sway along to Kurt Weill’s music as we begin our three-hour journey through the London underworld.

I sat in this audience after a day’s work at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. My time at the ZfL was drawing to a close. I had come there to think about performance, more specifically to study different ways of thinking about performance. I’d spoken with Katrin Trüstedt about Stellvertretung, with Falko Schmieder about Koselleckian approaches to conceptual history, and had the chance to share my own ideas with the Theoriegeschichte programme area. Yet, as I watched Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper unfold, I remembered an object sitting in my hotel room that I had not had a chance to share. I’d like to use this blog contribution to share it now, and so continue electronically some of the thinking I was so fortunate to do in Berlin.

This is the object:

Playing cards and an eighteenth-century card holder.  Photo taken by the author.

This is a modern facsimile of John Bowles’s set of Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was the inspiration for Die Dreigroschenoper; it was also an enormous theatrical success from the moment of its premiere in 1728. The first editions of Bowles’s cards date from this time, although they were then reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. I bought my facsimile because I believe that answers to the question of how to read these cards offered new ways of thinking about the performance, reception, and legacy of this famous eighteenth-century work.

First of all, we might read these cards as just another manifestation of the contemporary cultural impact of The Beggar’s Opera. In the wake of the work’s record-breaking, sixty-two-night opening run, various mementos began to appear, from paintings and engravings (the first Polly Peachum). The playing cards are a similar kind of product, cashing in on the popularity of the Opera. They are different from other objects, however, because these cards offer their owners a chance to engage with Gay’s work in a particular way: they provide all the information necessary to perform many of the songs, be that Gay’s lyrics, the musical score, or the name of the tune that Gay was giving new words to.

The nine of diamonds, showing the name of the ballad tune (‘All in a misty morning’), musical score, and Gay’s lyrics. Photo taken by the author.

By providing such information, these cards thus extend beyond the theatre what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has described as a distinctly political aspect of performance of The Beggar’s Opera. Dillon argues that Gay’s audiences would recognize many of the ballad tunes he reused in the work, and perhaps even join in. Such recognition (or even participation) transformed the theatre into a shared space of common musical goods, and so resisted contemporary efforts to privatise and enclose previously public material. Bowles’s playing cards might allow such participation to continue after the performance ended, and at the very least seem to exploit the extent to which Gay’s work became an omnipresent aspect of a shared English culture.

But there are other ways of reading these cards, which extend and supplement the above interpretation. Palming through the cards, I notice that only two contain any information about plot. The ten of clubs tells us it depicts a song ‘sung by Polly and Lucy in their resentment against Macheath’. The six of clubs similarly contains a cue that explains the emotional stakes of the song.

The six of clubs, with the information that the song was sung when Polly and Lucy were ‘both claiming of’ Macheath. Photo taken by the author.

Yet even these cards do not say why Polly and Lucy are upset, or even who Macheath is. This probably testifies, again, to the popularity of the Opera. It also, though, might suggest the unimportance of the details of the work’s plot, and so a way of understanding it more as a collection of sung performances loosely connected by events. A kind of eighteenth-century jukebox musical.  Indeed, in the noisy and crowded theatres of 1720s London, where audience members would arrive late and leave early, and productions would be broken through short breaks between each act, a more fragmentary understanding of The Beggar’s Opera as a collection of memorable moments reinforced with music seems appropriate.

A translation of the theatrical work into the format of playing cards emphasises such an understanding because of the way that playing cards are used. If these cards were played with, they would, for example, have been shuffled, so that the songs they depict would be produced in a different order in every game. There would still, of course, be patterns: there are more cards with songs by Macheath than any other, as befits his lead role; Polly and Lucy are next, while Peachum only has one of his songs represented. Beyond this, the choice of cardgame might give new meanings to certain cards. The ten of diamonds was the ‘big cassino’ in games of cassino, and the player lucky enough to draw it would perhaps experience a version of the youthful joy expressed in the song by Mrs Slammekin it represents. The ace of spades (also called ‘spadille’) is a powerful card in lots of games, and here it is used for the song in which Lucy Lockit describes the power of Macheath’s kiss.

The ace of spades, or spadille. Photo taken by the author.

It is possible these choices are pure chance, but – even if they are – they are still evidence of how the transfer of Gay’s work from the stage to the cards can open it up for new meaning while exploiting the already fragmentary aesthetics of The Beggar’s Opera. Indeed, it is perhaps out of fear of gaining new meanings that one song is not depicted on the cards: Macheath’s strongest condemnation of corrupt English society, sung to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ and explaining how ‘gold from law can take out the sting’.

There is more to say about these cards, and about performance than I have space to say here. Die Dreigroschenoper, for instance, is also a work whose songs have had an independent life, and which, by drawing on the aesthetics of the music hall, reimagines the ballad opera style of Gay. To my knowledge there is no cardset inspired by Brecht and Weill, although there is a Japanese rewriting of Die Dreigroschenoper called Hanafuda Denki (literally, Playing-Card Fantasy: 花札伝奇).

And there are also those people who sat next to me humming along to ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’. We can understand those spectators’ engagement with the Berliner Ensemble production a little better with the help of John Bowles’s Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. After all, the same aspects of Gay’s work that these cards once extended – be that the collection and adaptation of pre-existing music models or, as Dillon argued, the use of such songs in the theatre as a kind of shared cultural currency, radically available to all – are also some of the things that make Die Dreigroschenoper still a blockbuster theatrical experience today.


Picture: private.

James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University, UK. He was a Newcastle University-Leibniz Research Alliance Bilateral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin.

@jharrimansmith.bsky.social


Title picture: Josefin Platt as the Moon over Soho in Die Dreigroschenoper, JR Berliner Ensemble.

Fragmented Memories: The Struggle for the Anti-colonial Past in Modern-Day Angola

João Fusco Ribeiro writes about the contested memory of the anti-colonial liberation struggle in Angola.

The Angolan Liberation Struggle (1961–1974) was fundamental in dismantling Portugal’s colonial empire and galvanized anti-colonial resistance across southern Africa. 50 years later, Angola’s anti-colonial past remains deeply contested, its history shaped by partisan narratives, civil war legacies, and a fractured fight over national memory.

Der angolanische Befreiungskampf (1961–1974) war von grundlegender Bedeutung für die Zerschlagung des portugiesischen Kolonialreiches und befeuerte den antikolonialen Widerstand im südlichen Afrika. Diese Vergangenheit Angolas ist bis heute umstritten, geprägt von parteipolitischen Narrativen, dem Erbe des Bürgerkriegs und einer gespaltenen nationalen Erinnerung.


The historical relevance of the Angolan Liberation Struggle (1961-1974) in the African decolonization process is closely linked to its pioneering status among the anti-colonial armed struggles in sub-Saharan Africa, to its direct impact on the end of the Portuguese empire, as well as the profound regional anti-colonial consequences for the white minority regime in Rhodesia, the prospects of Namibian independence, and the intensification of the fight against South African apartheid.

The liberation struggle in Angola was also marked by the fragmentation of its nationalist movement, a feature common to other armed struggles in Africa, but which in Angola assumed a more extreme form. The liberation movements of the National Front for the Total Liberation of Angola (FNLA), the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), not only failed to form a united front against colonialism, but also actively fought one another in what became a de facto civil war running parallel to the liberation struggle. This civil war continued after independence in 1975 and was intensified by the internationalization of the conflict through Cuban and South African military interventions.

As a testament to the vitality of its internal dynamics of competition, the Angolan civil war outlasted the Cold War and the withdrawal of international belligerents, entering its most destructive phase in the 1990s and only ending in 2002. This persistent competition has left an enduring legacy of open rivalries in Angolan politics today, along with a deeply contested memory of what the liberation struggle truly meant, marked by established traditions of historical revisionism and the strategic production of silences about the past.

The legacy of liberation in Angola is shaped by several events and processes that have unfolded from independence to the present day. One of the most defining factors over the long term is arguably the MPLA’s continuous control of state power since 1975. This began with its role as the ruling party of a socialist one-party system and continued, following the democratic transition of the 1990s, as the dominant force in a multiparty system with fragile democratic credentials.

This half-century of control has allowed the MPLA to shape the official discourse of the liberation struggle, using state resources to construct its version of history. In contrast, other movements have had limited access to such tools of state memory-making, placing them at a clear disadvantage in the battle over historical legitimacy.

The mausoleum of Agostinho Neto, constructed with the support of Soviet expertise, functions as Angola’s de facto national pantheon, one that excludes anti-colonial figures not connected with the MPLA. Source: Wikipedia.

Official Infrastructure of Memory

The official infrastructure of memory overwhelmingly reflects the MPLA’s interpretation of the liberation struggle, a direct consequence of the party’s uninterrupted control of state power. This state-sponsored memory framework selectively honors figures and events that align with the MPLA’s historical narrative, while systematically excluding or marginalizing other anti-colonial actors.

Although this infrastructure claims to promote national unity, its effects can be quite the opposite. For many Angolans, particularly those from regions or communities historically aligned with rival movements, these commemorative practices are perceived not as efforts to foster a shared national identity, but as expressions of partisan dominance disguised as national remembrance.

Informal Infrastructure of Memory

The opposition is largely left to construct its own informal infrastructures of memory, without state sponsorship but also, in some cases, with limited government interference. A striking example is the site where UNITA’s founder and leader Jonas Savimbi was shot dead in 2002 by Angolan governmental forces, which quickly became an improvised memorial and remains a powerful symbol of remembrance for many Angolans despite its unofficial status. Despite its unofficial status, it has remained an important site of national pilgrimage to this day. The only government interference was not aimed at the informal efforts at memorialization, but at the reburial of the UNITA leader’s body in his hometown of Lopitanga. Something the MPLA eventually permitted in 2019, in what was seen as a late but significant step toward national reconciliation.

The site of Savimbi’s death in Luena became a place of pilgrimage, marked by an improvised memorial and the display of the metal door used to transport his body. Source: Ver Angola.

Inclusive Monuments

While the government consistently blocks efforts to establish official memorials honoring the anti-colonial heroes of rival movements, it has also demonstrated moments of some flexibility. A positive example is the Monument to Peace in Luena. Unlike other state memorials that are explicitly tied to the MPLA’s history, this monument stands out for its inclusive symbolism and deliberate ambiguity. Notably, the monument avoids any explicit ideological messaging or display of party symbolism. Instead, it offers a visual representation of peace, an abstract but universally positive concept that allows for multiple interpretations. This ambiguity enables Angolans from across the political spectrum to see themselves represented and included.

A monument to Peace was erected in Luena in 2012 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the end of the Angolan civil war. Even though it portrays an abstract visual representation of peace that allows for a more inclusive interpretation, the monument also aligns with the MPLA’s narrative, indirectly portraying former President José Eduardo dos Santos as the “Architect of Peace”. Source: Jornal de Angola.

The struggle for Angola’s anti-colonial past remains an unfinished battle, fought not in the context of the politics of memory. More than two decades after the end of the civil war, the legacy of liberation continues to be characterized by exclusion, rivalry and selective memory. Although efforts such as the Peace Monument hint timidly at the possibility of a more inclusive national narrative, the prevailing framework still reflects a deeply fragmented memory. For Angola to come to terms with its past and develop a truly shared sense of identity, a broader plural recognition of all voices of liberation is essential.


References

Justin Pearce, “Angola’s Momentous Year”, BBC News, 2002.

Justin Pearce, “Contesting the Past in Angolan Politics”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, (1), 2015: 103-10.

Vasco Martins, “Hegemony, Resistance and Gradations of Memory: Politics of Remembering Angola’s Liberation Struggle”, History & Memory, 33, (2), 2021: 80-106.

Vasco Martins and Miguel Cardina, “A Memory of Concrete: Politics of Representation and Silence in the Agostinho Neto Memorial”, Kronos, 45, 2019: 46-64.

Jeremy Ball,“‘From Cabinda to Cunene’: Monuments and the Construction of Angolan Nationalism since 1975”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 45, (5), 2019: 821-840.


João Fusco Ribeiro is a research fellow at the Political Science Research Center (CICP) at the University of Évora, and his research focuses on Angolan liberation movements, the decolonization process in Lusophone Africa and its interconnections with anti-colonial support networks from Eastern Europe.


Title picture: Pixabay Content Free License.

Extinct but not forgotten: how museum collections help study the evolution of Hawaiian honeycreepers

In diesem Beitrag von Grigory Evtukh über Hawaiianische Kleidervögel lernen wir, wie naturkundliche Museumssammlungen etwas zum Schutz der Biodiversität beitragen können.

More than half of the Hawaiian honeycreeper species have disappeared, and the remaining ones are struggling to survive. How do museum collections help us study their past and prevent further losses?

Über die Hälfte der Hawaiianischen Kleidervögel-Arten sind ausgestorben, und die verbleibenden kämpfen ums Überleben. Wie helfen Museumssammlungen, ihre Vergangenheit zu erforschen und weitere Verluste zu verhindern?


I sit in the basement of the Cambridge Museum of Zoology, next to a humming ventilation system. The collections here are hidden from visitors, stored in metal cabinets filled with drawers of bird specimens. Today, the museum collections manager brought out one of specimens and carefully placed it on the table. I saw before me the only Hawaiʻi mamo (Drepanis pacifica) specimen in the Cambridge Museum collection. It was stored under a glass dome on a velvet-covered platform, giving it an almost ceremonial presence. This taxidermy specimen, collected in the mid-19th century, depicts the bird perched on a branch with its wings slightly spread. Its glass eyes look strikingly lifelike, even though no living representatives of this species remain in the world.

Surrounded by these silent witnesses of the past, I ask myself: what can we learn from these birds that are no longer seen in the wild? And more importantly, how can this knowledge help protect those that still survive?

A taxidermy specimen of the extinct Hawaiʻi mamo (Drepanis pacifica) from the Cambridge Museum of Zoology. The specimen is mounted on a wooden perch with original collection tags attached. [Image credit: Grigory Evtukh]

What are Hawaiian honeycreepers and why are they disappearing?

Hawaiian honeycreepers (Drepanidinae) are a group of birds within the finch family (Fringillidae) that evolved in isolation on the Hawaiian Islands. Due to the absence of competitors and predators, they occupied a variety of ecological niches, evolving into dozens of species with unique adaptations: long, curved beaks for nectar feeding, powerful beaks for cracking seeds, and even specialized beaks for extracting larvae from under tree bark.

However, with the arrival of humans, the situation changed drastically. Introduced animals like cats, rats and pigs, diseases such as avian malaria, and deforestation led to the extinction of at least 34 species of Hawaiian honeycreepers, with 14 disappearing after the arrival of Polynesians and another 20 following European colonization. The most significant losses occurred in the 20th century, as honeycreeper populations began to decline rapidly due to the spread of mosquitoes carrying avian malaria. Some of the remaining species are now on the brink of extinction. This group of birds historically included at least 57 species, yet today, fewer than half of Hawaii’s once-thriving honeycreeper species still exist. Birds that once thrived in the montane forests of Hawaii have now become symbols of the region’s ecological crisis.

Museum collections as a source of knowledge

Collections like those in Cambridge allow scientists to study both extinct and surviving species. The museum holds dozens of honeycreeper specimens, including type specimens described as early as the 19th century. Each specimen represents a frozen moment in evolutionary history. Museum collections offer the opportunity to study morphology, examine anatomical changes, and even reconstruct past ecosystems.

In my research, I use standardized photography and microCT scanning methods. These technologies allow for a detailed analysis of beak shape, skull structure, and other morphological features. For example, I compare honeycreeper beaks of different lengths and curvatures. In combination with phylogeny this data will help me to understand how fast these birds change their morphological features and evolve.

A traditional Hawaiian feather cloak (ʻahuʻula) made from olona fiber netting and feathers of the ʻiʻiwi (Drepanis coccinea), ʻōʻō (Moho spp.), and mamo (Drepanis pacifica). Creating a single cloak required the feathers of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of birds, many of which were captured and killed specifically for this purpose, contributing to the decline of several species, including the now-extinct Hawaiʻi mamo. In German, Hawaiian honeycreepers are referred to as “Kleidervögel” (clothing birds) due to their historical use in featherwork. [Image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

Hawaiʻi mamo as an example of a lost species

Hawaiʻi mamo is one of the most well-known honeycreeper species that disappeared due to hunting and habitat destruction. These birds fed on the nectar of native trees such as ʻōhiʻa lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), which played a crucial role in the Hawaiian ecosystem. Their bright yellow feathers were used in the creation of traditional royal cloaks (ʻahuʻula) and helmets (mahiole) worn by Hawaiian chiefs and kings during ceremonies and warfare. These cloaks were crafted from thousands of individual feathers and hundreds of individual birds such as ʻōʻō (Moho) and mamo (Drepanis), symbolizing power and divine protection. The arrival of Europeans played a decisive role in the extinction of this species.

The study of museum specimens helps in the conservation of remaining species. For example, analyzing beak structure and dietary preferences helps in designing habitat restoration programs. Museum collection data are used in conservation initiatives such as the Kauaʻi Forest Bird Recovery Project and the Hawaiian Forest Bird Recovery Project, which focus on restoring local ecosystems, controlling invasive species, and protecting vulnerable bird populations.

A vibrant ʻIʻiwi (Drepanis coccinea) perched on a branch. This species, once widespread across the Hawaiian Islands, is now facing habitat loss and the threat of avian malaria but remains one of the most recognizable honeycreepers. [Image credit: Cricket Raspet / CC BY 4.0]

Scientists use museum specimens to analyze the genetic diversity of historical and modern populations, allowing them to identify species at the highest risk of extinction and develop conservation strategies. DNA analysis of extinct honeycreepers provides insights into how their gene pools differed from surviving species, helping assess the genetic resilience of remaining populations.

Additionally, data on extinct species are used to model ecological changes. Studies show that the disappearance of one species can trigger cascading effects on the ecosystem, making museum-based models crucial for predicting potential threats and adapting conservation measures. Such knowledge is important not only for Hawaii but also for preserving other island ecosystems. For example, in the Galápagos, active programs are working to restore endemic species affected by invasive animals, while in Madagascar, conservation efforts are intensifying to protect unique forest ecosystems. Human impact on these regions has led to significant biodiversity loss, and research based on museum data helps develop more effective conservation strategies.

How museum research helps in the real world

Many conservation projects rely on museum research. Historical data help scientists understand how species’ ranges have shifted over time and how they responded to environmental changes. These insights allow researchers to model how remaining populations will react to modern ecological challenges.

Recent studies suggest that some extinct species, such as the Poʻo-uli (Melamprosops phaeosoma), might have had a chance of survival if more aggressive conservation measures had been taken earlier. These lessons from the past help avoid similar mistakes in the future.

In addition to field research, museums facilitate international collaboration. Through digitization, researchers from different countries can study digital specimens and share data. This is especially crucial for species whose populations are critically endangered.

A Poʻouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma) being handled by researchers during conservation efforts. This extinct Hawaiian honeycreeper was discovered in 1973 and rapidly declined due to habitat loss, disease, and the fragmentation of its small population. The last confirmed sighting of a Poʻouli was in 2004. [Image credit: Paul E. Baker / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]

Conclusion

Museum collections play a crucial role in preserving biological heritage. Studying specimens like Hawaiʻi mamo allows us not only to explore the past but also to develop tools for protecting biodiversity in the future. Research based on these data helps determine the necessary steps for conserving vulnerable species and ecosystems.

Biodiversity conservation is not just about protecting individual species but about restoring ecosystems and preventing the repetition of past mistakes. Museum specimens give scientists the ability to understand the factors that led to species’ extinction and use this knowledge to develop effective conservation strategies.

Today, digitization of collections, international collaboration, and genetic research allow us to extract invaluable information even from long-extinct organisms. These data help not only analyze the past but also design programs for conserving surviving species, such as habitat restoration, invasive species control, and disease management.

Now, sitting in the quiet basement of the museum, I realize that these birds are not truly gone —their history lives on in science, in conservation initiatives, and in our ongoing efforts to prevent further losses.


[Image credit: private]

Grigory Evtukh is currently pursuing his PhD at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) in Germany.


Title picture: A vibrant ʻIʻiwi (Drepanis coccinea) perched on a branch. This species, once widespread across the Hawaiian Islands, is now facing habitat loss and the threat of avian malaria but remains one of the most recognizable honeycreepers. [Image credit: Cricket Raspet / CC BY 4.0]