Skulls and bones: A dark secret of German colonialism
Thousands of skulls and bones from the colonial era are still stored away in German archives. In Africa, the calls for their return are getting louder. But that's proving to be difficult. Daniel Pelz reports from Berlin.
Felix von Luschan probably didn't think that he was doing anything wrong. After the ambitious anthropologist took over the post of assistant director of Berlin's Museum of Ethnology in 1885, he gave the green light for a huge collection campaign: Europeans collected thousands of skulls and bones in various colonies and sent them to Berlin. Like other scientists of his time, Luschan wanted to use them to study human development. Many of the human relics ended up gathering dust in various storerooms for decades.
Some 5,500 human remains from Luschan's collections still exist. They're now owned by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs a number of museums, archives and libraries in Germany.
http://www.dw.com/en/skulls-and-bones-a-dark-secret-of-german-colonialism/a-43279594
