The press conference, Q&A and handover ceremony all took place in a lec- ture room on the Charité campus in the Mitte district of Berlin, just a few hundred metres from the Pathological Institute where the skulls were once studied by Bartels, Fetzer, Zeidler, and Virchow.374 During these public occa-
sions, two skulls – one Herero and one Nama – were prominently displayed in glass cases alongside eighteen individual boxes containing the other skulls. This was the first repatriation process during which human remains were actually visible for the public. Not only is it quite unique that the remains were put on display during the repatriation process, what is even more sur- prising is that they were presented as representatives of the ethnic categories ‘Herero’ and ‘Nama’. Even the boxes containing the other eighteen skulls were labelled accordingly. In a sense, the racial categories of interest to early twen- tieth-century racist researchers were reproduced. Before turning to the ma- terial traces of the repatriation process – the boxes and cases – I discuss the physical presentation of the skulls and the reasons behind this ‘visible return’. At the press conference on 26 September, the Charité had set up tables on the stage and in front of the stage of the lecture room and covered them with white linen (figure 15). Project leader and anatomist Prof. Andreas Win-
374 The building where this took place has since been demolished. A new high-rise Charité buildng is currently being constructed on the site.
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Figure 15
Press conference at the Charité, 26 September 2011. Photo: © Larissa Förster. Previously published in: Larissa Förster, ‘“These skulls are not enough”. The repatriation of Namibian human remains from Berlin to Windhoek in 2011’, Darkmatter (online report, 18 November 2013).
Figure 16
Q&A with the Namibian delegation conducted by Andreas Winkelmann. Photo: © Larissa Förster, ‘“These skulls are not enough”’.
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Figure 17
Handover ceremony on 30 September 2011. Photo: © Dorothee Arndt (Charité Hu- man Remains Project), previously published in Larissa Förster, ‘“These skulls are not enough”’.
Figure 18
Memorial service at St. Matthew’s Church, Berlin on 29 September 2011. Photo: © Larissa Förster, ‘“These skulls are not enough”’.
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kelmann and anthropologist Dr. Katrin Koel-Abt of the Charité Human Re- mains Project laid out eighteen boxes in a row on the large table on stage, the eight containing Herero skulls on the left and the ten with Nama skulls on the right, leaving a small space between the boxes on the right and those on the left. They placed the ninth Herero skull and the eleventh Nama skull in glass cases on top of the table in front of the stage, facing the audience.375 For the
Q&A with the delegation on 27 September, the first occasion for the Namib- ians to see the skulls up-close, the Charité team altered the display slightly. They set up a large table in front of the stage, with the Herero and Nama skulls in glass cases in the middle and the boxes on either side of them (figure 16). During the official handover ceremony the display was similar to that of the press conference (figure 17), with two notable differences: the Charité presented the reports alongside the skulls and the embassy covered the boxes containing the skulls with two Namibian flags. On all occasions, the Charité placed bouquets of white flowers on either side of the skulls.
The day before the handover, on 29 September, the Namibian embassy or- ganized a church service in St. Matthew’s Church, close to Potsdamer Platz. Here, the same Herero and Nama skulls were on display in front of the altar (figure 18). Unlike the events in the lecture hall of the Charité, this memorial event was organized by the Namibian embassy. In close collaboration with the embassy, Andreas Winkelmann and his team placed the skulls here in the same glass cases, on a smaller table covered with white linen. Behind this table, on a black pedestal, the team laid out the eighteen boxes containing the other skulls. Representatives of the Namibian embassy placed large bouquets of white and purple flowers around the skulls and draped a Namibian flag over the boxes.376
The decision to put a Herero and Nama skull on display in the lecture hall of the university hospital and in the church was not made by the Charité alone. Winkelmann and his team negotiated the presentation of the skulls with the Namibian embassy, who, in turn, related to Herero and Nama repre- sentatives. Following negotiations with various interest groups, the embassy requested a ‘visible return’ of the skulls. Nama, Herero, and the Namibian government agreed that the skulls had to be seen, not covered in closed box- es. 377 Winkelmann:
375 Winkelmann, interview.
376 Winkelmann, interview and email correspondence with the author. 377 Winkelmann, interview.
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We suggested what would be possible: the choice was between showing all or two. We could not display all twenty skulls, mainly for practical reasons. As it was a public occasion we could not just put them on the table, they had to be under glass. And it would not have been easy to find identical glass cases for all twenty skulls in the Medizinhistorischen Museum.
When the Charité brought up the possibility of ‘representative’ skulls, it be- came clear that the Namibian embassy wanted a representative of each group involved. Winkelmann: ‘To the Namibians it was very important to which group of Namibians these skulls belonged. It was important to know that they were either Herero or Nama.’ Winkelmann explained that the decision was political. Nama and Herero are known as the main victims of the Ger- man-Herero War and it was this connotation that the skulls on display (also) had to evoke. All twenty skulls had belonged to victims of the genocide. Win- kelmann:
The skulls were witnesses, Zeugen, to and evidence for what the Germans did between 1904 and 1908. We would not usually display skulls like this because they have a difficult past and come from a context that was not ethically correct, but it was the wishes of the Namibians that not just the hu- man remains, but the negative colonial context should be visible in a way. 378
It was left to the team of the Charité Human Remains Project to select the skulls that were to be displayed: ‘Herero A 834’ and ‘Nama A 787’. Both had been part of Paul Bartels’ collection of preserved heads and used by Bartels for his research on the ‘third eyelid’. The Nama head was subsequently stud- ied, dissected, drawn, and macerated by Christian Fetzer, the Herero head by Heinrich Zeidler. Probably Bartels himself wrote in ink on the outside of the Herero skull: ‘Bartels No. 28, Blst. No. 38 Herero E’ and on the inside ‘Herero?’, ‘E’ and again ‘E’ (figure 19). The other skull read ‘Hottentott’ in ink on the outside, and several inscriptions in pencil: ‘1', ‘20’ and ‘alpha’. More recent- ly, curators had attached plastic notes with the catalogue numbers (834 and 787) to the skulls. 379
Andreas Winkelmann, Thomas Schnalke and Katrin Koel-Abt of the Charité Human Remains Project chose these two skulls because they were intact, complete, and had legible inscriptions on them. The descriptions ensured
378 Ibid.
379 Charité Human Remains Project, Provenance analysis. Specimen A 834 (Herero) (30 Sep- tember 2011) and Provenance analysis. Specimen A 787 (Nama) (30 September 2011).
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that they could be identified by onlookers as Herero and Nama.380 Anoth-
er factor for choosing the Herero skull was that it displayed the traditional Herero tooth manipulation: the lower incisors were pulled out and the two upper incisors filed in an inverted V-shape. This ‘impressed’ the Namibian delegation, because it was immediate evidence that this skull had belonged to a Herero individual. The fact that racial classifications were written on the skull, especially the derogatory word ‘Hottentott’, evoked even to a lay audi- ence that the skulls had been used for racist science. Winkelmann: ‘In a way, we had a bad feeling about displaying these skulls as modern-day scientists. We displayed the racist scientific approach of our predecessors.’ 381