A research project investigated the history of the origin of the ‘Human Remains’. The specimens may have come from prisoners of war in what is now Namibia.
This text addresses war, physical violence, human remains and racism, which some readers may find disturbing.
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of human remains from colonial contexts that have been stored unnoticed or unquestioned in public collections for decades. Pressure from civil society, politics and communities of origin on institutions to deal with the provenance of their collections has also been increasing for several years.
Time and again, human remains are coming to light in places where one would not expect to find them – as in the Lautarchiv. The collection comprises around 7500 shellac discs, wax cylinders and tapes – including recordings of languages and dialects that were created under forced conditions in prisoner-of-war camps during the First and Second World Wars. The collection also includes recordings of German dialects from the 1920s, voice portraits of famous personalities, acoustic documentation from the GDR as well as music recordings and animal voices. When the collection was organised for the Humboldt Laboratory’s exhibition at the Humboldt Forum, laryngeal specimens came to the fore.
Why are there human specimens in the sound archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin? Where do they come from? What purpose did they serve? Historian Holger Stoecker has investigated these questions in a provenance research project. The theory cannot be proven, but according to Stoecker’s research, it seems entirely possible that the larynxes originate from what is now Namibia and were taken from the bodies of Herero and Nama prisoners of war during the German genocide. The question now is how the university will deal with these human remains, whose cruel fate can only be surmised and which will probably always remain nameless. Is the society of origin interested in taking them back? Should they be buried?
Museums and academic collections around the world are asking themselves these questions. In this interview, provenance research expert Holger Stoecker talks about his approach to research and the results of his enquiry.
Mr Stoecker, it was no secret that there are two human larynxes in the Lautarchiv’s collection. When was the existence of these objects problematised?
When the Lautarchiv was being prepared for its move to the Humboldt Forum, the rooms were inspected in 2017. On this occasion, the two specimens fell into the hands of the curators. I wasn’t there, but that’s what I was told. As such objects have to be treated with particular sensitivity, the people involved realised quite quickly that something had to be done. That’s why I was asked if I could take a look at it. This initial consultation resulted in a provenance research project.
Why is it important to find out where these objects come from?
On the one hand, it is striking that human specimens are found in an archive that deals with sound recordings. At first glance, this does not seem to fit together. In addition, the collection contained many recordings from non-European origins and colonial contexts. Voices of prisoners of war from colonial armies who had been interned in Germany during the First and Second World Wars were recorded for various purposes. The assumption that there was a connection to the preparations was obvious. However, it soon became clear that there was no direct connection between the two preparations and specific sound recordings. On the other hand, they possibly came from a colonial acquisition context and were in the context of racialising research. This is at least one possible explanation that has become strong in the provenance report.
What exactly is provenance research and what is its ethical concern?
Provenance research on collection objects generally aims to reconstruct their origin, the circumstances of their acquisition and their history in the collections. In the case of human remains, we are dealing with two dimensions at the same time, as this involves both the biography of an individual person, a subject, and the history of objects prepared from their mortal remains. The individuality of human remains has in most cases been ignored or deliberately made invisible over the past 200 years since anthropological collections have existed. The re-humanisation of human specimens is therefore a central concern of provenance research, especially when it comes to the bones and specimens of members of formerly colonised societies. This is because the greatest possible re-humanisation is the prerequisite for a dialogue with the community of origin or its state representatives on the further handling of the human remains.
Provenance research of this kind also makes it possible to deal with specific historical injustices and contributes to a critical reflection on one’s own disciplinary, collection and institutional history. Behind an anonymised collection object, a person becomes visible again – a process that can lead to cooperation with descendants and, if necessary, find a worthy conclusion in restitution and (re)burial.
Provenance research can help to restore a part of the personality of the deceased individual by attempting to reconstruct the identity and biography of the individual concerned from historical sources and to read an individual fate from the bones or specimens themselves through statements about age, gender, illnesses, injuries and cause of death. This is roughly how a working aid on ‘Interdisciplinary Provenance Research on Human Remains from Colonial Contexts’, which colleagues and I are currently finalising, puts it.
How did you go about your research?
Firstly, you look at the objects themselves and try to find out what they are and how they were stored. Is there any information or numbers that you can assign to them? The immediate surroundings, i.e. the context in which they were stored, are also examined. Perhaps neighbouring objects provide clues about the use of the specimens. In this case, there were hinged models of an ear that were apparently produced in the mid-20th century for demonstration purposes. It can therefore be assumed that the laryngeal specimens were used for teaching and demonstration purposes.
You then feel your way through the collection, try to find notes, track down the people involved and search through their subject areas – to find out whether they dealt with larynxes at some point. That was also the case here. Unfortunately, it was not possible to specifically identify the preparations. There was no one who wrote: I worked with prepared larynxes from the sound archive. There were only references to the contexts. One was that the larynx was used as an organ of voice training to mark ‘racial differences’. Cultural activities such as speaking, voice and singing were used to identify ostensibly biological ‘races’.
What were you able to find out about the origin of the preparations?
It is relatively clear that they were collected in the 1930s in connection with the current sound collection in the Lautarchiv. At that time it was still called the ‘Institute for Sound Research’. There are no concrete traces of the two preparations for the time before that. However, institutional structures, actors, acquisition and research contexts could be reconstructed, which together lead to a tentative subject/object biography. There is a plausible assumption that the specimens originate from Nama or Herero who were interned in camps during the Herero-Nama War (1904-1908) against German colonial rule in what was then German South West Africa and died there. This assumption is supported by the fact that a large consignment of human larynxes, 38 of which were from Nama and 15 from Herero, including three from children, arrived at the Berlin Anatomy Centre from German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. In the concentration camps where the Germans interned members of the Herero and Nama, the living conditions were catastrophic, leading to a very high mortality rate.
It is known that the bones and body parts of deceased prisoners were processed into specimens on site. Many human skulls and other body parts, including whole corpses, were sent to Germany, and in particular to Berlin, from this colonial war. I have tried to trace in the report how the two specimens could have travelled from the anatomy department via various stations to the Institute for Sound Research. I cannot prove this route in concrete terms, but can only tentatively point it out. Above all on the basis of personal connections between individual research contexts, which certainly suggest that the preparations arrived at the Institute for Sound Research by being taken from one station to another. In the 1930s and early 1940s, research there focussed on the connection between voice, language and ‘race’, especially with regard to languages and speakers in southern Africa. There was therefore certainly considerable interest in using the two larynx specimens for corresponding research, especially if their origin from what is now Namibia was still known at the time.
What happened to them there?
The specimens were last used there for demonstration purposes in teaching. In the end, they were left as ‘collection remnants’ without being used, fell out of sight, survived some reorganisations, but were not disposed of either. The latter is often the case in medical and scientific teaching collections in particular, where objects are ‘used up’ for teaching purposes and then replaced by new specimens. Such objects are therefore often not inventoried. The two larynx specimens were also never documented or even inventoried. It was only when they reappeared in 2017 that the two specimens attracted a great deal of interest. This time, however, not as objects for research or teaching, but as sensitive human remains. They turned out to be ‘stowaways’ in a history of collections, institutions and knowledge that leads us to unsuspected abysses.
How can it be that human remains can be found in so many collections around the world – including at Humboldt-Universität – but no one has been interested in them for a long time?
It is simply not true that – outside of the collections – nobody was interested in these human remains. The history of collecting human remains in colonial contexts was always also a history of rejection of the European ‘collecting mania’, resistance to it and demands for restitution on the part of affected communities of origin. There is evidence of this from the early days of the German colonial era. However, these voices were not heard in German institutions or were deliberately ignored. My thesis is that it was only as a result of the break-up of the East-West confrontation around 1989/90 that a global situation arose in which these voices became louder, gained more weight and could no longer be ignored. At the same time, postcolonial NGOs brought the issue into the public eye. In the collection institutions, there was initially little willingness to leave behind practices that had been practised for decades and to deal transparently with collection items as colonial contexts. But soon there were simply no more arguments in favour of this old way of thinking. The fact that there is now more openness and willingness to come to terms with the past is due, on the one hand, to a generational change among those responsible for the collections and others involved.
On the other hand, politicians have recognised the need for action, not least due to the expectations of civil society, and are providing resources for reappraisal, which in turn benefits the collections and institutions.
What could happen after the publication of your report?
The first step would be for the responsible parties to discuss how the preparations can be handled in a dignified and practicable manner. In the end, this handling will certainly lead to the two specimens being removed from the collection because they do not belong there for various reasons. The Lautarchiv is first and foremost a sound collection and not a collection of human specimens. The latter require different conservation conditions in order to store them appropriately. There are several options: Because there is a possible context of origin, the obvious thing in my view is to first ask the Namibian side whether they would be interested in taking the objects back. To do this, those responsible for the Lautarchiv, i.e. the collection curator, the institute and university management, would have to seek dialogue with the Namibian embassy, which already has some experience with the restitution of human remains from German collections. If restitution is not possible, one option would be to relocate the specimens to an anatomical collection, for example, where there are more suitable storage conditions. A third option would be to give the specimens a dignified burial. This is a path that has already been taken several times. Here too, the decision lies with those responsible for the sound archive.
In addition to this provenance research, the Lautarchiv is currently examining the ethical implications of the various options presented. On this basis, the Directorate of the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Techniques and the Presidential Board of the Humboldt University of Berlin will make a decision on the further handling of the laryngeal preparations.