Returns

Many Indigenous communities around the world lived for a long time in precarious conditions and were forced to hand over cultural items to Europeans, for example as ‘emergency sales’. However, cultural belongings were also stolen or extorted, and human remains of deceased individuals were turned into museum objects on the basis of racist ideologies. We have a responsibility to critically engage with this history of anthropological institutions and to facilitate returns. Through our systematic postcolonial provenance research, we contribute to addressing the contexts of injustice underlying many of the cultural artefacts in our museum collection. In doing so, we strive for the greatest possible transparency towards potential claimants for returns and take demands for the restitution or repatriation of collection items very seriously. In addition to extensive provenance research, cooperation with the communities of origin is particularly important for the preparation and implementation of returns from the museum collection.

For requests or claims for returns, or if you would like more detailed information about specific cultural belongings in the collection, you can make initial contact via . Your enquiry will then be forwarded to the relevant colleagues at the museum.