Berlin's Humboldt Forum Opens — and Confronts Its Past

Built inside a reconstruction of the old Prussian royal palace, Berlin's Humboldt Forum is one of Europe's most ambitious — and most contested — cultural projects. In September 2021 it opened the galleries of its Ethnological and Asian Art museums.

Spread across thousands of square metres, the displays place some 10,000 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas at the heart of the German capital — and squarely within a reckoning over how they were acquired.

Rather than hide the colonial histories behind its treasures, the Forum set out to confront them. As the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said at the opening: 'We cannot change the past, but we can change people's blindness to the past.'

Image: “Humboldt Forum and Berlin Cathedral June 2023 01” — ArildV, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.