Reparatur(en). Verfahren der Wiederherstellung zerstörter Wissens- und Erfahrungsbestände

Issues of “reparation” and “restitution” have long been discussed in the context of West Germany’s so-called Wiedergutmachungspolitik (reparations policy) following the Holocaust, particularly regarding the return and compensation of property belonging to Jews who were persecuted by the National Socialists. The Washington Conference Principles, established in 1998, revived the debate on the treatment of cultural artifacts looted by the Nazis and provided international collections with new guidelines. Later on, the widely discussed report on the restitution of African cultural goods by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy (2018), along with the ensuing discussion on the handling of colonial collections at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. raised awareness among the general public of other regions and historical periods. The overarching question is: Can injustice be made visible and compensated, and if so, how?

The need for a comprehensive sociopolitical understanding of such processes of restitution and compensation has, for example, led to the founding of the Käte Hamburger Centre Cultural Practices of Reparation in Saarbrücken. The Centre studies individual and collective reparations processes in a globalized world from a transmedial and transnational perspective. Their research focuses on cultures of remembrance and historical-political discourses, individual experiences of loss as well as general cultural-ecological issues.

The workshop starts from these debates and research approaches. Before the background of ongoing research projects at the DI and the ZfL, we will discuss different ideas and conceptions, symbolic meanings and practices of provenance research, reparation, and restitution.

Fig. above: Restituted books from the library of Henry Torrès, previously held by the ZfL library, © Dirk Naguschewski