Götz Aly & Stefan Koldehoff / Das Prachtboot. How Germans stole the art treasures of the South Seas

RESIST! Conversations: Götz Aly in conversation with Stefan Koldehoff
Friday, June 11, 2021, 7 p.m.

Conversation in German with simultaneous English translation
DEUTSCHE VERSION:    • Götz Aly mit Stefan Koldehoff / „Das ...  

Historian Götz Aly in conversation with journalist Stefan Koldehoff (Deutschlandfunk) about his new book "Das Prachtboot. How Germans Stole the Art Treasures of the South Seas."
The Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (RJM) continues its series of events on restitution and justice in the context of the exhibition "RESIST! The Art of Resistance" with the presentation of Götz Aly's new book "Das Prachtboot: Wie Deutsche die Kunstschätze der Südsee raubten (Das Prachtboot: How Germans stole the art treasures of the South Seas)" (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, May 2021). After dealing with the history of collecting the Benin bronzes from Nigeria, the RJM now focuses on the history of collecting in the Pacific, a part of the German colonial history that has received little attention and tended to be downplayed. With the presentation of Götz Aly's book, the RJM wants to make further visible this violent part of colonial history.
The historian Götz Aly will present his new book to the public for the first time in the exhibition area of RESIST!, in conversation with the journalist Stefan Koldehoff. Using the example of the "Luf boat," which came from the island of Luf (present-day Papua New Guinea), Götz Aly describes the circumstances of German colonial rule in the then colony of German Guinea. He also explains how the fifteen-metre-long ocean-going outrigger boat, which will be on display in the Entrée of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin's Humboldt Forum, arrived in Berlin. Götz Aly documents the violence, destructiveness and greed with which German traders, adventurers and ethnologists went on a raid in the South Seas and attacked the cultural treasures by means of "punitive expeditions" and reveals that many objects in ethnological collections brought to Europe during the colonial period were looted art.
The RJM collection contains 83 objects from what is now Papua New Guinea. They came to the museum in 1966 with the purchase of the collection of the artist Klaus Clausmeyer (1887-1968). An overview of this collection and an excerpt from the inventory catalogue Art and Culture from the South Seas. Clausmeyer Collection. Melanesia by Waldemar Stöhr from 1987 is available on the RJM website.