Episode 2: The Evidence on the Table

Episode 2 of Dig Where You Stand was just published. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the web, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We appreciate your help in spreading the word. If Episode 2 piques your interest, please share it with others you think would be interested. 

What’s in Episode 2?

The relatively straightforward questions driving our first episode were: Why are there so many human remains in Berlin museums? And, how did they get here? Episode two of Dig Where You Stand was driven by a similarly simple question: What happens when you try to give them back? 

To answer that, we looked at the first time Germany tried to address this brutal history with the return of 20 skulls to Namibia as part of the Charité Human Remains project in 2011. These human remains were incredibly sensitive because many of them had been collected in concentration camps as part of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in what was then German South West Africa. And the result was a diplomatic scandal.

In this episode, we look at the power these ancestors still hold and how repatriation can touch upon the entrenched power structures and reopen colonial wounds.

Germany’s Other Genocide

Episode two of Dig Where You Stand deals with some incredibly distressing subject matter - but one of the aspects of this crime that feels most shocking about this subject is how it is remembered.

For example, in the Colombiadamm graveyard in the Berlin district of Neukölln, there is a large inscribed stone which commemorates the genocide of the Herero people. The shocking fact here, however, is that this monument does not honour the murdered victims, but seven of the perpetrators who had volunteered for the Schutztruppe and died in what is today Namibia between 1904-1907.

Maintaining memorials to the murderers and, even today, holding hundreds of human remains from Namibia in the depots of its museums and universities, the subject of human remains continues to trouble the official narrative of Germany’s “remembrance culture.”

Episode 3

Episode 3 will come out in about a month and conclude this Dig Where You Stand series. What will happen to all the ancestral remains in Berlin if they can’t be returned?

What is Kollo Media?

Kollo Media is a new publishing entity based in Berlin. It works with other publishers to establish multimedia formats with audiences inspired by curiosity, conscientiousness, and quality. You can reach us at [email protected] or @kollomedia.