Objects, Cultural Heritage, and Belonging

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For the second episode of the conversation series “Conversations on Memory Culture in Contemporary Germany”, we are focusing on “Objects, Cultural Heritage, and Belonging.” We have invited historian Mirjam Brusius and anthropologist Duane Jethro to discuss recent debates on colonial traces and legacies in contemporary German public space, such as museums, collections, and street names. They will also examine the role of artifacts and objects for narratives about Germany’s past and the relationship between cultural heritage and belonging in contemporary Germany.

Mirjam Brusius is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute London. She completed her PhD in 2011 at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the history of museums, collecting, archaeology and fieldwork in imperial contexts; cultural heritage and preservation practices; the history of photography; and the history of colonial science. She published her book Fotografie und Museales Wissen: William Henry Fox Talbot, das Altertum und die Abstinenz der Fotografie in 2015, edited together with T. Dunkelgrün,  “Photography, Antiquity, Scholarship, History of Photography,” special  issue History and Photography 40/3 (2016), as well as with K. Dean and C. Ramalingam, William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (New Haven/London, 2013), and also wrote articles that appeared in German newspapers on recent debates about decolonizing museums and collections in contemporary Germany.

Duane Jethro is a junior research fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive, based in the Michaelis School of Fine Art, at the University of Cape Town. He graduated from the University of Utrecht, worked as a researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, CARMAH, at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and also held a Georg Forster Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellowship between 2017 and 2019. His research interests include the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures, as well as intersections between museums, heritage, religion, the secular, and the sacred. He is the editor of the journal Material Religion and published his book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power in 2020. His current project is a multiperspectival investigation of the loss and salvaging of the University of Cape Town Jagger Library and its collections after a devastating fire in April 2021.

Isabel Richter is the DAAD Professor of German History at the Department of History and the Department of German at UC Berkeley. She has published on the history of resistance to Nazism and the cultural history of death in the long 19th century and is currently working on youth and counter-cultures in the long 1960s. Her research interests include transnational youth cultures in the 20th century, the history of death in modern Europe, material and visual history in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the history of National Socialism and Gender Studies.

The series continues on May 4 with author and illustrator Nora Krug in conversation with Dr. Bettina Wodianka (Goethe-Institut San Francisco).

The series is organized by Heike Friedman (Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in Berkeley), Akasemi Newsome (Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley), Noémie Njangiru (Goethe-Institut San Francisco), Isabel Richter (DAAD Professor in the History and German Departments of UC Berkeley), and Bettina Wodianka (Goethe-Institut San Francisco).