Decolonizing German history is all the rage, and German ethnological museums have been at the center of an animated and contentious debate for over a decade. In part, that debate is about coming to terms with Germans’ colonial pasts. At the same time, however, much of it turns around Germany’s transcultural present and the challenge of reframing national narratives within globalized debates about being and belonging in Europe and the world.  One irony of these debates is the debaters’ tendency to instrumentalize rather than engage the objects in these museums, recapitulating many colonial tendencies in what claims to be a post-colonial moment.

H. Glenn Penny is the Henry J. Bruman Chair in German History at the University of California, Los Angeles.