Mannheim, 21 June 2024 Visit to the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums

On Friday, June 21, 2024, the Studienkolleg's G and S courses visited the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museums in Mannheim together with our director, Mrs Gardt, as well as our teachers, Mr. Bahn, Mr. Krebs and Mr. Roth. The excursion was part of Mr. Bahn's unit on “Colonialism” in the second half of the semester, which dealt with the colonial policies of European great powers in Africa and, within the context of the critical reappraisal of the colonial era, was also intended to shed light on the topics of “provenance research” and “restitution of looted colonial art”. This took place in cooperation with the head of the Department of World Cultures and Nature Studies, ethnologist Dr. Corinna Erckenbrecht, and anthropologist Jamie Dau, who has been focusing on provenance research at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen since January of this year. After an overview of, and a tour through, the individual museum buildings, where we also learned about their history and current use, we went to the former bank building of the Rheinische Creditbank located at Mannheim's square B 4, where the staff offices and part of the museum depot are located today. Divided into two groups, we were able to view the extensive collection of objects and artefacts, most of which stem from the former German colonies in Africa, including everyday objects as well as musical instruments and ritual objects. We were also lucky enough to take a look at objects from present-day Namibia, as a delegation from Windhoek had announced a visit to Mannheim for the last week of June as part of a city cooperation programme for whom a small selection of the object collection had been prepared. Our excursion ended with a question and discussion session.