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Skull return: Göttingen rehabilitates colonial past!
On October 7, 2025, the University of Göttingen will return four skulls to the Marshall Islands, part of a research project on the provenance of colonial human remains.
Skull return: Göttingen rehabilitates colonial past!
A historical event is on the agenda on October 7, 2025 in Göttingen: The university returns four skulls to the Republic of Marshall Islands. This return is part of an extensive research project that focuses on human remains from colonial contexts. In the past, these skulls went on a long journey that started in 1913 when a German colonial lord sold them to the former Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg. NDR reports.
The return is not only a gesture of reparation, but also part of the continuing efforts to research provenance. Historian Holger Stoecker and his team have been dealing with the examination of skulls and skeletons for several years to clarify the origin and history of these human remains. Her project "Human Remains from Colonial Contexts" has already launched further returns to the Palau and Marshall Islands Republics. However, what Stoecker and his team have in mind is more than just the return transport of bones, because the University of Göttingen has over 1,000 human remains from former colonies in their collections, which underlines the need to deal with and return.
A complex legacy
The research project not only extends to Göttingen, but also includes the museum on the Rothenbaum in Hamburg, where similar attention is paid to the provenance of human remains. The anthropological collections of the Göttingen University, which date between the 1880s and 1930s, include not only the skulls that have now been returned, but also many other remains, the origin and history of which must be clarified , according to Kulturgutverluste.de.
The backflow of the bones is a significant step in the context of provenance research in Germany. Initiatives and research projects aim to examine the connections between collection stands and European colonialism. The local knowledge of the origins of origin is also included in order to create more transparent and more respectful relationships between museums and the descendants of the cultures concerned , reports the Working Group Provenance Research.
More returns in prospect
Stoecker and his team have ambitious plans: they want more than 30 bones and skulls from Australia, as well as nine skulls and skeletons from Nauru and five skulls and bones from Namibia. The return of these remains is part of an overarching endeavor that is to be recorded as part of the "Sensitive Provenance" project and also in the reports and exhibitions on the results of provenance research. The research project will expire at the end of 2025, and there will currently be no financial means for a successor project in sight.
These returns are not only an act of reconciliation, but also a call to memory of the dark history of colonialism and the responsibility that today's generations bear.