| Centre for Transcultural Studies

New publication: "Zeugen des Kolonialismus"

transcript Verlag has published a book entitled "Zeugen des Kolonialismus" by Sara Müller, which uses ethnographic objects from the Göttingen Collection to show how German colonial policy in Oceania reflected economic exploitation, violence and political interests.

Sara Müller
Zeugen des Kolonialismus: Ethnographische Objekte und die deutsche Vergangenheit in Ozeanien
transcript Verlag, 2026
transcript-series: Global- und Kolonialgeschichte
ISBN: 9783837680171
342 Seiten (hardcover)
50,00 EUR

The entanglements between ethnographic objects and German colonialism are no longer a secret. The influence of scientific expeditions on the appropriation of objects, however, is less well known. In 1912 and 1913, the Empress Augusta River Expedition explored the Sepik region in German New Guinea. Using selected object biographies from the Ethnological Collection in Göttingen and with the help of historical provenance research, Sara Müller looks at the entire context of the appropriation of the objects. They thus become witnesses to economic exploitation, political interests, violence against people and the logistics and handling of objects in German collections in the 20th century.

The author
Sara Müller completed her doctorate in history at the Georg August University of Göttingen in 2023 on German colonial history in Papua New Guinea. Since April 2024, she has been working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection in Gotha, having previously held scholarships at the Deutsches Museum Munich and the Leibniz Institute of European History, among others.

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