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Berlin Museums Set To Return Everything

By Loes Hendriks, Çiçek İlengiz, Florence Potter and Judith Sieber

‘Berlin Museums Set To Return Everything’ reviews a temporary exhibition of the Berlin Pergamon Museum, a glimpse into their year-long reconstruction phase, against the grain. The mock piece looks optimistically at the display of the exhibition, proposing that gives the impression that a critical refection of the state of restitution in Germany has actually led to its logical solution: to finally return everything in order to arrive at the form of the decolonial museum.

Several people looking at a drawing on a brick wall.
Figure 1. Many curious visitors at the Pergamon Museum in March 2025. Photo by Loes Hendriks.

From the 7th to the 9th of March, 2025,[1] the world famous Pergamon Museum in Berlin opened its south wing to the public once more. However, visitors shouldn’t expect to see such attractions as the Sam’al Lions, the Pergamon Altar, or the Orpheus Mosaic. That’s because, in a global first, the Pergamon Museum has started the process of restituting the entirety of the collection to their places and communities of origin, radically altering the landscape of the museum. The Pergamon Museum has thus gone where no other museum has dared to go before in the face of a growing momentum and a wealth of restitution requests: to reshape how the European museum space can exist without objects dispossessed, looted and illegitimately acquired from around the world. Sounds bold, doesn’t it? The result is an enticing and stimulating space that embraces the absence of the physical objects, while providing a new look and experimenting with ways to go forward.

This reinvention could be seen as a strong final statement from Hermann Parzinger, the President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation), who has since retired and is replaced by Marion Ackermann, the former director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections).

A painting of the inside of the Pergamon Museum hanging over remains of the exibition.
Figure 2. New exhibition display at Pergamon Museum. Photo by Judith Sieber.

The Pergamon Museum has historically been a tourist magnet and this weekend was no exception, with huge numbers of people flocking back to its hallowed halls during these three days to witness the transformation. Behind closed doors, brick walls and barriers cordoning off the other wings of the museum, the restitution and renovation is continuing ‒ until 2030 at least. For instance, the museum has already announced the reopening of the north wing for 2027.

During the visit, it becomes clear why this transformation will take so long: the sheer scale of the task, including the removal of thousands of objects and subsequent construction work, is no mean feat. Given the amount of time and effort that has gone into the restitution process, it is understandable why it takes the museum so long to handle all the different objects. One does not even speak of the Ishtar Gate or the Milet Gate, both of which are still in the museum ‒ for now.

First impressions from the museum saw the new concept accepted by the visitors, who took lots of pictures, engaged in discussions with the museum staff and each other and stayed until 10pm in the museum on a mild Sunday night in the German capital.

Directly after entering the first room of the Vorderasiatisches Museum (which is part of the Pergamon Museum) you get the idea: not only did the museum restitute the artifacts, like the Ḫattuša or the Tell Halaf collections ‒ they carefully removed the ancient objects from what is today Turkey and Syria from the museum display.

People standing around a plaster model of the new Museum Island.
Figure 3. Plaster model of the new Museum Island and a guide documenting our visit. Photo by Loes Hendriks.

If you don’t know the collection by heart, you won’t miss that much. You might vaguely remember the two meter high Sam’al lions and other parts of the former city gate of Sam’al. Above the now-naked brick walls are digital collages and composite images that function as proxies of the now-returned collection. Such images invite visitors to imagine themselves next to the old physical collection, creating a level of absence and presence that highlights the fetishization of objects and ownership that has stood in the way of change for too long. Without the restituted artifacts, new experiments with digital reproductions of the former collection become a stand-in. Additionally, next to the empty walls and below the collages, you can read some information signs about the historical context of the unjust acquisitions, that testify to and justify the museum’s decision.

Centrally placed in this first room, between where the restituted Sam’al lions used to be, you can find a white plaster model depicting part of the new Museum Island that gives an impression of the future of the buildings, as the transformation process is not only limited to these collections. This model helps visitors who are unfamiliar with the building and its structure to find their way around the museum complex while also materializing what long seemed impossible: the museum has finally become its own object ‒ or as Bataille described it in his canonical text “Museum” from 1986, a place at which the visitors can contemplate their own existence and importance: “The museum is the colossal mirror in which man, finally contemplating himself from all sides, and finding himself literally an object of wonder (…)”.[2] What for a long time was only a metaphor or a thought experiment is especially remarkable since Museum Island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999.[3]

Two pictures on exposed brick wall, showing objects of the Pergamon Museum in boxes.
Figure 4. Documentation of the transportation process as part of the exhibition. Photo by Judith Sieber.
Close-up of one of the photos: A statue of a lion covered partly in cloth.
Figure 5. Documentation by Peter Thieme of transport of Lion from Sam’al (detail). Photo by Jessica Metz.

A small side room off the processional road leading to the Ishtar Gate takes a different approach: here a series of framed images by the German documentary photographer Peter Thieme hangs on the naked brick walls, next to the empty vitrines that formerly hosted the Babylonian collection. Thieme, the museum’s photographer, has carefully documented the recent restitution work in the museum, like the transportation of the aforementioned guardian lions as well as smaller objects like ceramics. A closer look at the images reveals how even the eyes of the lion ‒ in an act probably based in the belief in animism ‒ were covered with with specially designed fabrics, depicting the leaves of therapeutic plants traditionally used in rituals in Tel Halaf, thus treating them respectfully and giving them a safe and calm journey.

It was especially exciting to see how Thieme’s photos made the process of restitution transparent to visitors: from wrapping and packing the artifacts to shipping them to their places of origin.

Restitution or Not: Is That the Whole Question?

The restitution debate has been gaining more visibility in the last years, ever since Germany restituted an ancient pre-Islamic sculpture to Afghanistan in 2012,[4] and 22 of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in December 2022.[5] However, since then, the arena seemed to quiet down. Until recently, that is ‒ with the pioneering action of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz the metaphorical door has been kicked wide open.

In one fell swoop, the collections of Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Mesopotamian, Hittite and more have been designated for return. The decision by the Berlin State Museums has come as an unexpected one. Despite restitution debates currently raging across Germany and the wider world and myriad requests for the return of famous objects such as Nefertiti’s bust and the Pergamon Altar itself, the concept of the ‘universal’ and encyclopedic museum seemed set to stay.

That being said, critics of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz have welcomed this change with open arms as a powerful step to right over a century of wrongs that have allowed Germany to profit from the cultural heritage of many different areas of the world. It has also been praised as a significant move in attempting to rectify and redress Germany’s colonial past, which is inextricably tied to the museum sector. While previously restitution debates in Germany, and more closely in Berlin, had been dogged by the continuous investment made into safeguarding and restoration of the illegitimately acquired artifacts, the reason for such a big maneuver in the cultural policy is explained by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz as an acknowledgement of the long-durée critiques and protests that were heightened during the Humboldt Forum’s opening.[6] After intense efforts to incorporate the critiques,[7] the cultural institution of a seemingly bygone Prussian empire is now becoming a pioneer in the decolonizing of the Western museums.[8]

Altering the Altar

The Pergamon Museum ‒ which took its name from the hellenistic Pergamon Altar, excavated from the 1870s onwards by Carl Humann ‒ has been a key reference for the history of the Museum Island. The Pergamon Altar was built to honor and worship the ancient Greek god Zeus in the city of Pergamon, today’s Bergama in western Turkey. Carl Humann, a Prussian engineer living in the Ottoman Empire, “discovered” the altar in the 1870s after a tip from a local physician.[9] He managed to gather funding for an excavation, with the help of Alexander Conze of the Royal Museums. The altar friezes were discovered in the Byzantine era fortifications built on the mountain overlooking Bergama. The Prussians excavated the friezes and shipped them to Berlin after negotiations with the Sultan.[10] The Ottoman Empire was not able to sustain its imperial infrastructure due to its debts and was mainly dependent on external resources, which is how the Kaiser only paid 20,000 marks for the altar to the Ottoman government.[11]

Drawing in brown colours showing oxen pulling the Pergamon altar.
Figure 6. The transportation of the Altar. Drawing by Christian Wilberg 1879. [12]

Although restitution demands were largely addressed through an emphasis on preservation, the arrival of this massive altar already marked the beginning of its successive phases of destruction. In the next century and a half, the Prussian state museum had invested a great amount of resources and manpower into its preservation. However, the early preservation efforts did more harm than good ‒ iron and bronze dowels were driven deep into the stone, which caused cracks and subsequent moisture damage. When the Allied forces bombed Berlin during the Second World War, the museum employees attempted to protect the altar. First, they packed it in sand bags and wooden casing ‒ later, they removed the friezes and shipped them to the museum bunker at Zoologischer Garten. There, Stalin found them in 1945. He ordered all art treasures in the bunker to East Berlin, from where they were shipped to Leningrad (today St. Petersburg). When they were returned to East Berlin in 1958, the State Museums did not have enough money to restore them properly. It was only after German reunification in the 1990s that a new round of restorations became possible. By then, more than a century of moisture, rust and transport by train had damaged the friezes substantially.[13]

Old black and white photograph of the Pergamon Altar surrounded by construction rubble.
Figure 7. Depiction of the destroyed Altar after the bombing of Berlin during the WWII. Photo via Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zentralarchiv (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Those in Berlin back in early 2015 were the lucky ones able to see the Altar at the Pergamon Museum; since then the section has been closed for restoration work. In the face of its return, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the local actors who have been systematically working towards its restitution, expressed their renewed joy by stating that “things finally are falling into its right place,” as the global art and culture scene acknowledges the meaning of slogans that have been circulating since the early 2000s ‒ such as “the stone is heavy in its place.”[14]

Another surprising move was made by the Turkish state following the restitution of the Altar to its original place. Mirroring the maneuver in Prussian cultural policy, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has announced the possible return of the Alexander Sarcophagus to Lebanon, an artifact long considered a cornerstone of Ottoman and Turkish museum history, proudly displayed since the early days of the Ottoman Imperial Museum as a testament to scientific competence, and still occupying a central place in the contemporary Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Museum staff further declared their willingness to offer support and guidance for preserving the soon-to-be-returned artifact under the current conditions of war, cheerfully announcing the launch of a new department aptly named “Occupying to Preserve.”

A decolonized museum is a full museum

If you think that after all objects were restituted the museum is merely an empty shell, you would be wrong. It is simply entering a new stage in its history, reinventing itself.

On a TV placed near the old Ishtar Gate location, one can see a film showing visitors the former collection of the museum. The camera moves through all the rooms, as a kind of virtual guided tour. Here the visitors are invited to acknowledge that the physical presence of the original artifacts is not necessary for museums to exist. Once museums give up on their claims of ownership of stolen and illegitimately acquired items, the museum becomes, not only an ethical space, but a futuristic one.

In this futuristic structure, there will also be space to remember the past. The director of the museum is now considering reviving the so-called Pompeii Corridor, which was designed in the 1950s. According to the oral testimony of Elisabeth Rohde, director of the East Berlin Museums until 1982, the much-celebrated Pompeii Corridor was built to facilitate the passage between various collections by passing through the Pergamon Room, which was severely destroyed during the bombing of Berlin in WWII.[15] Numerous paintings and depictions of the famous Pompeii, including Mount Vesuvius, lined the walls of the corridors, testifying to the museum’s consistent desire to enchant visitors, despite the difficult circumstances. In light of the presumed restitution of the Pergamon Altar, the reintroduction of the Pompeii Corridor in its place shows that the Museum has reaffirmed the importance of not erasing the past, but rather using and embracing the positive aspects of its past to build for the future.

In its mission to look to the future, the Pergamon museum hasn’t stopped there. As a final inspiring touch to the opening weekend, the museum’s directors have come together to create a time capsule to mark March 6th, 2025, as an inspiring move to capture the meaning and significance of the event (see Figure 8). Such an action not only aims to distill what the museum, and more broadly Berlin, was like in 2025, but also allows us to look directly into the future and speculate on what the museum will be like once the capsule is uncovered once more. And it’s not the only one. More recently, on July 21st, 2025, an additional time capsule containing a timeline of the history of the renowned Mshatta Façade was concealed behind it. In another symbolic and commemorative gesture, the team at the Museum of Islamic Art once again looked ahead, noting that “museums are often associated with the past ‒ with historical events, people and objects. Today, however, we have built a bridge to the future.”[16]

In the meantime, the Pergamon Museum is already leading the way with such a groundbreaking transformation to restitute all artifacts, creating a real-life conception of Bataille’s museum where the “halls and…objects are but the container, whose content is formed by the visitors.”[17] With the acknowledgement that the museum doesn’t need objects to thrive, who knows what further innovations this time capsule will bear witness to in the future? We, for one, are excited to find out.

A capsule made out of bronze, reading "PERGAMONMUSEUM. Grundinstandsetzung und Ergänzung. Zeitkapsel 6. März 2025".
Figure 8. The Pergamon Museum time capsule, dated 6 March, 2025. Photo by Jessica Metz

Notes

[1] “Visitor Days in the South Wing of the Pergamonmuseum from 7 to 9 March 2025.” 2025. Preussischer-Kulturbesitz.de, February 20, 2025. https://www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/en/rss-detail/rss/2025/02/20/visitor-days-in-the-south-wing-of-the-pergamonmuseum-from-7-to-9-march-2025.html.

[2] George Bataille, “Museum”, in October, Spring, 1986, Vol 36, pp. 24-25, here: p. 24.

[3] UNESCO World Heritage Convention: Museumsinsel (Museum Island), Berlin, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/896/.

[4] “Germany Returns Afghan Sculpture,” BBC News, January 31, 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16811062.

[5] Alex Marshall, Rahila Lassa, and Thomas Rogers, ‘How Germany Changed Its Mind, and Gave the Benin Bronzes Back’, The New York Times, 20 December 2022, sec. arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/arts/benin-bronzes-nigeria-germany.html.

[6] The Coalition of Cultural Workers against the Humboldt Forum (CCWAH) formed in the summer of 2020. https://ccwah.info/
https://www.frieze.com/article/why-are-activists-kicking-storm-against-berlins-humboldt-forum

[7] Emerging in 2022 out of the critiques of the Humboldt Forum’s colonial entanglements and its handling of contested collections, the Global Cultural Assembly was incorporated as a participatory platform to engage artists, scholars, and activists in rethinking cultural heritage, restitution, and future pathways for postcolonial repair. “Global Cultural Assembly – the ROOM.” Humboldt Forum 2021. https://www.humboldtforum.org/en/programm/dauerangebot/installation-en/global-cultural-assembly-der-raum-140880/.

[8] Küçük, C. (2024). The Deadlock Of The Decolonization Of Museums: When The Colonizer Becomes The Decolonizer. Lidé města, 26(2), pp. 200-215.

[9] Carl Humann, ‘Geschichte der Unternehmung’, in Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen zu Pergamon. Vorläufiger Bericht 1, by Alexander Conze et al. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880), pp. 7–34. 

[10] Alexander Conze, ‘Geschichte der Untersuchung’, in Text. Stadt und Landschaft, by Alexander Conze et al., Altertümer von Pergamon, Band I,1 (Berlin and Stuttgart: Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1912), pp. 1–34. https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.929.

[11] Carl Humann, ‘Geschichte der Unternehmung’, in Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen zu Pergamon. Vorläufiger Bericht 1, by Alexander Conze et al. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880), pp. 7–34.

[12] Wilberg, Christian. Drawing by Christian Wilberg. Transport of the Pergamon Altar Reliefs. 1879. Graphite on paper. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. Museum Digital. https://smb.museum-digital.de/object/84490.

[13] Ellen Schraudolph, ‘Die Restaurierung der Friese vom Pergamonaltar’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 38 (1996), pp. 169–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/4122676. Britta Kaiser-Schuster, ‘Verlust und Rückgabe: Beutekunst’, Kulturstiftung der Länder, 9 April 2015, https://www.kulturstiftung.de/verlust-und-rueckgabe/.

[14] An interview with the former Mayor of Bergama Safa Taşkın who organized the first local restitution campaigns in the early 2000s and who popularized the slogans “the stone has weighted in its own place” and “this altar will come back here”; Erciyas, Saadet. 2023. Review of “O Sunak Buraya Gelecek.” Kentyasam.com, December 6, 2023. https://kentyasam.com.tr/haber_detay.php?id=118496.

[15] Zeitzeugen erzählen: “Es war Eis vorm Altar”. Krieg und Kalter Krieg auf der Museumsinsel, Oculus Film, 2013.

[16] “Pergamonmuseum.” Facebook.com. 2022. https://www.facebook.com/100064337603248/posts/1199633545524554/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v.

[17] Georges Bataille, “Museum,” October 36 (Spring, 1986), pp. 24-25, here: p. 24.


About the Authors

Loes Hendriks did her BA in archaeology at Leiden University and her MA at Freie Universität focusing on Holocaust archaeology. She starts a PhD in Holocaust archaeology at Freie Universität in 2026, where she will work on the experiences of women during genocide.

Çiçek İlengiz works at the intersection of heritage studies, the anthropology of emotions, and memory studies. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the ERC funded research project BEYONDREST. Her recent publications engage with the notions of inheritance, temporality, and commemoration. She is a member of the editorial collective Allegra Laboratory: Anthropology for Radical Optimism.

Florence Potter is a Master’s student studying the Archaeology of the Ancient World at Freie Universität, Berlin. Her areas of interest include museology, sensory archaeology and the relationships between colonialism and archaeology. She is a student assistant on the ERC-funded BEYONDREST research project.

Judith Sieber is an art historian and writer. She completed her PhD at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2023 as part of the graduate program “Cultures of Critique”. Her research interests include questions of the representation of time and history in art and visual culture. She currently works at the Forum Transregionale Studien as the project coordinator for BEYONDREST. Her dissertation “Die Erfindung des Zeitstrahls” was published in April 2025 by Transcript.


Citation: Loes Hendriks, Çiçek İlengiz, Florence Potter and Judith Sieber, Berlin Museums Set To Return Everything, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 11.12.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/63276


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (December 11, 2025). Berlin Museums Set To Return Everything. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15bnn


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