Countless museums hold objects in their collections that their very own codes of ethics would bar them from acquiring. The most striking examples of this glaring discrepancy are objects captured during military campaigns outside Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While museums historically considered the acquisition of these objects quite legal and unproblematic, it would now be unthinkable to set about acquiring objects that, for example, were looted during recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. While our values and attitudes have dramatically changed in recent years, the objects remain firmly ensconced in the display cases and storerooms of Europe’s leading cultural institutions, but only now are voices being raised to systematically confront the remarkable incongruity between this troubling inheritance and present-day ethics. As the title of this important edited volume – Not only looted art! – reminds us, objects taken at gunpoint or smuggled out of another country are not the only items that appear problematic. The most obvious are human remains or religious objects, the public display of which can cause a deep sense of cultural violation for their communities of origin.

This volume tackles these weighty issues head-on, and in the process, highlights the gradual emergence of new museum practices that, in the spirit of radical transparency, aim to address the not-always figurative skeletons in their closets. In 2016, the editors of this volume, who are curators at the University of Mainz, took a Benin bronze captured by British troops in 1897 as the stimulus to initiate a broad conversation about how museums can deal with problematic aspects of their collections. The resulting volume proved to be remarkably timely, its publication coinciding with a watershed moment when Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr’s report to Emmanuel Macron sent shockwaves through the museum world, with its far-reaching recommendations concerning the restitution of colonial objects from public collections.

These public statements have reignited much older discussions. Debates about the fate of looted antiquities began the moment they were taken from their respective countries – an issue that has recently gained renewed and wide-ranging exposure thanks to ISIS, which not only destroyed cultural heritage sites in Syria and Iraq, but also ran its own antiquities department that sold looted antiquities to foreign buyers to facilitate the group’s reign of terror. Michael Müller-Karpe of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz makes the powerful case that both poorly and undocumented antiquities now offered for acquisition were almost certainly always illegally excavated and exported from their countries of origin, at a great loss to local communities and to our knowledge of their context. With remarkable transparency, which is characteristic of the volume as a whole, Müller-Karpe describes how, in 1986, his own museum acquired objects from a problematic source and, in 2015, restituted them to Italy. Müller-Karpe makes an important point that applies to other restitution cases: yes, the return creates gaps in the collections, but these gaps can be closed by loans. “In other words, we don't have to steal from each other.”

The legacy of Nazi-looted art casts a long shadow over all debates concerning the problematic areas of museum collections. In spite of its many shortcomings, we can learn a lot from provenance research into the Nazi years, not the least of which is that the long-held fears of empty museums, swept clean by diligent provenance investigations, were ultimately completely unwarranted. Miriam Olivia Merz’s contribution is particularly enlightening. She takes as her case study a painting in the Wiesbaden Paintings Gallery that, in 1936, came to the museum from a problematic source. Its provenance could not be clarified. This raised the important question of how museums should deal with such uncertainty. Museums increasingly understand that not being able to reconstruct an unbroken chain of provenance for a given object is not an admission of guilt, but merely a lack of knowledge that, in time, may or may not be overcome, but is certainly best discussed and examined openly.

Beate Herrmann’s chapter provides a bridge from the challenges surrounding Nazi-looted art to those of colonial-era artefacts. She examines the fascinating case of an ethnographic collection that was looted by the Nazis from the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Łódź in September 1939, parts of which were seized upon by German museum directors to enrich their own collections at the expense of the conquered Poles. Parts of the collection ended up at the University of Göttingen and were restituted to Poland in 2014. In light of the ongoing debate over colonial-era artefacts, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that Poland itself will be confronted with claims for the return of these objects that were initially collected by Polish settlers in Africa and South America.

Objects that were acquired in a colonial context may not only be problematic because of the circumstances surrounding their acquisition, but also because of what they signify to their society of origin. Eva Ch. Raabe focuses on a group of objects a German missionary acquired in Australia. The missionary lived in close contact with the Aranda people, whom he protected against British colonisers. In trying to “enlighten” them, he forced the Aranda to trade their ritual objects, which he then studied and which ultimately ended up in the collections of the ethnographic museum in Frankfurt. There, they pose an enormous curatorial challenge because they are so-called secret/sacred objects – a designation for objects of ritual use that are not supposed to be seen by the uninitiated and the function of which should not be revealed to outsiders. Out of respect for their society of origin, the Museum of World Cultures in Frankfurt does not exhibit these objects. Raabe points out that this raises the pointed question of what use such objects can be to a museum if they can neither be studied nor exhibited. In such circumstances, it seems only logical that these objects should be returned. This highlights a vital issue that lies at the centre of debates surrounding restitution, and yet is often overlooked by those criticising museums from the outside. The surprising reality is that the governing statutes of museums, or laws concerning public collections, often prevent museums from removing objects from their collections, no matter the moral force of a given claim.

The presence of human remains in museum collections can often present a particularly difficult and controversial challenge. A human skull in the Ethnographic Museum in Witzhausen is the subject of Marion Hulverscheidt and Holger Stoecker’s chapter. The skull came to the museum via a German soldier who served in the genocidal war against the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia. In 1908, he sent what he described as a “male Hottentotten skull” to the museum of the German Colonial School in Witzhausen. A forensic examination of the skull suggests that in fact it belonged to a woman who was suffering from a disease. After the “rediscovery” of the skull in 2014, the museum, which is not affected by regulations that limit its ability to restitute, retains possession of the skull in anticipation of its transfer to Namibia. Because the skull has been removed from display, its place has been taken by an art installation featuring an imprint of the skull’s teeth in sand taken from the Namib Desert. This somewhat abstract piece is designed to encourage visitors to engage with Germany’s troubling colonial past and the legacies it has left in museum collections. In this way, the gaps left in collections by the restitution of certain items can be closed in novel and thoughtful ways that provoke discussion rather than silence.

This important volume shows that museums have no reason to be afraid of history. It provides incredibly valuable insights into the soul-searching going on at museums and provides crucial orientation and inspiration for museum practitioners and scholars alike, adding much-needed nuance and complexity to a debate that will continue to be of vital importance for all collections-based institutions for years to come.