Provenance researchA Long Way Back

2 April 2025

Photo: Roberta Zollo

How did so many objects from Indonesia end up in the collections of museums in Lower Saxony? Roberta Zollo, an alumna of the CSMC Graduate School, is part of a team that seeks to find an answer to this question. ‘We need to revise our understanding of German colonial history,’ she says.

On 20 September 2024, the Netherlands returned 288 historical weapons, coins, jewellery, textiles, and other objects from public collections to Indonesia. These objects ‘should never have come to the Netherlands in the first place,’ said Eppo Bruins, the Dutch minister for education, culture, and science, on that day. But they did, and they remained there for over 100 years – like so many other objects that the Dutch looted from the Indonesian people during the colonial era. The two countries have since created a legal framework for the return of stolen goods. Last autumn’s return was the second of its kind; the first took place in the summer of 2023.

There is no comparable agreement between Indonesia and Germany. However, there are considerable numbers of Indonesian objects in the collections of numerous museums in this country, especially in Lower Saxony. A consequence of the proximity to the Netherlands and thus a geographical coincidence? According to Roberta Zollo, there is more to it than that: Germany was much more involved in Indonesia’s colonial history than is generally recognised. ‘Although Germany never formally colonised Indonesia, Germans were actively involved in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries. There interactions with the local population were characterised by a significant power imbalance,’ she says. In particular, two types of actors played a crucial role: plantation owners and missionaries. ‘They had established themselves especially in North Sumatra even before the region came under formal Dutch colonial control, as the Dutch began setting up outposts and administrative stations. The Indonesian objects that we find in the collections of many museums in Lower Saxony today mostly date from that time. Many of them probably did not come to Germany via the Netherlands, but directly from Indonesia.’

The aim of a two-year research project, coordinated by the Museumsverband für Niedersachsen und Bremen and funded by the German Lost Art Foundation, is to reappraise the provenance of Indonesian objects in the collections of various ethnographic and natural history museums in Lower Saxony. Roberta is a research associate in the project, which started in October 2024. It is her first engagement since she submitted her doctoral thesis at the CSMC Graduate School. In her dissertation, she examined a corpus of manuscripts produced by the Batak people from North Sumatra in pre-colonial times, currently stored in various European public collections. Her knowledge of the history and culture of the Batak, especially of their manuscript culture, now helps to shed light on the ‘German-Dutch-Indonesian entangled history’, which is the subtitle of the project (‘Eine deutsch-niederländisch-indonesische Verflechtungsgeschichte’). The Batak manuscripts often deal with deities, spirituality, and magic; they were therefore particularly suspect to the Christian missionaries. They banned their production and distribution, had them burned or confiscated, and sent these copies to Europe. As a result, no country except the Netherlands has as many Batak manuscripts as Germany today.

Photo: Roberta Zollo

Roberta Zollo (right) and Dr Rainer Hatoum (provenance researcher for the ethnological collections at Städtisches Museum Braunschweig) holding one of the Batak manuscripts, part of the collection of Städtisches Museum Braunschweig. Photo taken during the first survey of the museum collection.

Photo: Roberta Zollo

Batak Manuscript, Inv. No. A II e 969. This image captures two pages of the manuscript, featuring several short sections of text alongside intricate illustrations. The lower page prominently displays the Bindu Matoga Matogu, one of the most renowned and powerful symbolic drawings, encircled by the mythological serpent Naga na Bolon. These visual elements accompany a divinatory text, which predicts the outcome of specific endeavors based on Pane na Bolon’s observed position throughout the year.

Photo: Roberta Zollo

Research in action at the Wolfenbüttel archives—exploring historical documents on the Duke of Braunschweig within the rich collections of Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv.

Photo: Roberta Zollo

Batak bone inscription — once part of a series bound together like a belt. This artefact, complete with its original tag, offers a glimpse into the rich tradition of Batak script and material culture.

Photo: Roberta Zollo

Tracing historical journeys — examining archival documents detailing the Duke of Braunschweig’s travel route from Southeast Asia back to Germany, preserved in the Wolfenbüttel collections at Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv.

In total, around 1,400 objects were selected to be investigated in this project. They are spread across the collections of eight participating institutions in Lower Saxony (Landesmuseum Hannover Städtisches Museum Braunschweig, Staatliches Naturhistorisches Museum – 3Landesmuseen in Braunschweig, Institut für Ethnologie und Ethnologische Sammlung der Georg August-Universität Göttingen, Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch Oldenburg, Naturforschende Gesellschaft zu Emden, and Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden). These objects came to these institutions between 1880 and 1920. Roberta aims to trace as closely as possible how this happened. To do this, she and her colleagues are researching the biographies of the main collectors who brought the objects to Lower Saxony, for example Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, a committed supporter of German colonial politics who travelled the world extensively, and Hugo Raap, one of the many Europeans who undertook expeditions to ‘exotic’ Southeast Asia and appropriated all kinds of objects there in the name of science.

The specifics of these objects have not been sufficiently recorded so far, says Roberta. The usual categories such as ‘ethnographica’, i.e. everything produced by humans such as jewellery, clothing, or household items, and ‘naturalia’, such as stuffed animals or dried plants, only allow very rough distinctions. Above all, they impose a Eurocentric perspective on the objects. In the first phase of the project, Roberta wants to take stock and find more suitable categories, which she wants to develop together with members of the local communities in Indonesia. In the next step, the objects are to be described in detail, not only in German, as has been the case so far, but also in English and Indonesian, again with the help of the local population. This will not only help the European curators of the collections to better understand the objects they are dealing with; it also helps to restore lost knowledge to the local population: in some cases, the objects in the European collections, for example certain musical instruments, are the only ones that have survived to this day.

The project will run for two years; not much time considering all that needs to be done. ‘We won’t be able to thoroughly examine all the objects and will have to prioritise,’ says Roberta. The most important overarching goal of this project is to create an awareness of the depth of Germany’s historical entanglements in Indonesia and that these should be understood as part of German colonial history. Such an awareness would create the conditions for all further steps until one day, perhaps, the two countries have a legally binding restitution agreement, as there already is between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Only within such a legal framework can the objects be returned to Indonesia at some point, says Roberta. ‘So far, the only way to do this would be for the German museums to donate the objects to corresponding institutions in Indonesia. But that would be completely inappropriate. You can’t “donate” stolen goods to the people you stole them from. In fact, such a condescending gesture would repeat the mistakes of the past rather than making amends. What is needed is not an act of generosity, but a recognition of historical responsibility.’ From today’s perspective, there is still a long way to go, but projects like the one in Lower Saxony and the work of researchers like Roberta are a start.

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