After Theft: Loot, loss, and reckoning with colonialism in germany

Jonathan Bach is Professor of Global Studies and faculty affiliate in Anthropology at The New School. With a focus on how societies inherit difficult pasts, his work has explored, inter alia, the politics of memory in reunified Germany, the contested afterlives of state socialism, and China’s post-Mao urban transformation. Jonathan’s current research includes how contemporary Germany is confronting the legacies of colonialism.

He is the author of What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (2017), (German edition: Die Spuren der DDR, 2019), and Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989 (1999), and the co-editor of Re-Centering the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (2020) and Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (2017). He was the founding chair of the Global Studies Program at The New School.

As a GIDEST fellow, Jonathan will examine what it means for Germany to navigate recent demands for reckoning with its colonial past alongside the memory of fascist and socialist regimes. Focusing on the legacy of museum collections of colonial-era artifacts, objects, and human remains, he will explore the discourse around provenance research—the search for an object’s origins and ownership history—and how it has come to play a key role in reckoning with violent pasts. What Jonathan calls provenance-centered reckoning shifts provenance from the realm of a sober, legalistic, and historical method to a site of narration, rediscovery, and implication in emotional and violent histories. His project asks what kind of spaces of agency does this enable or disable for enacting historical responsibility?