From an eminent and provocative historian, a wrenching parable of the
ravages of colonialism in the South Pacific.
Countless museums in the West have been criticized for their looted
treasures, but few as trenchantly as the Humboldt Forum, which displays
predominantly non-Western art and artifacts in a modern reconstruction
of the former Royal Palace in Berlin. The Forum's premier attraction, an
ornately decorated fifteen-meter boat from the island of Luf in
modern-day Papua New Guinea, was acquired under the most dubious
circumstances by Max Thiel, a German trader, in 1902 after two decades
of bloody German colonial expeditions in Oceania.
Götz Aly tells the story of the German pillaging of Luf and surrounding
islands, a campaign of violence in which Berlin ethnologists were
brazenly complicit. In the aftermath, the majestic vessel was sold to
the Ethnological Museum in the imperial capital, where it has remained
ever since. In Aly's vivid telling, the looted boat is a portal to a
forgotten chapter in the history of empire--the conquest of the Bismarck
Archipelago. One of these islands was even called Aly, in honor of the
author's great-granduncle, Gottlob Johannes Aly, a naval chaplain who
served aboard ships that helped subjugate the South Sea islands Germany
colonized.
While acknowledging the complexity of cultural ownership debates, Götz
Aly boldly questions the legitimacy of allowing so many treasures from
faraway, conquered places to remain located in the West. Through the
story of one emblematic object, The Magnificent Boat artfully
illuminates a sphere of colonial brutality of which too few are aware
today.
