Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the memory politics regarding an institute for eugenics and racial anthropology in Berlin, I discuss the potentials and appropriation risks concerning the institutionalization of counter/memory initiatives that tackle histories of racism and German imperialism.

Paper long abstract:

Physical and biological anthropology played a crucial role in the racialization of human difference, with important political consequences. In Germany, anthropologists were not only tightly entangled with the formulation of eugenicist policies during National Socialism but also, decades before, enmeshed in German colonial regimes. This paper analyses the process of memorialization of an important site of the anthropological making of race that connects these different histories of German imperialisms. Opened in Berlin from 1927 until the end of the Second World War, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A) convened a large number of racial researchers and was founded by Eugen Fischer, after he had made a career from researching what he called “racial mixture” in German South West Africa. The KWI-A’s building later became part of the Freie Universität Berlin. I examine different student-led counter/memory initiatives that tackled the histories of the KWI-A since the 1980s, including a project started by myself ten years ago. I discuss the potentials and effects of these bottom-up, counter/memory initiatives as well as the tensions embedded in the recent institutionalization of a memorial site project, which aims to commemorate the KWI-A and its victims through a participatory, multidirectional memory approach. I argue that memory sites can potentially serve the interests of the institution that might appropriate them for its own interest (in this case, the Freie Universität Berlin), while I contend that the political openings for such memory processes can also be fruitful for institutional change and future mobilizations.