Provenire – serie

Despite efforts by a reunited Germany to regulate "pending property issues", cultural heritage institutions are still having to address questions of museum ethics: Is it right that nationalized property dating from 1945–1990 forms part of public collections? What kinds of dispossessions took place? Who were those involved? When and under what circumstances did the objects make their way into public collections? From where? These questions are of cross-border interest. Confiscated private collections and items of uncertain origin from the "Museumsfonds der DDR" (East Germany's museum stock), were exchanged for foreign currency on the international art market. One of the functions of the German Lost Art Foundation is to investigate the confiscations of cultural goods in the Soviet Occupation Zone and East Germany, an area of research it has been facilitating since 2017.

The debate about the return of cultural assets to former colonial territories is highly topical and at the same time much older than most assume. Authors from countries in the Global South and North shed light on the long history of restitution claims from colonised countries. Their research reveals disputes about restitutions sometimes lasting for decades, traces veiled references to colonial violence by the former colonial powers in archives, and discusses what the "homecoming" of human remains can mean for societies.