Give It All Back

The Palast der Republik has been torn down . Angels went to look, more than a year ago, before its destruction began, just a last glimpse of the Communist East, but felt no regrets, not for the end of the seat of government of Honecker's nightmare, not for the minor provincial city, sub-Bauhaus architecture of the building, with its cheap, copper-clad, not even brazen face.

The Italian architect Francesco Stella is to design the €552 million replacement, on such an important site, in central Berlin. The outside 'will mimic the baroque-style Hohenzollern palace which stood there from the 15th century, when the Prussian royal family began construction, to 1950, when the East German government decided the war-ruined palace was a reminder of a decadent old world and destroyed its remains.' (Der Spiegel). Part of the new complex, the Humboldt Forum, will house Berlin's Ethnographic Museum.

All museums are ethnographic museums. They are collections of objects removed from their provenance and displayed as trophies. They are all small to large-scale, temporary to longstanding, expressions of power. Rarely is a collection put together by an artist to speak of the artist's work as a collectivity. Usually objects have been taken by force, or purchased at the highest offer - another way of using force - and removed as spoils and souvenirs. Their final resting place is invariably a hotchpotch of acquisitions, sometimes with a small order imposed by imaginative and inventive keepers.

These artefacts, lying in a state of death in their bereft surroundings, should be returned to where they belong as soon as is practicable. From the Elgin marbles, through the torn out hearts of frescoes and triptyches, ikons and paintings, grave goods and mummies, the contents of long houses, and the shrunken heads of the Haddon, all should be returned and re-integrated into the culture they yearn for and express.

It is not just what was taken between 1939 and 1945, or in other wars, or from private hands, or from dominant cultures that should concern us. It is all of it, taken any where, at any time. And if Berlin fills the new palace on the banks of the Spree with the embodiments and representations of cultures removed from the world they might as well have left Honecker's Palast standing and used it to continue to administrate and house stolen treasure.