Marleen von Bargen & Ruth Schilling

Circulating Memories and Colonial Images: Sea Travelled Souvenirs in Imperial Germany 

The so-called “maritime turn” during the Imperial Age in Germany tells the story of high risk political and economic investment in carrying the Industrial Revolution onto the High Sea. It opened, however, a society to contacts with trans-oceanic spaces and practices on a scale hitherto unknown and is, therefore, part of the tension between growing global entanglement and accelerated national imperialism characteristic for this period. We would like to look at very individual artifacts from this period having been brought home by members of the Navy as souvenirs. These artifacts do not only show if and how the seafarers perceived non-European cultures: They also express a multifold negotiation of cultural expression involving several groups of actors both in the places where they were produced. Arriving in Europe these souvenirs became part again of communicating the sea too often land-based cultural habits: The sea traveled artifact thus ended up on the Wilhelminian dinner table.

Methodologically we would like to ask if the concept of “boundary objects” established in media sciences would help to understand the effects of circulation and re-appropriation visible in the visual and cultural histories of these artifacts. For that, we would like to differentiate the concept of “souvenirs”, exploring the realm of different practices and their effect on the production of memories inherent in these objects. On a third level, we would like to ask if and how the analysis of these artifacts might be part of a new “maritime” interpretation of German Society around 1900.

The artifacts chosen stem from the material collection of the German Maritime Museum/ Leibniz-Institute for Maritime History. They will play a major role in the new semi-permanent overall exhibition due to for 2020/2021. In the last part of our paper, we would like to present some of our recent exhibition ideas, discussing if and how processes of entanglement and traveling memories will be visible in the museum display and if and how visitors’ communication will be part of the spatial arrangement in the exhibition area.