: How Activists Are Radically Interrogating Berlin’s Colonial Past—and Reshaping Its Future #WorldNEWS Nestled alongside the River Spree south of Berlin’s city center, Treptower Park is home

How Activists Are Radically Interrogating Berlin’s Colonial Past—and Reshaping Its Future #WorldNEWS
Nestled alongside the River Spree south of Berlin’s city center, Treptower Park is home to green lawns, riverboat rides and runners pounding their way along the waterside path. Summer days usually see sunbathers enjoying the views of the leafy landscape, or tourists in awe of the Soviet War Memorial’s commanding centerpiece: a 12-meter tall statue of a Soviet soldier, built in the park in 1949 in remembrance of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in World War II.
The memorial is one of several physical reminders of Germany’s 20th century history in public spaces throughout the city, among them Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate and the Holocaust Memorial. Now, a group of activists, artists and educators known as Dekoloniale is working to draw attention to another part of the country’s past: its dark history of colonialism, starting with the story of Treptower Park itself. Home to the first German Colonial Exhibition of 1896, the park became the setting for reconstructions of villages of Germany’s overseas colonies across the African continent. Not only were these model villages on display—so were 106 people from these communities, unwilling and unwitting participants who were uprooted from their homes and “exhibited” for audiences in Berlin.
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Now, 125 years on, the members of Dekoloniale are commemorating the inhabitants of the Colonial Exhibition’s villages through a new permanent exhibition at Treptow Museum, detailing their lives and their forms of resistance against oppression. After the pandemic forced a digital launch last November on the anniversary of the Berlin Conference, the new exhibition at Treptow and an accompanying program of events including a city-wide tour of sites with overlooked imperial history recently marked the first physical events Dekoloniale has hosted. “Its really about implementing a new form of remembrance culture, and also showing people in a very physical way how present that past is, and how much it still shapes the present,” says journalist and curator Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, one of Dekoloniale’s directors.
She’s speaking not just about the new exhibition, which opened on Oct. 15, but the overall work of Dekoloniale—which launched last year and will continue through 2024, constituting perhapsthe most ambitious such initiative to date to promote understanding of aEuropean capital city’s colonial history. Made up of a coalition of Berlin-based organizations already working to promote postcolonial knowledge and racial justice activism, Dekoloniale is making colonial history comprehensible through a new interactive mapping tool examining sites with imperial history, working with museums on policies around exhibitions and artifacts, and launching festivals and art exhibitions in public spaces with the intention of confronting German colonialism and its legacy.