Four minutes to read.
If Pergamon Museum in Berlin charged admission, I’d demand a refund. Not wanting to risk overlooking a single one of the museum’s marquee artifacts, I am on the free docent-led tour.
In the museum’s massive galleries, in the long hallways, in the side rooms tucked everywhere, up and down flights of steps lined with ancient treasures, I’m in a souq overflowing with vases, statuary, Islamic decorative arts, archaeological treasures, artifacts, amphora, antiquities and artworks from ancient Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia. Pergamon is the summation of centuries of German exploration, exploitation, colonialization.
The docent’s name tag reads Lisbeth. No last name. She wears a floor-length skirt with an army fatigue pattern that’s no longer stylish. A taupe cotton blouse buttoned at the neck, hard-to-see earrings, hair in a tight bun, sensible shoes. Lipstick the color of sunburn. She carries herself with a serious amount of self-satisfaction.
When she talks, her eyes colorize from dull grey to a molten amber. Her scratchy, deep-pitched voice has a Spanish accent. She alternates between excavating the provenance of a particular antiquity and reciting a playlist of grievances about cultural appropriation and art theft.
A few minutes into the tour, I’ve started grinding my teeth.
Lisbeth, I am discovering, is a member in good standing of the fashionably offended. She takes her responsibility for my conscience seriously.
Usurping her transitory authority as a guide, she is turning the museum into a crime scene, indicting me and the other Westerners on the tour as criminal accessories after the fact. She wants us to know that the museum collection was assembled by white people, probably connected to money and power and probably from colonialist countries. She does not invite discussion.
Lisbeth’s virtue signaling buzzkills my chance to enjoy, appreciate, respect ancient peoples and their magnificent civilizations. Distracted by her haranguing from focusing on the art and the artifacts, my face reddens.
Her face—agitated by her fevered lecturing—flushes crimson, matching my own. I wonder why she bothers herself to work in a place she finds so disreputable.
I also wonder why I just don’t leave the tour. I should say something.
I should defend my belief in the universality of humankind. That great artworks belong to all of us. That a great museum is the world’s scrapbook.
Her rectitude does not consider that repatriating art might be a compounding sin. Where is the ‘museum justice’ in returning an object of high artistic value to an authoritarian country that stifles artistic freedom, free speech, free thinking?
She snuffs out, seemingly without a care, the notion that people, ideas, music, art should be borderless. Nobody gets to choose where they are born. Artists create artworks wherever they are because that is where they are.
Ancient artworks and archaeological digs don’t come with mattress tags reading “do not remove under penalty of law.” If a centuries ago an evil archaeologist did an evil thing, I’m content to overlook the transgression, the cultural crime.
Tough luck, Lisbeth, but your world view means a world in which you would be repatriated to Spain or Latin America or wherever you come from. Hmm. Maybe you have a point.