a canteen that belonged to a Herero,
a painting by the Italian Futurist Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi depicting a bombing during the Italo-Ethiopian War, and a photograph of C. L. R. James speaking in Trafalgar Square in 1935 against the planned invasion of Ethiopia.
Displayed alongside material on colonial history are objects directly connected with National Socialism, including items of SS uniform and postwar drawings by Vladimír Matějka, a former prisoner of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. These juxtapositions are not meant to suggest that the histories shown were the same. Rather, they are intended to prompt questions about similar mechanisms, symbols, and language of violence.
The exhibition also reminds visitors that historical comparisons are not made in
a vacuum. They are formulated by specific people at particular moments, often in response to the political controversies of the day. Since the 1930s, comparisons of colonialism, fascism, and National Socialism have served very different ends. They have been a tool of anti-colonial critique of the European empires and a way of interpreting fascism, but they have also figured in later disputes over memory.
“We hope that the ideological charge, which has grown much stronger over the past twenty years, can be brought back once more to a more factual debate—to the facts and realities that people need to know before they enter into these disputes,” said Stephan Malinowski.
This statement aptly describes the role the museum sees for itself in the debate. Visitors are not handed a ready-made position but are given the knowledge to judge the strength of the various arguments for themselves. In the exhibition’s epilogue, historians representing different perspectives have their say, so the question of continuity or rupture is not settled once and for all.
Controversial Kinship is therefore more than an exhibition about colonialism and National Socialism. It is also about the historian’s craft itself and the responsibility that comes with comparing different histories of violence.
Comparison can help reveal mechanisms that would remain invisible if viewed in isolation. But it can also lead to oversimplification when similarity begins to take the place of analyzing the historical context.
Where the Holocaust is concerned, the stakes are especially high. Studying colonial traditions of racism, conquest, and violence can broaden our understanding of the world in which National Socialism arose. But that does not mean Auschwitz can be explained by pointing to an earlier counterpart.
The most important question raised by the Berlin exhibition, then, is not so much whether these histories are “related” as how to speak about the connections between them without stripping either of its historical distinctiveness. A mature memory culture should be able both to see the links between different histories of violence and to recognize the point at which analogy stops explaining.
Controversial Kinship. Colonial and National Socialist Violence
Kontrowersyjne pokrewieństwo. Przemoc kolonialna i narodowosocjalistyczna
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Pei-Bau, Berlin
October 16, 2026 – April 11, 2027
Curator: Stephan Malinowski
Project Manager: Philipp Springer
President of the Deutsches Historisches Museum: Raphael Gross.
The exhibition is accompanied by an academic and educational program, guided tours, a film series, and a publication on the historical foundations of the debate about the relationship between colonial and National Socialist violence.
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Photo: Julia Baier, DHM ©