visualisation of the exhibition space of the «Alexander Ecker Collection» at the University of Freiburg, late 19th / early 20th century

Victims of Colonial Science:
«The Alexander Ecker Collection» at the University of Freiburg

Since September 2025, I have been leading a five-year research project on the «anatomical-anthropological collection» of the University of Freiburg, also known as the «Alexander Ecker Collection». This collection comprises hundreds of human skulls that were gathered in colonial contexts of violence. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these remains were used as “evidence” for racist theories that sought to legitimise German colonialism and later the racial politics of National Socialism. The five-year research project «Provenance Research on Colonial Scientific Collections» is situated at the Vice-Rectorate for University Culture and jointly funded by the University of Freiburg and the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg. Its objectives are to reconstruct the origins of these human remains to enable their return to the societies of origin, while at the same time critically examining the involvement of Freiburg’s anthropology and related disciplines in colonial and racial science.

The project forms part of the University’s broader process of addressing its colonial past. As the university acknowledges, scholars in disciplines such as geography, ethnology, anthropology, medicine, economics, and history actively contributed to colonial knowledge production, and public lectures on colonial science were part of Freiburg’s academic life. The «Alexander Ecker Collection» exemplifies these entanglements, having been expanded since 1857 to include skulls from across the world, often acquired without consent and catalogued as objects. During the period of German colonial rule, human remains were also obtained from overseas territories, for example, in 1905, three heads of executed individuals from German New Guinea were transferred to Freiburg.

In recent years, the university has begun to return human remains where possible: In 2014 to Namibia, and in 2023 to Hawai‘i. While the collections are legally owned by the state of Baden-Württemberg, the University of Freiburg views demands for repatriation positively and seeks transparent solutions in dialogue with the societies of origin.

Against this background, my research aims to contribute to a larger institutional effort to develop ethical, decolonial, and historically responsible approaches to dealing with colonial scientific collections. For more on the University of Freiburg’s initiatives in confronting its colonial past, see:

«Koloniale Vergangenheit der Universität Freiburg» (in German):
https://uni-freiburg.de/koloniale-vergangenheit-der-universitaet-freiburg/