EDITOR’S LETTER Forum for debate? 1. The east and north facades of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin loss Berliner Sch im t Forum ld Humbo tiftung l/S ippe lexander Sch : A to Pho Can a museum have too much history? The Humboldt Forum in Berlin may be a new institution, but it has been so long in the planning that – like all projects conceived in different political and cultural circumstances – once realised, it is the subject of a more searching reception than the simple praise its prime movers were counting on. (The M+ in Hong Kong springs to mind as another museum that has the same kind of problem, albeit for rather different reasons.) A royal residence stood, in one form or another, on the site of what is now the Humboldt Forum for 500 years. In 1945, when the baroque structure designed in the 18th century by Andreas Schlüter was bombed, it burned for four days. Demolished in 1950 by the East German government, it was replaced in 1976 by APOLLO JANUARY 2022 the modernist Palast der Republik until, after German reunification, that too was demolished and, as Daniel Trilling writes (see pp. 42–49), the idea caught on of rebuilding the Stadtschloss that was. The notion of moving the vast but neglected holdings of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art into the new building must have seemed like a good way of giving two great collections a much higher profile. But, while debates about the architecture of the rebuild have rumbled on since the early 2000s, the conversations about ethnographic collections in Western museums, how to address the history of those collections and if they should be in those museums in the first place have become more public still. The Humboldt Forum has some way to go until all of the permanent displays are installed; it is still too early to be sure of what it wants to say about itself and its holdings and what their future should be. What is clear is that a rebuilt Prussian palace that houses one of the world’s great collections of non-Western art is not short of stories, which will lead to encounters and juxtapositions that are likely to be as awkward as they are enlightening. If that sounds uncomfortable, that’s because our experience of change – not just in museums, but in all institutions that tackle these questions – always is. Reckoning with history is uncomfortable, but no one can say that it is boring. o Fatema Ahmed, Acting Editor 15