The dark colonial history of Berliner Naturkunde Museum's most famous exhibit - The Berliner (2024)

Object Lesson

One of the largest and tallest dinosaur skeletons ever reconstructed stands in Berlin’s Naturkunde Museum – but the story of how it ended up there remains an open wound.

Some objects are obscured by their reputation, made so familiar to us that their distinct history becomes difficult to recognise through a veil of reproductions. The long-necked dinosaur skeleton at the Museum für Naturkunde appears to crane its cervical vertebrae right up to the glass and steel atrium roof.

Descriptions of this huge herbivore tend towards the superlative: the largest, the tallest, one of the most complete mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world. A specimen like this is so rare that almost every depiction of a brachiosaurus is in fact modelled from this dinosaur.

Until recently, the museum displayed only limited information about the provenance of this beast. In the DDR, the informational placard simply read that the bones were discovered in “East Africa”. In 2007, it was updated to read Tanzania. But modern Tanzania was only formed in 1964.

These bones were discovered in 1906, when a German engineer was prospecting the region for precious resources like graphite and gemstones on behalf of Lindi Mining Company. He was led to the area by a local who knew of the presence of these bones, situated in a landscape that had recently suffered massive depopulation during a devastating colonial war.

The year before these dinosaur bones were discovered saw the outbreak of the Maji Maji rebellion in what was then called German East Africa. The brutal suppression of this uprising lasted over two years and killed around 300,000 native people, compared to just 15 Germans.

Until recently, the museum displayed only limited information about the provenance of this beast.

In 1907, scientist Eberhard Fraas travelled inland to the site, called Tendaguru, from the coastal town of Lindi to investigate reports of the bones, passing through emptied-out villages whose recent desolation had allowed the biting, disease-carrying tsetse fly to return in large numbers. Often, Fraas felt too weak to walk and was carried in a litter.

Once Germany confirmed the presence of the fossils, they issued a straightforward administrative decree: the land was declared “uninhabited” and would now belong to the German crown. Pack animals could not assist the excavation work due to the biting tsetse fly, so native people had to undertake the work of excavation by hand.

From April 1909 to January 1913, 400 to 500 African labourers, porters and supervisors were employed on the site, with up to 900 taking up residence in a village established during the work. Walter Wendt, the district commissioner of the Lindi region, wrote at the time: “Thefts [of bones] are not to be feared because the natives consider the site to be possessed by the devil.”

The light-filled hall of the Museum für Naturkunde was decorated with large flags bearing swastikas.

One of the major causes of the Maji Maji rebellion was the German policy of forcing native people to work in cotton plantations – and the 230 tonnes of dinosaur bones found at this site were eventually transported to Berlin in boxes stuffed with cotton.

After arrival, it took scientists 26 years to assemble this prehistoric jigsaw puzzle. When members of the press were finally invited to see the finished result in November 1937, the light-filled hall of the Museum für Naturkunde was decorated with large flags bearing swastikas.

The colonial history of Berlin’s dinosaurs was addressed by a 2018 research project, and is now a little more visible. Just as some well-known dinosaurs, like the Diplodocus carnegii, bear the name of the American industrialists who funded missions of discovery, specimens in the Museum für Naturkunde continue to honour the names of colonial war criminals.

Near this giant in the dinosaur hall, visitors can find Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki, a relatively small plant-eating dinosaur that is named for Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a general in the Imperial German Army who participated in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples.

• An English translation of the German book Dinosaurierfragmente, under the title Deconstructing Dinosaurs: The History of the Tendaguru Expedition and its finds, 1906-2022 (edited by Ina Heumann, Holger Stoecker and Mareike Vennen) is expected later this year.