Tanja Rother, Reckoning with a German museum’s Pacific past, e-Tangata, 1 March 2026
Historian Tanja Rother visits a German museum that’s trying to decolonise its own Pacific narrative.
When you step out of the train station onto the big square in the centre of Bremen, a large city in the northwest of Germany, it feels a world away from the Pacific.
Yet the Übersee (“overseas”) Museum, a monumental building dominating the busy square, houses a large collection of Sāmoan measina, Māori taonga, and many other “objects” from Oceania.
It’s here that I meet Dr Safua Akeli, the first person of Pacific heritage to take on the role of curator of an Oceania collection and head the Department of Ethnology at a European museum.