"Adjak" in plaster. Key data of an (object) biography

In addition to plaster casts of important sculptures, the Gipsformerei of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin also houses casts of living people that were used to research supposed "human races". Using the example of the full-body cast of a man named "Adjak", this article shows what lies behind a historical mould and what role the problematic legacy of colonial physical anthropology can play in the reconstruction of individual life stories.

Between manufactory and historical museum collection

The Berlin Gipsformerei is an unusual place: it is both a craft business and a museum collection and is considered the oldest institution of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Its official founding date is December 8, 1819. On that day, King Friedrich Wilhelm III issued a cabinet order to establish a "casting institute", which the Prussian state hoped would provide a new source of income and strengthen its cultural-political relations. Since that time, the Gipsformerei has been producing casts of important works of art and cultural history and selling them to museums, universities, public institutions, artists and private individuals worldwide. ^[1]

In 1891, the plaster moulding shop moved from Berlin-Mitte to Charlottenburg. The building at Sophie-Charlotten-Straße 17/18 (Fig. 1), which is now a listed building, was built at the time after the workshop in Münzstraße had become too small for the constantly growing collection of moulds and the increasingly monumental casts. Thanks to the move, the collection of moulds and models survived the Second World War almost unscathed, while large parts of the centre of Berlin lay in ruins. Today, the Gipsformerei is a place of living history, where the old craft of mould making and plaster casting is cultivated in a manufactory and the historical collection is scientifically researched. Casts are now sold via an online catalogue, and the historic brick building, which includes plaster, painter and locksmith workshops, mould and model storage, a packing shop, offices and a sales room, is due to undergo extensive renovation in the next few years.

More than 20,000 forms and models, dating back to more than 7,000 sculptures from prehistory to the early 20th century, are now in the collection of the Gipsformerei (Figs. 2 and 3). In accordance with the preferences of the time, the collection initially focused on Greco-Roman antiquity and the then contemporary sculpture of the Berlin School of Sculpture, for example, but the range of works expanded in parallel with the founding of museums in the 19th century. In the second half of the century, works from the history of European sculpture from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, but also Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities, prehistoric and early historic archaeologica, and works of art from Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania, and South America were added to the collection. In a musée imaginaire musée imaginaire , the plaster molding shop depicted what was considered canonical from a Eurocentric point of view. At the same time, it reflects the idea of the universal museum in the medium of the cast, which is controversially discussed today. ^[2]

Sensitive collections in the Re-Vision

The following is not about the bestsellers of the Gipsformerei or about the historical conjunctures and lulls of plaster casts. Instead, light is to be shed on a dark chapter in the history of the museum's collection, which has only recently been researched in more detail. It refers to the almost three hundred live casts that European anthropologists took from the faces and bodies of non-European people at the turn of the 20th century. Casts of this kind were intended to substantiate the idea of different ethnic types in research and to convey it in teaching. The associated historical casting molds are still stored in the Gipsformerei today. ^[3]

Anthropological casts from colonial contexts are considered sensitive collection objects that must be researched and exhibited with particular care. In most cases, their contexts of origin and use are ethically problematic: on the one hand, they were produced using epistemic, psychological, and sometimes physical violence, as well as disregarding cultural habits and values. On the other hand, they served to establish and disseminate racist doctrines, thus promoting discrimination and white supremacy. ^[4] Institutions such as the Gipsformerei played an active role in such colonial knowledge production, as they produced casts of faces, body parts, or entire people as supposedly scientific "evidence," sold them to museums and universities around the world, and thus literally reproduced corresponding attitudes. With the "invention of the human races", the existence of which has long since been scientifically refuted, an ideologization took place that reached its negative climax in eugenics ("racial hygiene") of the Third Reich and lives on to this day in the racist tendencies of our society. ^[5] Colonial continuities must therefore also be overcome in the sense of a critical revision of one's own institutional history.

This text is intended to make an exemplary contribution to such a literal re-vision of the history of the Gipsformerei's collection. At its centre is the casting mould with the inventory number 4097, the provenance of which has been unexplored for a long time is outlined below. ^[6] The multi-part plaster piece form is based on a sculpture just under two metres tall, which depicts an unclothed standing man of tall and slender stature. From the late 1890s onwards, the cast of this sculpture was offered for sale by the Gipsformerei as a "Life-Size Figure of a Dinka" (Fig. 4). In the 1900 sales directory it cost seventy, in the 1906 and 1911 editions one hundred marks. ^[7] According to the order books, at least nine casts of the figure were sold by 1919. ^[8] Since that time, the multi-part plaster piece mold has been lying in a closed state in the mold warehouse of the Gipsformerei. It was fully opened for the first time in the summer of 2020 for scientific investigation by the author (Fig. 5). ^[9]

"Adjak": Fragments of a biography

Basic information about the man depicted and the circumstances that led to his figure portrait is provided by an exchange of letters between the German sculptor Ernst Bernardien and the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, today's Ethnological Museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In a letter dated 4 February 1895, Bernardien informed the museum's founding director, Adolf Bastian, that he had received permission from Louis Castan, the operator of the Berlin wax museum Castan's Panoptikum at the time, to "sculpturally reproduce" the "Dinka Adjak" in the Panoptikum. ^[10] From this letter we also learn that it was the prominent physician, anthropologist and ethnologist Rudolf Virchow who chose "Adjak" for a full-length portrait for the Royal Museum of Ethnology, and that "Adjak" belonged to a larger group of the Dinka ethnic group native to South Sudan who were "guesting" at Castan's Panoptikum at the time. In the further course of the letter, Bernardien mentions a plaster cast of the figure, which is to be made by the Royal Plaster Molding Works. Against this background, it stands to reason that the sculpture mentioned in the letter is related to the plaster form examined here, and that the "life-size figure of a Dinka" is actually the plastic portrait of a South Sudanese man named "Adjak".

The reference to Castan's Panoptikum provides further points of contact. As it turns out, the Dinka group in Berlin in 1895 was the so-called "Dinka [N-word] caravan" under a German "Führer", which had made stops in Budapest, Breslau, Dresden, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Basel and Munich before moving into its winter quarters in Berlin at the end of 1894. ^[11] The group, which was inadequately referred to as the "caravan" in the sense of prevailing stereotypes, was part of a new entertainment industry that flourished in (Western) Europe and North America from the mid-19th century until the 1930s: for the purpose of colonial propaganda, for the amusement of the native population and with great commercial success, people who were read as "exotic", "wild" or "primitive" according to an omnipresent colonial gaze were exhibited in so-called "people's shows". Shows of this kind took place in zoological gardens, at fairs, in variety shows or as part of world exhibitions. They often had the character of a demonstration and followed a prescribed choreography. ^[12]

In the historical documents of the "Dinka Caravan"^[13], no references to the person behind the name "Adjak" have been found to date. We do not know who "Adjak" was, whether his name is spelled correctly or correctly^[14], when and under what circumstances he came to Germany, what role he played in the "Caravan", how he experienced his life and work in Berlin and elsewhere, and whether, when and how he returned to his homeland. However, the ideological, social and economic environment in which "Adjak" found itself in Europe in the late 19th century becomes clear. It reveals itself as a historical setting in which people were exhibited like zoo animals, exploited through hard work and racially discriminated against. The "Caravan" makes it clear that the "Völkerschauen" (people's shows), but also the general anthropological interests of that time, were not directed at the human individual, but at "types" and "races". As a result, only fragmentary biographical information on the persons involved can often be found in the colonial archives.

From the "Völkerschau" to the figure portrait in plaster

How did the sculptural portrait of "Adjak" come about? "The leader of the group, Mr. Gehring, cannot allow Dinka to be modelled in my studio, as people easily catch a cold when leaving the house," Bernardien writes in the further course of the above-mentioned letter of 4 February 1895. Bernardien's letter is accompanied by two cost estimates – one for the auxiliary model, the other for the life-size figure. In addition to the sculptor's fee (300 marks), ten kilograms of plasticine (20 marks) and iron for the reinforcement of the figure (5 marks), the first cost estimate also contains a "model money or gift for the Dinka", for which Bernardien has noted a question mark instead of a sum of money. According to the correspondence, the figure is completed in October. ^[15] Written negotiations follow about Bernardien's final remuneration. ^[16] In the spring of 1896 – more than a year after the idea of portrait sculpture had been born – Adolf Bastian confirmed that the sculpture had entered the collection of the Ethnological Museum, in whose depot it is still located today; a little later, the casting mould for the reproduction of the figure was produced in the plaster moulding shop. ^[17]

The genesis and acquisition of the sculpture can therefore be traced relatively clearly. However, an inconsistency in the process of creation remains: while the written sources clearly point to a freely modelled portrait sculpture, the open plaster form conveys a different picture. On the backs of the hands and feet, wrists and ankles, knees, heels and other parts of the body with a pronounced skin structure, pores, furrows and wrinkles have been clearly visible transferred to the surface of the plaster – clear signs of at least a partial body impression (Fig. 6). The exact conditions under which "Adjak" stood as a model in 1895 thus remain vague – both with regard to the intimate situation of a potential body impression, which is often experienced as intrusive and unpleasant, and with regard to the "eye level" of this encounter between artist and model. For even if the payment of a fee was at least provided for and – according to the reference in a later letter^[18] – an interpreter had apparently also been called in, it must be assumed that this portrait was created under unequal and exploitative power relations, the inevitable dictates of the self-proclaimed German authorities and thus in a setting that was fundamentally disadvantageous for "Adjak".

In our search for more information about "Adjak", the panopticon context now leads us to a written report by Rudolf Virchow, in which he "discusses" the Dinka "guest" at Castan's work from a biological point of view. ^[19] For the academic world, "Völkerschauen" had primarily a purely practical value: the scientists used the people on display as research objects. In order to determine overarching "racial characteristics" and to substantiate them with positivist findings, the people were medically examined, anthropometrically measured, photographed and cast in plaster. For the members of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory (BGAEU), it was therefore nothing unusual to visit "Völkerschauen" together or to have the respective people "paraded" for them.

On January 26, 1895, Virchow had "some personalities selected by [him]" of the Dinka group brought to a meeting of the BGAEU and asked his colleagues "to take a closer look at the highly peculiar phenomena". ^[20] On the basis of the living "study objects", he discussed skin, hair and eye colours, tattoos, physiognomies, anatomical features, stature and body measurements and summarised his observations in the aforementioned written report. A man named "Atjak" [sic] is part of Virchow's comparative studies and is attracting attention, among other things, because of his extraordinary arm length. It must have been at this meeting of the BGAEU in January 1895 that Virchow decided to have a full-body cast of the man made for the Museum of Ethnology, which had opened almost ten years earlier. Contemporary sources indicate that at that time the museum lacked ethnographic figures on the basis of which clothing and jewellery could be presented in a supposedly authentic way. ^[21] This deficiency was to be remedied by the acquisition of figures such as that of "Adjak".

"Survival in the Picture"^[22]

In Virchow's report, "Adjak" is the only person of whom a photograph has been printed (Fig. 7). ^[23] When we look at the photo today, the person whose existence until then had a rather abstract character comes to life for the first time. The black-and-white photo was reproduced almost full-page in the publication. The young man was photographed unclothed, in side view and in front of a neutral background, he stands upright in a striding posture and looks straight ahead. The seemingly neutral side view focuses on the tall and narrow stature of the man and his long, slender limbs. In a subtle way, the viewer's attention is thus drawn to those features of the body that were the focus of anthropological research; the photograph becomes evidence of a scientific thesis. At the same time, it reveals itself as the result of a discriminatory staging in which a person was objectified and reduced to his outer shell.

In summary, it can be said that while the historical documents used here primarily provide disturbing insights into the degrading research practice of colonial-era physical anthropology, it is precisely the material heritage of this practice that can be made productive in the end: the height given by Virchow for "Adjak" corresponds approximately to the size of the cast offered for sale by the Gipsformerei (194.6 cm vs. 192 cm), and the external appearance of "Adjak" in the photo corresponds to that in the plaster mold. We can now safely assume that the man in the photo is the one who was recreated by Bernardien and captured in plaster. The identification of the nameless Dinka portrayed in mold 4097 has been successful, key data of his biography and the rough circumstances of the modeling could be reconstructed, and the entry in the inventory of the Gipsformerei could be personalized. The plaster mold, the anthropological photograph and the measurement data – at the same time the material output of a racist research practice and the only personal documents of "Adjak" that we have – thus become catalysts of their own history, transcending their original function and releasing new levels of meaning. Thanks to them, we can form an image of that person marginalized in colonial historiography and link an anonymized object to a face, an identity, a person. (Fig. 8)