Adalbert von Roessler’s illustration of the 1884/1885 Berlin Conference.
Drab, late-GDR architecture dominates the streetscape of Wilhelmstraße. Tour groups shuffle down a gangway to the Führerbunker carpark, and on the corner is an artistic, lit-in-the-dark monument to Georg Elser, the Swabian carpenter who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939. On the ground floor of Wilhelmstraße 92 is an empty office space. Tourists flit past it from one sight to the next. Little do they know, the Reich Chancellery once stood here: Berlin’s equivalent to the White House.
The Reich Chancellery was not only where Hitler held power between 1933 and 1945; it was the site of the 1884/1885 Berlin Conference, during which Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, brought together imperial stakeholders to dissect the continent of Africa. Yet, save for a few faded information panels, there is little indication that this street once represented the centre of Prussian and German imperial power.
Between 2020 and 2024, Wilhelmstraße 92 housed Dekoloniale in the office space that now sits empty.
Empty Dekoloniale office on Wilhelmstraße, photo credit: Steven Richards
What was Deokoloniale?
Dekoloniale: Memory Culture in the City was an organisation funded by the Berlin Senate tasked with coordinating cultural responses to Berlin’s colonial past and the postcolonial present. It blended artistic, activistic and intellectual approaches to highlight the links between the era of high imperialism and present-day racism. Member organisations included local NGOs, such as Each One Teach One, the Initiative of Black People in Germany and the Berlin municipal museums.
Dekoloniale’s choice of address was no accident.
The 1884/1885 Berlin Conference is of exceptional historical importance to the people of Africa and African diasporas. It symbolically represents the moment when white imperial map makers sliced and diced up the African continent to determine areas of colonial influence, denying African agency and sovereignty in the process. Historians debate the decisiveness of the conference, but at the very least, it represented a group of self-important white men deciding on Africa’s fate without any Black voices of dissent. Wilhelmstraße 92 thus bore witness to the underlying conceit of colonial racism: that the fate of Africa could be decided by the imperial powers of Europe and North America.
An information panel on Wilhelmstraße, initiated in 2005, has become a rallying point for Berlin’s African diaspora. Since February 2006, it has been the starting point of the Memorial March Dedicated to the African/Black Heroes and Victims of Maafa. On the back of this annual event, and after decades of campaigning for greater visibility, the left-leaning government shifted policy in 2016.
Information panel
According to a report in the Berliner Zeitung from February 4, 2026, this information panel was removed from the site at the end of January without any consultation with Berlin’s Black diaspora. It was previously bolted into the ground and has now been completely removed, which likely rules out spontaneous acts of vandalism. It remains a mystery as to who removed it or why.
Photo Credit: OTFW CC BY-SA 3.0
Under the coalition of the Left, the Greens and the SPD, not only was Berlin’s significance as a former site of Stalinist-style communism and Hitler-led fascism highlighted, but also the city’s colonial role. After all, Berlin was also the home of Berlin Zoo, the Royal Ethnological Museum, the Berlin Botanical Garden and Berlin University. These state-supported institutions led the charge in collecting items, languages, seeds and bodies – both human and nonhuman – from the colonies for analysis, often putting them on display.
But truly, the biggest stumbling block for a remembrance site boils down to one simple question: who’s going to pay?
In 2019, the left-leaning coalition proposed a policy in cooperation with civil society actors to promote research and raise awareness of Berlin’s central role in colonial history. They stated, “The aim of such a concept is, on the one hand, to intensify society’s engagement with the history of colonialism connected to Berlin, to anchor the topic in scholarship and education, to contribute to reconciliation and to develop dignified forms of remembrance. On the other hand, the concept is also intended to take into account the traces and lasting effects that the colonial past has left in Berlin and in the former German colonies up to the present day.”
Dekoloniale was born of this process. It ran as a five-year project, organising and providing funds for artistic residencies, decolonial city tours, annual festivals and deepening ties with the cultural scene. This led to the involvement of Berlin’s 12 borough museums, who took turns presenting exhibitions and coming together to run the project ‘Confronting Colonialism: Decentralised perspectives on Berlin’s urban history’.
According to Chief Coordinator Anna Yeboah, Dekoloniale had the financial means to keep renting the site beyond the project’s official termination on December 31, 2025, which coincided with the end of the lease agreement. Despite meeting the asking price, the owner decided against allowing Dekoloniale to remain at this highly visible location.
Rudolf Virchow with his collection of 4,500 ancestral remains, image credit: Internet Archive Book Images
Funding Limbo
While Dekoloniale focussed on a cultural response to the past, literature scholar Dr Ibou Diop was tasked with looking forward. In 2022, he started providing recommendations for future responses to the state government. Key stakeholders included Dekoloniale, Decolonize Berlin, ADEFRA, Korea Verband, korientation e.V. and Afrika-Rat. This process culminated in April 2024 at an event in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where he presented the result of two years of consultation, debate and consensus-building to the public. The concept’s key recommendations had the aim of “developing a central remembrance site dedicated to colonialism in Berlin” and “fostering a broader culture of remembrance”.
But until something changes, the state of decolonial remembrance in Berlin remains in limbo – and the office space at Wilhelmstraße 92 remains empty.
It took another 18 months to officially deliver the concept to the Berlin Senate. In the meantime, Diop’s role changed from drafting to implementing its number one recommendation: the development of a central remembrance site in Berlin. In December 2025, the Greens tabled the motion, which ended in parliamentary deadlock: the CDU and AFD rejected the concept’s recommendations and the SPD (though one of the co-initiators) abstained from the debate. The can has been kicked down the road until after the state election, due to be held in September this year.
But truly, the biggest stumbling block for a remembrance site boils down to one simple question: who’s going to pay?
Even if the left-leaning coalition were to retake the Rotes Rathaus in September and agree to commit funds for a centre of remembrance, it would still baulk at being solely responsible for financing a cultural site of national significance. The lack of movement on this issue at a federal level is caused by animosity within the CDU, CSU and AFD to transnational, decolonial approaches to the past. This they see as antithetical to Holocaust remembrance, particularly in regard to Israel. According to an article in Die Zeit from September 13, 2025, new Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Wolfram Weiner has been a vocal critic of decolonial discourses since October 7, 2023. He considers them a cover for antisemitic attacks on Israel. Given the fact he’s the chief bureaucrat for federal funding of the cultural sector, this doesn’t bode well for decolonial organisations lobbying for support.
The Court of Honour (Ehrenhof), the main courtyard of the Reich Chancellery built between 1937 and 1939 by architect Albert Speer, image credit: Bundesarchiv
A Potential Memorial Site
In hope, one potential site for a memorial and learning centre has been identified. It’s only a 10-minute stroll from Dekoloniale’s old office space: a carpark in front of Gropius Bau. It was once the site of the Royal Ethnological Museum – itself a perpetrator of colonial violence dedicated to collecting non-European artefacts from the colonial frontier. If the centre were to be developed here, it would create a memorial avenue along Niederkirchnerstraße. This would include the former headquarters of the Gestapo and SS (now the Topography of Terror) and an intact section of the Berlin Wall. In other words, people could interact with Berlin’s fascistic, communist and colonial pasts in a 500-metre section of road.
Alas, such a possibility remains a pipe dream.
Those who want to see Berlin take responsibility for its colonial history must wait for the machine of everyday politics to pull itself together and secure funding. After all, a memorial beside the Topography of Terror would be quite fitting, a site born of a grassroots historical-political movement. It, too, had needed a turn in the political tide to guarantee long-term federal funding against resistance from the CDU and CSU. In the end, this tidal turn was a tsunami: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Perhaps Berlin has another Mauerfall in it yet. Perhaps not. But until something changes, the state of decolonial remembrance in Berlin remains in limbo – and the office space at Wilhelmstraße 92 remains empty.
