ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the concept of heritage from a material religion perspective. It draws on the controversy triggered by the inclusion of a Christian cross on the Berlin Stadtschloss (City Palace), a monumental reconstruction project, housing the Humboldt Forum heritage complex. The chapter maps the arguments made for and against its inclusion according to three dominant scholarly theories of heritage; that is, namely, the notion of heritage as representative of the nation and national identity; the notion of heritage as/and the sacred; and Christianity as heritage. The first section situates the case through a review of current literature in the area of material religion that takes heritage, broadly construed, as a focus. The second section illustrates how the historic Berlin Palace and its associated museum collections illustrate the theory of heritage and the nation—as indicative of the historical process of the revolutionary seizure and transformation of royal and Christian religious material culture into the collective possession of citizens. The third section draws on examples of contentious ethnographic objects held by the Humboldt Forum to show how their incorporation, curation, preservation, and display simultaneously “domesticated” them as museum objects and sacralised them as being of cultural value, illustrating the theory of heritage as the sacred. The fourth section profiles a counter-claim made that the cross was not a purely Christian symbol, but was instead a symbol of German Christian cultural heritage. Here, I show how the Berlin Palace was drawn into a political project of the culturalization of Christianity as national heritage and the reformulation of heritage for the regulation of social and cultural difference. Showing up heritage’s complicated, contradictory, and unfinished entanglements with Christianity through the debate about the cross on the Berlin City Palace, I argue that, ultimately, it should be embraced as a material religious term.
