In close cooperation with museums, missionary orders and other partners, the IWM provides support in the processing of the missionary legacy.
The institute also has an eye for the restitution issue. RC orders in Germany still hold some fifty ethnographic collections. The project will focus on a few of them. The project is portrayed in a tv-broadcast of 3Sat Kultur Zeit.
Werner Hilbrecht writes to RM* about the Protestant mission:
Germany also has the Archiv- und Museumsstiftung der Vereinigten Evangelischen Mission (VEM) is catering for the heritage of two German mission societies active in colonial times, the Rheinische Mission and Bethel Mission, with the archives of VEM and the Museum auf der Hardt.
The VEM has already 20 years ago supplied a complete microfilm of their archives relating to Namibia and South Africa to the National Archives of Namibia.
However, as far as I know, other important German Protestant mission societies, such as the Norddeutsche Mission in Bremen and the Berliner Mission, are also critically reviewing their collections (as well as the Basler Mission in Switzerland).
