At a glance:
- No national laws or policies on repatriation
- In June 2023, an Expert Committee published their recommendations for guidelines for collections from colonial contexts. The guidelines include advising the return of items on a state-to-state basis, which suggests Indigenous Nations or communities would not be able to make claims themselves but that the country will be open to repatriation claims
- A new restitution law was due to be proposed in 2024, but this has been delayed, if not cancelled, due to the election results
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Overview
Although Austria is not perceived as a colonial power in the same way as some of the other countries in Europe, it did benefit from colonialism. Austria, like many countries around the world, has begun to take an introspective look at their colonial past.
On 20 January 2022, a new Expert Committee was established to ‘develop a guideline for a consistent approach to objects in a colonial context and demands for repatriation’. This Committee was chaired by Jonathan Fine, Director of the Weltsmuseum Wien and the results were published in June 2023. Notably, the recommendations advise committing to return on a ‘state-to-state basis’, which suggests that any claims would have to be made through a nation state government and could not be made by an Indigenous Nation itself.
The Austrian government announced plans to propose a new restitution law by March 2024, however this was not passed by the time of the September 2024 election which seems to have delayed, if not cancelled, plans for this new law.
Guidelines
The main points were summarised as follows:
- To commit the Federal Government of Austria to returning heritage items from colonial contexts upon request on a state-to-state basis in order to address the injustice of acquiring them against the will or wishes of their previous owners
- To fund provenance research to understand how and under what circumstances heritage objects from colonial contexts in Austria’s federal collections were collected and to provide a basis for scientific and ethical judgment for determining whether they are eligible for permanent return.
- To establish procedures and bodies to determine, based on provenance research, whether heritage objects are eligible for permanent return and to specify the interests of the various involved parties in the return or retention of the objects.
- To empower Austria’s federal museums and the custodians of the other collections directly owned by the Federation to seek appropriate solutions (including long term loans, collection sharing, digital and virtual access, joint research and scholarly exchange, as well as cultural exchange) for objects that do not qualify for return.
- To take practical steps beyond returning objects to address the legacy of colonialism, including increasing international cultural and scholarly exchange between Austria and countries that were formerly colonized, supporting civil society initiatives in Austria working to raise awareness about the colonial past, and encouraging all of Austria’s museums to address colonialism in their work.
The guidelines also include recommendations about which belongings are eligible and not eligible for return, as well as a procedure to evaluate requests for repatriation, including greater focus on both proactive and reactive provenance research.
As these recommendations were only just published, time will tell of how they are enacted. This page will be updated with any developments or applications of these new guidelines.
Further Background
Sebastian M. Spitra wrote an article in 2022, entitled ‘Austria Approaches Its Colonial Past: Prospects of a New Restitution Law for Cultural Objects’. In this piece, Spitra identified two legal obstacles, administrative barriers, and preconditions for the repatriation of cultural objects from colonial contexts in Austrian federal museums. First, the state’s rules on de-owning cultural objects and second, the norms related to exporting material culture. At the moment, an Indigenous Nation seeking repatriation would potentially have to pass through both of the below barriers to secure a return.
Property on Cultural Objects in Federal Collections
- Austria is a federal republic made up of nine federal states or provinces. Collections and property on cultural objects might be held by the Federal Republic of Austria, the nine different federal states, or municipalities within the states. The rules on relinquishing or de-owning cultural property depend on who is the proprietor of the object.
- The Austrian Federal Museums Act governs ownership for federal museums – including the Weltmuseum Wien.
- Repatriation is not specifically addressed in this Act but it does ‘allow the State to withdraw objects from the museums’ collections for imperative state policy interests, which legally opens the door to carry out restitutions, as has been the case with Nazi-looted artworks.’
- The museums themselves do not have any ability to repatriation objects from their collections on their own.
- Two legal norms act as the basis for the deaccessioning of museum collections; the Art Restitution Law and a guideline by ICOM Austria which sets standards for deaccessioning museum objects (‘most notably this covers human remains and requires a reasoned statement by the museum management, authorities, or an ethics committee as the basis for their restitution’.)
- The guidelines of the expert committee, which are currently being drafted, intend to establish a legal procedure to claim cultural objects from colonised contexts. It is supposed to regulate who can claim which objects and under which conditions they can be subject to a restitution. (Note: at the moment, such a legal procedure is only in place for the restitution of Nazi-looted art to individuals or nation states.)
Export Rules for Cultural Objects being Considered as National Monuments
- ‘The main federal law that regulates the protection of cultural objects is the Monuments Protection Act’ – this means that stolen cultural belongings in the collections of federal and regional museums are defined as monuments under this law. ‘Therefore, a special legal regime for their export applies to these objects.’
- ‘The Bundesdenkmalamt (Federal Monuments Office) is the agency in charge of executing the Monuments Protection Act and consequently is entrusted to decide whether the public and national interest requires a certain cultural object to remain within the borders of the Republic of Austria. The Federal Monuments Office has to weigh in and decide whether the public interest or the reasons for export prevail.’ Belongings or cultural items may only be exported if ‘serious reasons’ apply, but what constitutes as serious reasons is not defined in the law.
- This law applies to objects that are held privately and by the public.
Where to find collections
The main items from colonial contexts held in Austria are in the Weltsmuseum Wien, which houses around 200,000 ethnographic objects, over 100,000 photographs, and 146,000 texts – but this museum has no mandate to restitute cultural objects.
The other museum with a large colonial collection is the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, where the team (as of 2023) are conducting a survey of their anthropological collection in order to ‘document the potential colonial acquirement contexts of human remains’ in their collection. (Spitra, 2022)
There are private collections and municipal collections as well as collections of federal states, which might also contain a larger amount of objects from colonised contexts, but which are not registered or publicly accessible. There are no estimates of how many objects with a problematic provenance might be held in such collections.
Despite its limited competencies to the field of Nazi-looted art restitutions, the Commission for Provenance Research as well as the Provenance Research Departments in the museums, might be good first contact points in the case of restitution requests. In the past, Austria has cooperated with Indigenous nations in the repatriation of ancestors but the country has been historically closed to restitution claims.
Some Provenance Research Departments to explore:
Routes to Return 