It’s a hot potato, that restitution business. The formerly colonized demand the return of the cultural assets that were stolen from them during the colonial era or that entered German collections in questionable ways. The Federal Republic, for its part, argues that it isn’t all quite so simple—and actually rebuilds the old palace of the Prussian rulers who helped write a chapter of the history of colonialism. Renamed in honor of Humboldt, the building is destined to become a repository for those same cultural assets.

And now this. In 2013—the ground had just been broken for the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace—the former lords of the manor, the Prussian princes of the House of Hohenzollern, came out of the woodwork to demand their own restitution: 5,000 pieces from the former crown estate now held by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, 266 paintings by Lucas Cranach and others—all this and much more, they claimed, was rightfully theirs. For good measure, they wanted to move back into Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam with its 176 rooms. The Soviets’ seizure of the family seat after the war and its transfer to public—which is to say, our collective—ownership, they argued, was unlawful, and so they wanted it back.

What makes their demands provocative and indeed scandalous is that anyone who “significantly aided and abetted” the Nazi regime is precluded by law from obtaining restitution of or compensation for assets expropriated after the war. The Hohenzollerns were chummy with the Nazis or certainly not opposed to them, and today they exhaust all legal avenues to suppress historical research into their own Nazi past, as the public learned when Jan Böhmermann leaked relevant documents. Their strategy is of a piece with the perpetual aggrievement of today’s Trumpists and populists, who pose as victims of history’s injustices to distract from their role as perpetrators, distort the facts beyond recognition, and even hijack discourses of resistance to repurpose them in support of their own, frequently illegitimate claims to power.

Dierk Schmidt’s latest work cuts to the core of this confusing melee. For several years, his art has grappled with the legal and other frameworks of Germany’s and other countries’ colonial histories and with questions of restitution. A critic of the Humboldt Forum, he was actively involved in numerous initiatives; he is familiar with the facts and the history behind them and only too familiar with anger and frustration. (In our showroom, we present the installation Berliner Schlossgeister, his contribution to the 2004 Berlin Biennale, which investigated the entanglements between neo-monarchists and political and business elites around the reconstruction of the City Palace.)