As both a historical study and commentary on the present, Im Shatten Humboldts (In Humboldt's Shadow) is a particularly timely volume. Following on the heels of Andrea Wulf's wildly popular work, The Invention of Nature (2015), it enriches a renewed interest in the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt. Although Humboldt does not make an appearance in this text, his influence on the ethnologists at the center of the study is unmistakable. At issue here are not only the far-flung travels of academic adventurers inspired by Humboldt's exploits, but also the fruits of their labors—in this case, the collections of artifacts housed in the recesses of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. Today, these objects are split among several institutions in the city, with some parts inaccessible to visitors and others selectively displayed in the reconstructed Berlin Palace in the city center. Within this space, in the new Humboldt Forum, they are meant to speak to a more cosmopolitan vision of Germany, but their entanglement with the legacies of imperialism instead has sparked recent debate about the ownership and display of material culture.

There is perhaps no one better positioned to tackle this issue than historian H. Glenn Penny. For nearly two decades, Penny has concerned himself with the history of Germany's fascination with the non-Western world, and his research has made significant contributions to a respatialization of German history within a global framework. Here, Penny explains how the forgotten history of the Berlin Ethnological Museum is critical to understanding the current dilemma in the Humboldt Forum and how it also offers a path forward. At the heart of his account is a cohort of enterprising ethnologists, a bold academic vision, and an extensive expatriate network, which came together in the late nineteenth century to build one of the most extensive ethnological collections in the world.

Through crisp, engaging prose, Penny follows two generations of scholars and collectors as they journeyed across oceans and traversed imperial boundaries. Each chapter takes readers to a new location, from Southeast Asia to the South Pacific and across the Americas. Each is framed around the story of the scholars themselves and the key objects they sought, including Hawaiian royal capes, Benin bronzes, and Alaskan shamanic masks. Together, these stories explain the vast efforts to fulfill the “Humboldtian wish” (154) of the Museum's founder, Adolf Bastian. Inspired by Humboldt's discoveries of patterns in nature, Bastian envisioned a collection that would span the globe and lead scholars and visitors to understand the collective history of humankind. Unfortunately, Bastian and his colleagues were racing against time, as advancing modernity and the ravages of empire imperiled both the cultures under study and their associated artifacts. Thus, as Penny explains, the ethnologists were forced into a number of “devil's bargains” (220) with unscrupulous traders and imperialist armies, putting their research goals on the backburner in favor of acquiring ever more artifacts in a flurry of activity that Penny calls “hyper-collecting” (77). Bastian passed away in 1905, and by the middle of the twentieth century, resource pressures, space limitations, and generational turnover occluded the overarching mission, while Germany's defeat in World War II left the collection scattered across Europe.

What emerges is a complex story that complicates the European appropriation of non-Western cultures. It is a story of good intentions and noble efforts, of a liberal anthropological tradition that employed the fruits of empire to challenge racist prejudices. And it is a story of failure, of how Bastian's grandiose plans for his museum were lost through poor planning and a fundamental misunderstanding of his mission. And, as Penny stresses, it is a story of tragedy. Even after much of the collection had been miraculously recovered in the late twentieth century, the original vision remained lost, leaving only the memory of its linkages to imperialism. Consequently, the Berlin Ethnological Museum finds itself today in the same haphazard state that bedeviled it in the last century, but this need not be the end of the story. Penny concludes by discussing his consulting work with Hawaiian natives eager to study the museum's Pacific treasures. It leads him to the conviction that the future of the Berlin Ethnological Museum rests not simply on questions of retaining or returning artifacts, but on its capacity to work inclusively with the cultures represented in the collection and to bring cultures together as its founders intended. “For the first time,” Penny writes, “the Museum has perhaps the potential to accomplish a good portion of the Humboldtian goals that motivated its founding. For the first time in a long time it has the chance to actualize a part of Bastian's vision” (262).

This view undoubtedly will be controversial, and some may be less charitable toward the attitudes of the nineteenth-century collectors. For the most part, Penny takes a suitably critical approach, but occasionally he cuts a few corners, presumably to make clearer the connections between past and present. At times, he neglects to scrutinize the sort of underlying assumptions within the ethnological community that made Bastian's vision possible in the first place, and he overstates the contemporary interest in inclusive scholarship. Nevertheless, the history he presents, thoroughly researched and expertly narrated, is instructive and lends support to his intriguing suggestions. At the very least, Penny's ideas deserve close consideration and hopefully will generate a meaningful discussion, not just about the Humboldt Forum, but also about the practice of museum scholarship and the legacy of Germany's engagement with the wider world.