Gustavo Petro, what a joy it is to welcome you here to Schloss Bellevue today, on your first visit to our country in your role as President! I know that you come as a friend and close partner, and the talks we just had were also characterised by a spirit of friendship and trust. For this, I am sincerely grateful.

Your homeland is too big for me to be able to say that I know Colombia. However, I have visited Colombia on several occasions, and each time I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of the people and the richness and beauty of the natural world, particularly during my last trip following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt.

You are aware that I follow the peace process in your country with great hope and interest. Your country has made history with the peace agreement, as it has with its establishment of a truth commission. Vast hopes have been placed in you, Gustavo Petro, and in your Presidency, by people whose greatest wish is undoubtedly lasting peace in the entire country and a just society in which the wounds of the past can be healed. Today, I want to explicitly assure you that my country supports you and the peace process in your country.

Yet this day is a particular pleasure as well as a great honour to me for another reason, too. For today marks the final chapter of a story that is very close to my heart. The first time I – at that time in another role – had the privilege of visiting the Kogi high up in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in 2015, we had plenty of opportunities to talk. I learned a lot about the history of the Kogi, their traditions and their way of life. And I remember the farewell gift I received: a bracelet on which a special blessing lay. I wore it until, several years later, it fell apart. At a further meeting with Kogi representatives in Bogotá in 2017 the gift was renewed, and again I wore it for several years. These encounters have remained with me. It seems to me that with this small celebration in Schloss Bellevue today we have come full circle.

These two masks, which have been here in the museum in Berlin for more than a century, have considerable religious significance for the Kogi. I am pleased that today they can be returned to Colombia – two masks which the then-Director of the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) in Berlin, Konrad Theodor Preuss, brought back to Berlin from a research trip in 1915. These masks are sacred for the Kogi, they are “important beings from the origins of time”, as Mama Pedro Juan Noevita once said, and I quote: “They should be where they can help nature so that it is in harmony with the Kogi and humanity.”

During my visit I was deeply impressed by the extent to which the Kogi live in harmony with nature. And I am convinced that we, the people in the industrialised countries of the north, have much to learn from the Kogi when it comes to preserving our environment and our natural resources for future generations.

I would like to convey my heartfelt thanks to you all, and in particular to you, Professor Parzinger, for making this handover possible here in Schloss Bellevue. The return of the masks is part of a change of mindset with regard to how we approach our colonial history, a process that has begun in many European countries. And I welcome the fact that Germany has assumed a leading role in this area.

Without a doubt, ethnological collections still hold a great fascination for us. Through them, world cultures come to us. We learn to see and understand the unfamiliar, just as Alexander von Humboldt intended.

But we Europeans today ask ourselves different questions than people in Konrad Theodor Preuss’ times. We have to ask ourselves critically on whose shoulders the modern western world was built, with what contradictions and injustices – and what consequences that has for our world today.

Professor Parzinger, I am grateful that you are not only posing these questions but, together with many others, are also seeking answers to them.

We now know that the story of how many works of art and cult objects were obtained is still unclear. Much of what is exhibited in our ethnological collections has been acquired directly or via third parties. Much is unknown. But many thefts and much plundering took place, people were subjugated and murdered. And a great deal of research and international cooperation will still be needed to uncover the origins of individual objects.

To this end we must seek out dialogue with the countries and regions from which these artefacts come. It is not first and foremost about us Europeans, about our perception of ourselves and our responsibility in light of history. It is about the future of the world. I am convinced that only if we seek out open and critical dialogue with the peoples of the Global South, only if we actively distance ourselves from the thought patterns and hierarchies of the colonial era – and many of these thought patterns are deep seated – only then will we be able to resolve the problems confronting us all together as humanity. At least, that is what I took away from my encounters with the Kogi in Colombia – they were moving, instructive, eye-opening.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to all those who have worked to bring the story of the Kogi masks to a happy ending today. May these masks have a safe journey – back to where they are needed, where they continue to be bridges between humanity and nature.