The other day Cabinet Magazine sent out a fresh link to their June 2024 essay by James G. Harper and Philip W. Scher, “Looking Back At The White Man: The Story of Julius Lips.”
The title is a reference to the working title of Lips’ own multiyear research project, begun while he was a promising, young anthropologist in Cologne who was made director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in 1928: “How The Black Man Looks At The White Man.” Lips had collected depictions of European colonizers by indigenous people across Africa, North America, and Oceania, the source material for a counter-narrative of the civilizing myths of white supremacy.
In 1933 Lips was forced out by nazis who worked for months with complicit colleagues of his to seize control of his research. He smuggled it and his wife out of Germany, through France, and to the US, where his book was published in 1938 with the title, The Savage Hits Back. Though happy to dunk on nazis, the US anthropology world didn’t seem to receptive to his anti-racist take, and ignored or took issue with discrepancies in his interpretations. Still, Harper & Scher make a case for Lips as an important progenitor of anti-colonialist theory.
The Savage Hits Back is on the Internet Archive in a nearly illegible scan. His former museum in Cologne did an exhibition revisiting Lips work in 2018, which might be the same show that turned up at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2019 as Spectral-White. Wait, no, this is not right. Harper & Scher’s first footnote is a big vague/wrong about this sequence of events.Anna Brus staged a symposium, “The Savage Hits Back Revisited,” in Cologne, at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, in February 2016. Brus also co-curated the show, Spektral-Weiss, at HKW in 2019. The publication Brus edited, which accompanied the show, was The Savage Hits Back Revisited: Art and Alterity in the Colonial Encounter, and I assume it was the proceedings of the 2016 symposium.
The Julius Lips pullquote for the HKW exhibition, “All that is needed to caricature an oppressor is to portray him exactly as he is.” sounds like the kind of thing that could drive nazis berserk all over again, even today.