The chapter proposes a critical materialist reading of memory and history after the cultural turn and the iconic turn. These have led to a questioning of the materialist approach of the 1970s. The German scholar Horst Bredekamp serves as a focal point for examining the transformation of the materialist approach into an idealist conception of history and memory, inspired by the model of Aby Warburg. In recent decades, Bredekamp has also emerged as one of the most ardent supporters of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the reconstruction of the former palace of the Prussian kings and German emperors. The relevance of the Humboldt Forum to the debate on memory, iconoclasm, and history lies in its role as a museum of royal ethnological collections and Asian art, one of the largest in the world. In contrast to a teleological and ossified version of history and memory typical of idealist conceptions of culture, a Benjaminian and Brechtian approach is defended, which considers the political agency of social subjects.