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Municipal Displays. Civic self-promotion and the

development of German ethnographic mus eums,

1 870- 1 9 14“

During the last decade or more the role of museums in European and American culture and the intentions of the groups who created and supported them have caught the interest of scholars from a variety of disciplines. While not all of these scholars have been so bold as Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach - who argued that ‘the museum’s primary function is ideological . . . meant to impress upon those who use or pass through it society’s most revered beliefs and values’ (Duncan and Wallach 1980: 449) - most of the scholars working on nineteenth-century museums have approached them as critical sites within an emerging public sphere which contributed to an ambitious and pointed promulgation of ideologies and shaping of identities. Whether the agent behind this active formation is depicted as a rising social class - usually a hegemonic bourgeoisie - or a group of ambitious art critics or scientists, the tendency has been to analyse these museums’ social and cultural functions by focusing on the degree to which they contributed to the dominant cultural, racial and social discourses which supposedly shaped the nineteenth century.’ At the same time, most of these analyses have also tended to focus on some greater mission behind the museums’ foundations and displays, and have tended to shy away from analyses of micro- political processes or patterns of decision-making over longer periods of time. In terms of ethnographic museums, this mission is generally seen as one of purposeful creation, governed or at least pushed by colonial agendas and national concerns. Indeed, the German ethnologist Volker Harms, for example, has even gone so far as to argue that

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the German Studies Association Conference in Seattle in October 1996. The research for this project was supported by grants from the University of Illinois, the Council for European Studies at Columbia University and the Social Science Research Council/Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. I would like to express my personal thanks to Peter Fritzsche and Joseph B. Perry for their support and criticisms.

1 There has been a significant amount of work focused on museums in the public sphere and the role of museums in nineteenth-century European cultures. Most of this work has either drawn on or engaged with the theories of Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas or Antonio Gramsci (see, for example: Bennett 1995; Sherman 1989).

SocialAnthropolo~(1998), 6, 2, 1 5 7 - 1 6 8 . 0 1998 European Association of Social Anthropologists 157

‘the intended function of ethnographic museums was clearly to provide propaganda for colonialism’ (Harms 1984: 405).’

Reducing the ‘intended function’ of these museums to a propagandistic support of colonialism, however, not only oversimplifies the relationship between the museums and their sponsors, it also obscures other impulses behind the museums’ foundations and presentations which are critical to our understanding of nineteenth-century European cultures.’ In fact, my research on ethnographic museums in Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig indicates that a critical and enduring factor - more important for the development of these museums and their displays than the support of colonialism - stemmed from the museums’ engagement in a cosmopolitan culture of collecting. In most cases, a combination of scientific enthusiasm and civic self-promotion provided the impetus, and later the motor, for the creation and support of ethnographic museums, which were regarded as vehicles for gaining prestige and often international re~ognition.~ Once these projects were embraced, however, supporters quickly found themselves engaged in a pressing and unyielding competition for possessions that fed an international market on which the material culture of humanity was eagerly collected, traded, bought and sold. After a very short time, this market began dictating what should be sought after and obtained, and had a fundamental impact on the museums’ collections and displays.

Now it is not my intention simply to move from one reductionist stance to another by arguing for the importance of some form of capitalism over colonialism in the development of German ethnographic museums or their cultural importance. Rather, what I hope to do is to draw on some of Rudy Koshar’s insights about the

2 Although this article was written some time ago the argument continues to be part of Harms’s current work (see Harms 1995, especially n. 28).

3 For example, the connection Harms makes between German ethnographic museums and colo- nialism based on the dates these museums were created is quite misleading. The Leipzig museum, for instance, was actually established in 1868, before the founding of the Reich, and the city pledged over a million Marks to the creation of a monumental building in 1883, before German colonialism took off. Moreover, although the funding was allocated only a short time before Bismarck‘s move toward colonialism in 1884, the funds for this project came from a locally created foundation dedicated to improving the city, and the money was allocated to his museum building (which contained both a Kunst und Gewerbe Museum as well as a Vdkerkunde museum) in response to demands from the local ethnographic association and negative reactions about the state of the museum in Leipzig and Berlin newspapers. This association threatened to sell the collection to another city if their demands for a financial commitment were not met, and the city government agreed, fearing a loss for the city’s prestige and image as a university city and centre of science. In this case civic self-promotion far outweighed any colonialist agendas despite the founding date (SB: 10.6.83; LT: 31.5.83; Lehmann 1953: 28).

4 The role of status and prestige in the museums’ histories is made clear, for example, by a glance through the Leipzig museum’s yearly reports or acquisitions records. The Leipzig museum had a series of awards and titles which it regularly distributed to generous or potentially useful patrons, and which encouraged many individuals and groups to support this museum over others. (Adolf Bastian had a similar system for the Berlin museum based on governmental recognitions, although his was geared towards rewarding major contributions, while Hermann Obst in Leipzig worked to attract all levels of contributors and members). The positive reactions by patrons who received these awards makes it clear that this was an effective method of soliciting benefactors, and that sponsors often chose the museum they wished to support based on what it could d o for them. At the same time, this recognition reflected on the cities themselves, which often used the possession of these institutions as evidence of their international character and importance.

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importance of historical contingency and his argument that the process of fashioning identities has ‘always been limited by what makes it p~ss ib le ’ ,~ and use the identity politics of civic self-promotion as well as critical contingencies such as monetary and technical limitations to show how such policies and eventualities affected and structured what these museums were able to achieve (Koshar 1994: 216). Furthermore, by focusing on localised decision-making, I also hope to draw into question the degree to which a strong link can be made between the missions behind these museums and their functions in Germany, as well as to locate some fundamental impulses in European culture that shaped museums’ narratives, and which might be otherwise obscured by privileging the museums’ connections to colonial or other hegemonic discourses. Ultimately, I will argue that German ethnographic museums were joint projects, fashioned by a combination of forces with frequently competing intentions; yet be these intentions primarily scientific, essentially political or some combination of both, even the clearest of intentions often failed to produce the desired results.

The initial scientific goal behind ethnographic museums was the creation of well- ordered institutions filled with examples of material culture from all of humanity.6 These institutions were meant to function as a laboratory for the comparative analysis of human artifacts and the inductive study of mankind, and were expected to lead ethnologists toward fundamental truths about human character and development. The belief that it was actually possible to collect, house and order such a vast number of artifacts was shared by the directors of almost all European and American museums and provided the standard of measure for a museum’s reputation even after 1918. This goal, however, required harnessing a vast amount of resources, which led to the dependence of the museums and their scientists on their city governments o r their sponsors and patrons, most of whom were local residents.

Moreover, the financial commitments to this project fuelled the competition between European and American museums for the possession of other people’s material culture, and the ever-increasing expenses made the price of this status easily measured in dollars and cents. In order to compete in this international market, the directors of German ethnographic museums were forced to commit an overwhelming amount of their time to soliciting support for their projects. Patrons were sought out, collectors were wooed, and when private collections came up for sale they were fought over with an aggression and tenacity that today’s most successful stockbrokers might admire .

When Caesar Godeffroy’s private collection of South-Seas artifacts came up for sale in 1879, for example, a heated competition between Germany’s major museums ensued. The Godeffroy Museum, as this collection was commonly known, contained artifacts collected by ships’ captains and professional Summler employed by the Godeffroy trading house in Hamburg, and it was generally recognised across Europe as the most complete collection from Australia and the Pacific islands.’ Its ethno-

5 In this passage Koshar is referring specifically to ‘building pasts’ but I believe that his arguments

6 This initial desire included the areas within Europe as well as outside Europe. See note 13 below. 7 Initially, these collectors and ships’ captains were commissioned to bring back examples of the

natural and artificial curiosities in the area in order to inform Godeffroy’s rather flexible trading policies rather than to contribute to science. Only after accumulating a huge stock of these curiosities did Godeffroy hire a Wissenschuftfer from Denmark to put these items in order and establish his private museum (Scheps 1994; 1996).

apply to building identities through display in general.

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graphic section was especially prized because it had been assembled prior to the most destructive ‘europeanization’, the term ethnographers used to refer to the worst cultural effects of colonization and the rapid expansion in international trade. Adolf Bastian, perhaps the most well-known ethnologist of the day and director of the Berlin museum, described this collection to the Prussian Cultural Ministry as ‘one of the most magnificent [groflartigsten] of its kind’, while Kristian Bahnson, in his highly influential work on European ethnographic museums, described the Godeffroy collection as by far the best South-Seas collection in Europe, and stressed that the scientific value and importance of this collection stemmed from the fact that it was gathered before the greatest impact of European cultural expansion (GSAa: Bastian/ GRM 3.6.81; Bahnson 1888).

Clearly, the scarcity of its artifacts as well as its completeness gave this collection a singular value in the scientific world. However, once the museums’ ethnologists and the cities’ Wissenscbuftler confirmed its value for the scientific community, this scientific value quickly became secondary to the collection’s reputation, the fame it could bring to the city which obtained it, and its monetary value in both the public debates and back-room dealings that followed.’ Ministerial debates in Hamburg and Leipzig, for example, as well as assertions in local papers about the need to secure this collection for their cities, resouhd with references to the collection’s monetary value and constant allusions to the city’s prestige. Official reports by the Natural Sciences Association and Museums’ Commission in Hamburg, for example, not only emphas- ised that it was essentially this collection alone that had brought Hamburg recognition in the scientific world but also emphatically stressed that an attempt to duplicate the collection would cost considerably more than its current price (HSAa: WorlCe, Brinckmann, LuderdKirchenpauer, 1.8.85). Similarly, Leipzig’s papers called on patriotic citizens to help raise funds for the acquisition and projected a return ten times as large as their initial investment of time, energy and costs. They stressed that the city would be getting something no other ‘Culturstadt’ had or could later acquire (LT: 24.4.82/25.4.82). But the commentary which perhaps best characterised the attitudes fuelling these efforts appeared on 30 April 1882 in the Leipziger Tugeblutt:

It follows, that as ethnographic artifacts become ever scarcer prices grow from year to year, and due to the museums appearing in every town and the dilettantes, for whom collecting, as it were,

8 When the commissions met to discuss the acquisition of this collection in both Berlin and Hamburg, the scientific worth of the collection became subordinated to discussions of space and money. In Hamburg, as in Berlin, members of scientific associations were used to confirm the collection’s value, and in both cases recommended the acquisition of the collection. An appeal to the Hamburg Senat from members of the local scientific associations assigned to evaluate the collection contained over four pages of signatures from Hamburg’s most prominent scientists. Yet once beyond this point, the monetary factor overrode scientific worth, and the Hamburg Senat officially lamented the size of the museum and the costs involved in taking over and housing such a collection. This was, however, a tactical stance assumed by the government in the hopes of reducing the price rather than a sign of uncertainty. Burgermeister Kirchenpauer was extremely disen- chanted by what he termed the ‘unwelcome news’ that the collection had been sold to Leipzig, and noted in a private circular that this substantial loss for the city’s reputation was largely due to a tactical miscalculation. He stated ‘one still had the hope, that Dr Godeffroy, a man swimming in money, would decide to give the valuable collection to his Vaterstadt in one form or another’. The loss was critical for the museum’s history; reference to this miscalculation and the loss of this collection remained a prominent fixture in the discussions around the museum for the next thirty years. (HSAc: Kirchenpauer/P.M. 9.10.85).

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has currently become a sport, they have been driven up so considerably that for our means they have already reached a scarcely affordable height (LT: 30.4.82).

Considering this sport-like atmosphere, it is not surprising that when the ethnographic collection was eventually sold to Leipzig the Hamburg press erupted in condemnations, local elites expressed shock and dismay, and the Senat quickly moved to acquire Godeffroy’s natural history collection in order to save face. Newspapers in Leipzig, on the other hand, gleefully reprinted the lamentations of the Hamburg press, local officials celebrated their city’s good fortune, while outside observers shook their heads at Leipzig’s Schnupchen - the head of the German commission at the 1885 World’s Fair in Antwerp calling it a ‘laughable price’.’Some reactions to the sale were even quite hostile as they expressed the important loss or gain for the respective cities. L. Friederichsen in Hamburg, for example, wrote to Director Obst in Leipzig:

Dear Friend! The news of the sale of the Godeffroy Museum to your Volkerkunde museum extremely surprised and painfully moved myself and all concerned parties [his emphasis]. The devil should come snatch up the greedy Dr. Godeffroy! This is certainly an irreparable disgrace for Hamburg! You and Leipzig can only be congratulated for the acquisitions ( M N L B 02427: 7.10.85).

While Dr. E. Graeffe, who had once collected for Godeffroy, indicated in his letter to Obst how this reflected on both cities:

Your message, that the Godeffroy Museum was acquired by the Volkerkunde museum in Leipzig was completely new to me! So, Hamburg actually allowed this treasure from within its walls to go, and its enterprising citizens thought no further on honour! While I am somewhat hurt by Hamburg’s ingratitude, I am also delighted that this arduously acquired collection has at least gone to this well-known museum in an intellectual centre, to a university city ( M N L B 02453: 20.12.85).”

The loss of this collection, however, was viewed not so much in the Hamburg Senat, the local papers, o r the private correspondence as a lost opportunity to improve their scientific institutions per se, rather it was discussed more as a loss of honour and prestige, a theme which consistently recurred in the discussions of other acquisitions in Hamburg year after year, as science continued increasingly to function as a means to achieving recognition.”

Some twenty-five years later in the wake of Senator Werner von Melle’s persistent drive to restructure Hamburg’s image, one Speaker returned to these issues of competition, material value and prestige during a debate over purchasing a collection from another native Hamburger. Noting that several other European and American museums had attempted to acquire the collection, and arguing that the Berlin museum

9 This letter from the German Committee at the 1885 World’s Fair in Antwerp is one of a series of letters between the Leipzig museum and the German representatives concerning acquisitions for the museum through the exposition and discussing the activities of buyers from the Berlin museum (MVL B 02467: 12.10.85).

10 The ideal of the ‘Universitatsstadt’ played a critical role in Leipzig’s self-imagining, was integral to the competition between Leipzig and Berlin and contributed fundamentally to the development of the Leipzig museum.

11 At the same time, underwriting much of the enthusiasm for this collection in Leipzig was the recognition that this collection of never-to-be-reproduced artifacts was a tremendous investment which would only increase in value over the years.

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would certainly purchase it if the Senat failed to act, he stressed that the purchase of this collection was an excellent opportunity to help reshape Hamburg’s image as well as to turn a profit. In the face of lamentations from the city’s finance committee about the expense of the collection, he argued:

As I, incidentally, have been informed, the administration of a second German museum [Berlin] is also considering the collection, and if we do not purchase it for this price this second museum administration will. I do not know, whether I need to name this museum administration - (Shout: No!) . . . The collection is not only valuable, but also cheap, and therefore I would beseech you to agree to this purchase! (HSAb: M 29.7.07)

Moving then from a stress on competition and profits to an emphasis on what the museum and this collection could do for the city, he argued further:

We citizens of Hamburg have recently demonstrated, by founding the so-called Hamburg scientific foundation, that we surely know to honour and promote art and science in our Vuterstudt. We have here once again a fitting opportunity to demonstrate to others, that Hamburg is not only a Hundelsstudt and a city of materials gains, but that we are also willing to nurture and cultivate art and science inside the walls of our Vuterstudt and therefore I beseech you again to pass this motion! (Bravo!)” (HSAb: M 29.7.07)

The competitive edge governing these debates is characteristic of the general mood surrounding the acquisition of ethnographic materials from either European o r non- European areas at this time. It is easy to forget that the European landscape was often scoured for artifacts during this period as well, and that whether it was a discussion of ferocious cannibals’ material culture or the handwork and dress of Bavarian or Saxon peasants, a sense of urgency, a recognition of rapidly changing times, and a concern with preserving and cataloging artifacts from recognisably vanishing culture which were recognisably vanishing consistently underwrote all such discussions.” But in the case of collecting in non-European lands this was particularly intense; fired by a conviction that the ‘europeanisation’ of other cultures threatened to make impossible the study of other peoples in their most pristine state and a recognition that artifacts produced by these cultures were rapidly vanishing, an ever-increasing number of museums, private collectors, amateur scientists and curiosity dealers fought among each other to corner a part of the market wherever they could. This was much more than ‘salvage anthropology’. Scarcity and strangeness became the catchwords in a scientific enterprise increasingly governed by aesthetics, market values, local identity politics, and a desire to beat one’s competitors to the punch. The chief consequence of

12 This concerned the purchase of the Thomannschen collection from Burma, gathered by a Hamburg resident and offered for sale to New York, Berlin and Hamburg. The initial asking price was 200,000 Marks, but Hamburg was able to convince the collector to sell for 60,000 Marks (an incredible bargain considering that A. Griinwedel, Directorial Assistant at the Berlin Museum wrote to Thilenius offering to pay over twice this amount). The finance committee argued that the city could not afford such purchases owing to their fiscal commitments, and especially in view of the fact that these included building a new gasworks and a new hospital for well over ten million Marks. This is typical of the difficulties faced by the directors of the museums.

13 Good examples of this consistency come out of Adrian Jacobsen’s letters relating to his collecting ventures in and outside Europe: the language he uses to describe these actions in both areas, as well as his subjects, is essentially the same. Jacobsen worked as a collector and Custos for Rudolf Virchow’s Museum f i i ~ deutsche Volkskunde as well as for Carl Hagenbeck and many of the Volkerkunde Museums (J A); the debates surrounding the acquisition of Altertiimer in Germany (i.e. those between Saxon and Prussian institutions) are another excellent example (LZ: 20.8.74).

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this was that museums exerted their greatest efforts and pooled their resources to collect in areas not yet reached by either colonial expansion or other museums - a combination of opportunism, market values and chance, in other words, often governed what ethnologists chose to put in their museums.

One of the best examples of this concerns the Berlin museum’s collecting adventures on the Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada in the early 1880s. Upon hearing of plans by the Bremen ethnographic museum to send scientists to the area, Adolf Bastian, director of the Berlin museum, telegraphed Adrian Jacobsen, a well-known collector, to scrap his plans for a three-year collecting venture in the South-Seas and to immediately board a steamer for America.14 In by far the biggest collecting action of the day, Jacobsen made a lightning dash to the area, acquiring in a short time what remains one of the largest collections from the Northwest Coast, and effectively shutting out other European and American com- petitors. His collections were greeted with an overwhelming enthusiasm in Berlin, while news of his ventures sparked envy and controversy in other cities and nations, leading ethnologists at the Smithsonian Institution, for instance, to portray the venture as a serious blow against American honour and to lobby their government for funding that would allow them to engage in this competition before all of America’s treasures were lost (Cole 1985).

Interestingly, this collection of some 7,000 items was tremendously well received by Berlin academics, museum officials and patrons in spite of the fact that Jacobsen, having had no academic training as an anthropologist o r ethnologist, was terribly concerned about the quality of his selections. As an experienced collector, however, he focused on rarities, very old and very strange items, and this led to his success. Nevertheless, he was constantly frustrated in his attempts to obtain such things, since local antiquity dealers and collectors had often driven up the prices of artifacts and ‘gotten the best things’ before he arrived - indicating the degree to which the understanding of the ‘value’ assigned to such artifacts was not particularly scientific, but was something shared and perhaps jointly created by scientific researchers, private collectors and curiosity dealer^.'^

Such attitudes and goals remained an entrenched part of European collecting cultures well into the twentieth century; in fact, they were so generally accepted that Georg Thilenius, director of the Hamburg ethnographic museum, had no reservations about stating these goals quite clearly when discussing the ultimate purpose of his 1908 South-Seas expedition. Thilenius wrote in 1907:

The concern [of this expedition] will be to choose a population currently exposed to european- ization, so that on the one hand, all of the important elements of the culture are still present, yet on the other hand is already far enough along in the process of europeanization that a resurgence of the old culture would be out of the question. In this case the expedition would be able to return home with a complete picture of the culture including its most fundamental characteristics,

14 In Jacobsen’s autobiographical essay titled ‘Wie ich in Verbindung mit Hagenback kahm!’Jacobsen clearly stated the reason for this action: ‘The primary reason for this measure was that an expedition to British Columbia and Eastern Siberia was being equipped in Bremen as well, and we wanted to arrive before them’. (JA)

15 It is also worth noting that he was supported by donations from the Ethnographic Hilfcommitte, a private organisation set up by well-to-do Berliners (usually non-academics) to support the museum’s acquisitions. I t was not funded by the national government. (JA: Tugebiicher from N W Coast; MVBJ).

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without having to fear, that an expedition to the same area, undertaken at some later time by another museum, could obtain equally valuable results (MVH/SSE 1: ThilenidHWS 1907; Fischer 1981).16

Thus the primary goals of this scientific expedition were to ‘corner the market’ in one area of material culture by gaining a collection that would retain its value and contribute to the prestige of Hamburg and its museum - a collection which was sure to never be reproduced by a culture guaranteed to perish.

In addition, the ramifications of this approach also extended into the museums themselves, governing what could be displayed. Not only did most museums end up focusing on particular areas determined by market forces, but the energetic compe- tition to acquire the material culture of other peoples led to a collecting and hoarding of artifacts that quickly created a gap in the history of the collections and the history of the displays in all major German ethnographic museums.” Space limitations and the aggressive competition abroad also contributed to the separation of European material culture out of these museums, a division that was contrary to the planners’ original intentions but made prudent by the realities of the collecting frenzy which continued to gain momentum in the first decades of the twentieth century.’*

Spurred on by the desire to please their patrons and increase their institutions’ prestige, museums filled their rooms, halls and storage facilities with the items they found to be in the highest demand. But as the size of the collections rapidly increased the facilities for housing such collections often lagged seriously behind, so that new plans were constantly being created for the next building, while new buildings, once occupied, quickly became overcrowded, jumbled and confused. One observer, lament- ing the state of Berlin’s museum in 1901 portrayed the visitor’s odyssey through the museum in this way:

16 That this document was labelled ‘confidential’ (Vertruulicb) only further confirms the competitive nature of such an expedition.

17 Space was always at a premium in the nineteenth-century museums, and much of what was collected could not be displayed. The famous Jacobsen collection, mentioned above, was only shown in its entirety at one time, in a temporary location in the old Stock Exchange following its arrival in the city, and afterwards the majority of the collection was returned to boxes and stored. The Godeffroy collection in Leipzig met a similar fate, and was first set up in its entirety only some twenty years after acquisition. However, because of a lack of room, many other collections were never exhibited at all; of those that were exhibited, many were displayed because of contracts with the contributors. See note 20 below.

18 This original plan can be found in the documents concerning the founding of the Berlin Museum. Report over the building from the directors of the Berliner Anthropoloische Gesellschaft from 24.5.78 (GSAb: BAG Denkschrift 24.5.78.) The discussion of the original plan was also revisited during public debates on the museum’s future and ministerial debates over the creation of a national museum in Berlin. ( V S 3.7.1900, TR 18.2.01). In both Hamburg and Leipzig the attempt to include Europe in the museums began with their foundation. Thilenius returned to this emphasis when he took over the Hamburg museum in 1904, and planned a European section for the new museum, eventually opened in 1919. Karl Weule (director in Leipzig following Obst’s death in 1906) was forced publicly to rationalise this division following criticism in the Leipzig newspapers, and argued that although Europe had been included in the museum from the beginning, space and other limitations made it difficult to create good displays, and that because the Nuturvolker were so rapidly disappearing, ethnologists were forced to focus on acquiring their material objects before they were gone (an argument that lasted over 40 years). The museum later admitted that this section really had been neglected, and the European collection was given increased space in the displays. (LN: 2.12.04, L N 10.12.04, LA Sonderuusgabe: 29.11.13)

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On the ground floor [of the museum the visitor] finds the heimiscbe prehistory and the remains of the Schliemann Iliad. If he is able to pull himself away from the amphora from Troy or the innumerable pieces of pottery from the Prussian administrative region, he will immediately find himself in the middle of a hall, half of which is filled with Inca mummies and earthen vessels, the other half with fur overcoats from the inhabitants of the Amur region and metalwork from the land of the Shah. Naturally only provisionally! He climbs to the second floor of the building; in the gallery he has the choice of turning from a store of Papuan idols right to the bronzes out of African Benin or left to the urns of now extinct Argentineans. He decides for Africa, gadgets in the South Seas, emerges out of New Guinea suddenly among the Feuerlander and encounters in the last American hall Asian Tschuktschen with Eskimos, Mexicans, and Chileans united like neighbors. How could he still have the strength and courage to savor the exemplary ordered but overwhelmingly crushed-together treasures from vorder- and Hinterindian, Indonesia, China, Japan, which are on the third floor? With horror he hears that there is a fourth-floor as well, which is shared by the anthropological collection and American plaster castings. n h e author then ends with a question.] Should these scientific collections from throughout the world be permitted to be mixed together like cabbage and turnips? (VZ: 6.7.00)19

The overwhelming size, complexity and problematic arrangement of the museum is made painfully clear by this report. Yet what the author fails to mention is that often times there was a method to this madness. As Bastian was reminded in 1900 by Arthur Baessler, head of the ethnographic Hilfscommittk, a privately funded organisation set up to support acquisitions for the Berlin museum, big donations had to be displayed regardless of space limitations. Otherwise the museum ran the risk that contributors would ask for their collections to be returned or would take their next collection to a museum more prepared to properly celebrate their contributions. Thus the ‘order of things’, to borrow a well-worn phrase from Michel Foucault, was often determined as much by the desire to please a patron and stay in the competition as to construct cultural hierarchies or explain current theories about the multiplicity of humanity.”

19 This article was one of a series in a public debate about the future of the museum. Weule also noted the conditions of the Berlin museum both publicly and in private correspondence with the Leipzig city council, and argued that Leipzig’s museum was quickly moving in this direction (as a result of his extensive collecting policies). LA Sonderausgabe: 29.1 1.13)

20 Sometimes this was due to conditions stated in official contracts (such was the case with donations from the Neu Guinea Compaigne in 1885, which even noted that failure to abide by the conditions would lead to the collections being taken back (GSAc: NGC/Gossler 24.9.85) but often this was simply because the museum’s Mitarbeiter recognised that patrons who donated collections generally wished to have their collections conspicuously displayed, and were discouraged from making donations when previous gifts were not set out for pubicviewing. Thus, for example, Arthur Baessler, chairman of the privately organised HilfscommittP sent a circular to director Bastian in 1900 (during the same year that the above critique in the VZ appeared) noting that a Dr Max Fischer von Oppenheim, who had earlier donated collections to the museum was about to embark on another trip abroad, and could be persuaded to collect for the museum. However, Baessler also noted that, ‘collections which were earlier donated to the museum by him were not displayed, rather were packed away in crates’, and Oppenheim expressed little interest in further assisting the museum unless his collections were displayed. In spite of the shortage of room in the museum and Oppenheim’s insistence that his donations be displayed, Baessler stressed: ‘It would be in the museum’s interest, to put forth this request to the meritorious traveller’ (MVBE 994/00: Baessler/Bastian 17.1 1.00). None of this, of course, was news to Bastian, who was well aware that in some cases collections which were not given adequate exposure were asked to be returned. Thus large donations maintained a presence in the museums’ exhibitions which did not always correspond to their scientific importance, and technical, micro-political, and economic considerations always channelled and shaped scientific ideals and limited what the museum could do. There are many similar examples.

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At the same time, however, even during the many well-organised temporary exhibitions, or during periods when museums occupied new buildings and set up carefully organised collections, there is little evidence that even the well-educated public was able to extract or receive the scientific messages better gained through a close reading of scholarly journals. In a 1907 official report about the current state of ethnographic museums, Thilenius lamented their condition and argued that a collec- tion cannot look like a magazine if it hopes to communicate something:

To the layman, even a well-arranged magazine would easily remain a collection of curiosities which would give him impressions of strangeness, ‘amuse’ or ‘interest’ him, but in the end leaves him with a feeling of dissatisfaction. It is quite characteristic that visitors to our museum happily entrust themselves to guided tours through the collection by one of our overseers; they suspect that the employee knows something about these things, which one cannot begin to understand alone (HSAd: Thilenius 3.5.07).

H e noted as well that people visiting the museums enjoyed asking questions, but he also complained that the dominant question was ‘what does one do with it?’ and that the general reaction to any exp,lanation was: ‘oh, how strange!’ Seldom did he hear questions about how things were put together, o r why they are fashioned in a certain way. Strangeness dominated and the museums enticed, but caught up in the spectacle of display, it was often difficult to spark visitors’ interests in the meanings these artifacts might have in other cultures or for the multiplicity of human culture these artifacts might imply. Visitors first had to learn to ‘read’ the taxonomies and to ‘see’ the order before one could discern the messages and take part in the ‘knowing’, and thus many turned to the ‘knowers’ for instructions on how to ‘see’; yet ultimately, when either guided through collections by an employee or strolling through them alone, Thilenius indicated that visitors appear to have left the museums with their convictions confirmed rather than with newer ideas in hand.

When stringing together the day-to-day decision-making processes in an effort to understand the particular development of individual museums, there is an element of contingency which cries out for recognition and which clearly affected the museums’ acquisitions and displays. Micro-politics, market forces, financial and technical limita- tions contributed fundamentally to the parameters in which ethnologists were forced to operate and often guided their decisions. As public spaces, these museums were sites of intersection in which intellectual ideas, political policies, cultural politics on local, national, international levels, and science in the popular imagination came together to fashion these institutions and their displays. As local groups embraced and often harnessed the international discourses promulgated by the ‘sciences of mankind’, they brought with them competing agendas which directly affected the narratives of German museums. These institutions became collective projects, supported for a variety of reasons, and it is therefore problematic to talk about ‘the intended function’ behind the museums or ‘the primary function’ such museums have played in Europe or North America, particularly given museums’ often idiosyncratic development (Forgan 1994: 141). Of course, some generalities can be made and it is clear that science, with its ever-increasing authority, continued to be harnessed for its power to name, define and authenticate, and remained consistently entrenched in Germans’ relationship with the broader world; but this was a power that often lost its control to a passion for possession, which although not mutually exclusive from the former, frequently legitimated well-ordered systems being thrown into disarray. The spectacle

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which often emerged continued to have meaning, but it was a meaning perhaps less defined and more open to interpretation than the ‘museum masters’ would have preferred.

Glenn Penny Department of History University of Illinois 810 South Wright Street 309 Gregory Hall Urbana Illinois 61801 USA

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Washington Press.

Abbreviations

H N Hamburger Nachrichten LA Leipziger Abendzeitung L N Leipziger Nachrichten LT Leipziger Tageblatt SB Schalk (Berlin) T R Taglicher Rundschau vs Vossisches Zeitung

M U N I C I P A L D I S P L A Y S 167

Manuscript Sources GSA

HSA

JA MVB

MVL

MVH

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. All citations in this paper come from the following files: ‘a’ indicates I HA, Rep. 76 Ve. Sekt. 15., Abt. XI., N r 2, Bd 11. ‘b’ indicates IHA, Rep. 76 Ve. Sekt. 15., Abt. 111. Nr. 2, Bd 11. ‘c’ indicates I HA, Rep. 76 Ve. Sekt. 15., Abt. XI., Nr 2, Bd V1. Hamburg Staatsarchiv. All citations in this paper come from the following files: ‘a’ indicates file 361-5 I, Hochschulwesen I, C 11, b 15, Bd. I. ‘b’ indicates file 361-5 I, Hochschulwesen I, C 11, b 15, Bd HI. ‘c’ indicates file 361-5 I, Hochschulwesen I, C IX a, 39 a, Bd I. ‘d’ indicates 361-5 I Hochschulwesen I, C 11, a 1. ‘M’ indicates Mitteilung des Senats an die Burgerscbaft. Jacobsen Nachlass, Hamburgisches Museum fur Volkerkunde Museum fur Volkerkunde, Berlin. ‘J’ indicates the papers of Adrian Jacobsen. ‘E’ indicates the papers in ‘Erwiterungsbau des Koniglichen Museums fur Volkerkunde Vol. 1’. Museum fur Volkerkunde zu Leipzig. ‘B’ indicates the Briefwecbsel (collection of corre- spondence). Hamburgisches Museum fiir Volkerkunde. ‘SSE’ refers to the holdings concerning the South Seas Expection 1908-10

Abbreviations BAG Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft GRM NGC Neu Guinea Compaigne HWS Hamburger Wissenschaftliche Stiftung

General Administration of the Royal Museums

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