Many people ask me how I arrived at this topic and what possessed me to devote so much time to nineteenth-century German ethnographic museums. The project began innocently enough: I arrived in graduate school with questions about identity formation and a strong interest in museums. I did some initial work on history museums in East and West Germany,1 but it soon became clear to me that if I was going to posit questions about German identities, particularly German national identity, then it would make good intellectual sense to begin in the middle of the nineteenth century rather than at the end of the twentieth.
As I shifted my focus back in time, Völkerkunde museums immediately caught my attention because of the ways they were distributed across Germany's institutional landscape - and the fact that so many had been founded during a very short period of time. Indeed, the museums in Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich (by far the largest and most well known) were all founded between 1868 and 1877.2 Local associations in each of these cities created them simultaneously and spontaneously; I found that intriguing. But even more intriguing was that no one could tell me why.
This and several other fairly simple questions pushed me forward: I wanted to know why the world's largest ethnographic museum was in Berlin - where it was conceived before the creation of the German nation and founded more than a decade before Germany became a colonial power in 1884. I wanted to know why these museums grew at such an astounding rate that they quickly became the envy of scientists and museum directors across Europe and the United States. And, given the number and impressive growth of these institutions, I wanted to know why there was little mention of German ethnologists or their museums in the literature on the history of anthropology.3
There are, I think, a number of different explanations for this absence, but primary among them is that the trauma of National Socialism and German anthropologists' complicity in Nazi racial policies have made the history of late nineteenth-century German ethnology difficult for historians to reconstruct.4 The majority of scholars who have examined this period have generally either focused on locating antecedents to the racial and biological theories promoted by German anthropologists during the Weimar and Nazi periods, or they have sought to expose ethnologists' complicity in colonialist policies. One can occasionally find references to nineteenth-century German ethnologists and their museums in the more general literature on the history of anthropology. We know from George Stocking's work, for example, that E. B. Tylor in Britain was influenced by Germany's leading ethnologist Adolf Bastian, and Curtis Hinsley has made it clear in his work on the Smithsonian Institution that Otis Mason's conceptions of museum display were shaped in fundamental ways by his visits to Leipzig's ethnographic museum; but for the most part, nineteenth-century German ethnologists and their museums have received surprisingly little attention during the period in which they were arguably the most influential.5
Although the scholarship on German ethnology was - and still is - quite limited, there is a much larger historiography on ethnographic and other kinds of museums and displays, as well as a considerable amount of literature on the history of British and American anthropology; it was largely this literature, together with my background in European history, that helped me shape my initial questions. While preparing to do my research, for example, I read a lot about the roles museums played in the search for order in the late nineteenth century, the ways in which they had been used as part of a more general checking process to control rapid change and fortify and legitimate established orders and values. I learned how scientists often constructed their museums with the goal of disseminating values to their publics. I read that museums often became the tools of particular classes, that they promulgated gendered ideals as well as nationalist and colonialist goals, and that they had been used to help legitimate racial, social, and cultural hierarchies, and to fashion clearly recognizable "others" and "selves."6
As a result, I arrived in the archives ready to unveil the ethnologists' links to colonialism, to read the displays, to discern the hierarchies, and to analyze the "others." Much to my surprise, however, I found disorder rather than order. I found a combination of older, cosmopolitan traditions and civic self-promotion rather than nationalist or colonialist goals governing the museums' founding, growth, and even the creation of their displays. I found that the directors and ethnologists in these museums eschewed Darwin and racial theories. I found an international market in material culture guiding ostensibly scientific decisions and creating scientific value, and I found a range of different publics shaping these museums rather than being instructed from above - all points that I have written about at length in my dissertation.7
Clearly I cannot collapse the entire dissertation into this essay or go into all these issues at great length. However, I think it would be useful if I at least explain the dissertation's title, "Cosmopolitan Visions and Municipal Displays," and discuss some of its implications. I will begin by quickly sketching out the ways in which the Humboldtian visions shared by Germany's first ethnologists combined with the cosmopolitan orientations of their supporters in a range of different cities to channel and shape German ethnographic museums and provide these institutions and the scientists in them with their impressive momentum. I will also discuss, just briefly, the transformation of these museums over time and, most important, what I believe their histories can tell us about both the development of German ethnology as a science as well as Germany's road to modernity.
In late nineteenth-century Germany ethnology was an emerging discipline led by intellectual newcomers in cities caught up in the throes of change. Ethnology began to emerge in the late 1860s as a scientific discipline in Europe, and consequently German ethnology benefited from the wave of civic associations that began forming after the Napoleonic wars and especially from the increasing numbers of natural scientific associations that were founded following the 1848 revolutions.8 Many of the people involved in these associations, and many who later championed ethnographic museums, were also inspired by the travel literature that began flooding Europe at this time. They were enchanted by Alexander von Humboldt's cosmopolitan vision, his challenge to pursue total histories of humanity and the world, and his penchant for massive empirical projects.9 His vision and method constituted the critical intellectual backdrop for men like Adolf Bastian, the director of Berlin's ethnographic museum from 1873 to 1905 and perhaps the leading ethnologist of the day, as well as the physicians, businessmen, professionals, and others who helped aspiring ethnologists such as Hermann Obst create their institutions.10
It was largely a result of this Humboldtian vision and their commitment to vast empirical projects that Germans developed a future-oriented ethnology centered around large collecting museums. Moreover, it also was because of this vision that they regarded their displays as working arrangements for exploring human nature, rather than (as in Britain and the United States) static explanations about humanity and the world.11 As Bastian envisioned it in the early 1870s, the ideal ethnographic museum would contain material culture from across the globe and throughout time, but it would not be constructed to articulate pointed narratives. Bastian favored open collections in which objects were arranged in cabinets made of glass and steel, flooded by natural light from large windows and glass ceilings, and positioned in such a way that the visitor could move easily through the geographically organized displays, gain an overview of the objects from entire regions, and make mental connections between the material cultures of people living in different times and places. Such arrangements were fundamentally different than what one might find in art museums or even in the colonial museums and exhibitions that became so popular later in the century. No particular object, grouping, or arrangement was supposed to stand out or be emphasized; there was no developmental series of artifacts such as one might find in the evolutionary arrangements in many British and American museums; and the museum's goal was not to instruct its visitors with pedagogical exhibits. The displays were meant to function as tools of induction and comparative analysis, and they were expected to facilitate the location and exploration of the elementary characteristics of a unitary humanity and of the fundamental nature of "the human being."
This vision, this science, and the opportunity to create and fill these museums, emerged just as Germany's cities were beginning a phase of unprecedented growth.12 This proved critical for the development of ethnographic museums. Organizations of citizens in a range of cities consistently embraced ethnologists and their institutions for the same reason: because this new, international science provided the city that possessed a significant ethnological institution with cultural capital, and a means for exhibiting its citizens' worldliness and thus for refashioning themselves. The Germans who founded and supported Germany's largest ethnographic museums did so in four very different cities.13 Hamburg was a free city and mercantile harbor, Leipzig a landlocked commercial center, Berlin the national capital and an important industrial hub, and Munich the capital of Bavaria, which the historian Veit Valentine termed "the 'classic state' for antinational reaction."14 Despite their differences, these cities shared several characteristics: They were the largest cities in Imperial Germany, and during the period from 1850 to 1910 they all experienced fantastic growth. Berlin grew from a provincial capital to a city of over two million people. The populations in Hamburg and Munich increased five-fold, and Leipzig's population of 63,000 in 1850 grew to nearly eleven times that size by 1910.
The Germans who supported these institutions shared certain characteristics that provide us with critical insights into a nation that had only begun to be created in 1871: They were internationally as well as locally oriented; they were worldly despite their often-provincial origins; and they shared cosmopolitan outlooks, a strong civic pride, future-oriented worldviews, a powerful sense of optimism, and a willingness to take control, challenge older institutional structures, and refashion their environments to suit their needs. The actions and motivations of these worldly provincials reveal a Germany caught up in self-fashioning at the personal, local, and national levels. It was a Germany teeming with dynamic individuals and civic associations who eagerly embraced changes brought on by the second industrial revolution, the rising population, and the rapid growth of cities, and confidently viewed these changes as full of opportunities, something to be managed and negotiated rather than resisted.
The social life of these institutions also captures the tense interrelationship of regional, national, and international interests, as well as the avid intra-German competition that permeated Imperial Germany and the "German sciences."15 Much of the history of the Kaiserreich has been based on analyses of actions and attitudes in Prussia, particularly in Berlin. But the tendency to focus on Prussia when contemplating questions about Germany, German identities, or the German cultural sciences during the Imperial period has often obscured critical details about the development of modern Germany and the ways in which nationalism functioned as a stronger, more dominating form of particularism that ultimately proved much more stifling to Germans' cosmopolitan visions than their regional and local loyalties.
Moreover, these regional and local loyalties were hardly a drawback. They provided this and other German sciences with much of their dynamism. Despite the political and economic unification of Germany in 1871, cultural affairs were left in the hands of the individual regions, and many of the people living in these regions refused to follow Berlin. Hand-in-hand with the concerted efforts at nation building in the late nineteenth century went the persistence of strong regional and international orientations and an energetic competition among the aggregate components of this young nation.16 It often was this competition that drove civic societies to sponsor museums, continually increase their budgets, and support ever greater expeditions in an effort to outdo each other. And in many cases, the scientists and their supporters in the provinces set the trends - a fact the Prussocentric historiography has left unexplored.
Indeed, a strong cosmopolitan orientation and competitive zeal were critical components in the drive to refashion the reputations and images of Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich during the period of this study, and they constituted the chief orientation for the clusters of scientists and supporters who developed German ethnographic museums. They constantly compared themselves with their counterparts in other "world cities" and took great pains to insure that they were not only keeping pace with these other cities but setting that pace in scientific and cultural achievements. Indeed, in many ways this competition on the world stage made them much more worldly than they otherwise might have been.
Moreover, Germans' pressing desire to surpass the efforts of their counterparts in other German cities as well as to keep up with the latest international trends far outweighed any national interests behind the formation of these museums and continued throughout the Kaiserreich to guide the efforts of their supporters in fundamental ways - efforts that, if we accept Alan Beyerschen's argument about competitive science and technology being hallmarks of modernity, were explicitly modern even though they were not necessarily nationally oriented.17 Modernization, in other words, does not necessarily mean the nationalization of everything.
These questions of nation and colonialism are particularly important, and I considered including a number of examples from my dissertation: the repeated proposals for a national ethnographic museum that were continuously shot down; the colonial museum that was exiled into Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin where, without any state support, it teetered and tottered until it finally collapsed on the eve of World War I. I decided instead that it would make the most sense to simply make an explicit statement about the colonial question, because it is one that continues to come up again and again.
Many historians have characterized ethnology as the "foundational colonial discipline," and a number of scholars have made repeated attempts to tie German ethnologists' efforts at museum building during the late nineteenth century to colonial aspirations and nationalistic desires to raise Germany to world-power status.18
My dissertation explicitly questions these assertions. Clearly, ethnology took shape within colonial contexts, and ethnologists often became intertwined in colonialist agendas.19 However, this is hardly news. Stressing this single point would strike me as akin to running through an open door; whereas overstressing it, as many scholars continue to do, is an action that shows little appreciation for the complexity of colonial situations or the particular cultural and intellectual contexts in which German ethnology took shape.
Given the relatively weak enthusiasm for colonialist efforts in Germany during much of the Kaiserreich, it would strike me as misguided to assume that they could explain the creation and rapid growth of these museums.20 Simply the timing behind the founding of Berlin's ethnographic museum - by far the largest of its kind - should already give us cause to reconsider: The Berlin museum was envisioned before the creation of the German nation and founded eleven years before Germany became a colonial power in 1884. But this is only the first of many seemingly counterintuitive facts. The second-largest German ethnographic museum, for example, was not in Hamburg - Germany's major harbor city, with its extensive connections to all regions of the globe - or Göttingen, where Georg Forster returned after his voyage with James Cook and where the term Ethnologie was coined in the late eighteenth century; rather, it emerged in the landlocked city of Leipzig, where the ethnographic museum was founded in 1868 by a local association comprised mostly of autodidactic physicians and businessmen and supported throughout its existence as a municipal display rather than as part of a national endeavor.
A close analysis of the rhetoric and actions surrounding these museums makes it clear that when imperialism did begin to have a strong influence on ethnologists' displays it was largely an imperialism that came from below, pushed into the museums by the increasingly broad and socially diverse audiences that began frequenting them around the turn of the century. These audiences arrived in the wake of efforts by municipal governments to link their scientific museums to more general trends in education and to use the museums' visual displays to communicate with an increasingly large and diverse public. The directors of German ethnographic museums were drawn into these trends because of their dependence on municipal funds, and their movement was facilitated by their professonalization, which released them from their Humboldtian project as humanism went disciplinary in the late nineteenth century.
But if a new collectivity was formed with the rise of mass visual culture around the turn of the century, as scholars such as Vanessa Schwartz have argued,21 it was one in which the increasingly large and socially diverse audiences streaming into these museums, far from being "taught to see," channeled and shaped the meanings of ethnologists' displays and delimited what these scientists could do.
Furthermore, these visitors pushed the science in a dangerous direction. The putatively simple displays they demanded depended on an intertextualtiy of experiences that, when spread across these increasingly diverse groups of people, soon led to the oversimplification of ethnologists' messages, reinforcing facile notions of polarity between Europeans and non-Europeans, and displacing the empathy at the heart of ethnologists' Humboldtian visions with a pointed focus on human difference. Democratization, in other words, undermined the liberal tendencies initially at the heart of this science.22
Unfortunately, liberal humanism and democracy, two things that we in the West tend to cherish, do not always or necessarily coexist well.23 And what becomes clear through an analysis of the growth and development of Germany's leading ethnographic museums is the degree to which an awareness of the world portrayed in these museums became more hierarchical as they became popular public institutions. The process of democratization and professionalization undermined German ethnology's cosmopolitan character, divorced ethnologists from their liberal convictions, and made these museums, and indeed the science itself, more didactic, more proscriptive, and unfortunately much more effective vehicles for communicating ideas about irreconcilable human difference, which dovetailed quite nicely with new theories about race. The link between democratization and the rise of race theory among ethnologists and anthropologists is a point I am still pondering.