HARMONY AND COMPLICATION: The collection of Victor Goldschmidt, founder of the Ethnographic Museum of the J. u. E. von Portheim-Stiftung in Heidelberg

Abstract

The history of the little-known and partly lost collection of Victor Goldschmidt is traced here for the years 1895–1935. The collection was for a long time regarded as little more than a rag-bag and, in a reduced form, merely as a standard ethnographic collection. In fact it had an internal coherence which illustrated aspects of Victor Goldschmidt's intellectual standpoint as a natural philosopher. The analysis of Goldschmidt's assignment of meaning to the objects in his collection is followed by consideration and comparison of the ways in which the two subsequent curators, Alfred Zintgraff and Eugen Fehrle, exhibited parts of the collection in the service of imperialist and fascist ideology.