Museum Berlin Research Articles

(079) Proposal to convert Recommendation 41A.1 into an Article

Recommendation 41A.1 of the Shenzhen Code (Turland & al. in Regnum Veg. 159. 2018) states that “The full and direct reference to the place of publication of the basionym or replaced synonym should immediately follow a proposed new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name. It should not be provided by mere cross-reference to a bibliography at the end of the publication or to other parts of the same publication, e.g. by use of the abbreviations ‘loc. cit.’ or ‘op. cit.’” However, this Recommendation has not been followed by some authors in their publications owing to strict adherence to the format required by some journals, i.e. “Author(s) (year: page/plate number(s))” with full bibliographic details given in the References section of the paper. This is especially apparent in the journal Phytotaxa, but not in all cases (e.g. Kanokorn & al. in Phytotaxa 162: 120. 2014). Furthermore, there are a few other taxonomic journals such as Blumea and Telopea that follow this format for bibliographic/nomenclatural citation. However, when it comes to new combination, name at new rank or replacement name, a full and direct reference to the place of publication is also given immediately after the basionym or replacement name. As pointed out by Turland (Code Decoded, ed. 2: 39. 2019), we strongly feel that this method of citation is against what the Code recommends, even though it technically complies with what the Code rules. To bring uniformity to such citations, we would like to make Rec. 41A.1 mandatory by upgrading it to an Article by means of an amendment to the existing Art. 41.5, as follows. “41.5. On or after 1 January 1953, a new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name is not validly published unless its basionym or replaced synonym is clearly indicated and a full and direct reference given to its author and place of valid publication, with page or plate reference and date (but see Art. 41.6 and 41.8). On or after 1 January 2007, a new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name is not validly published unless its basionym or replaced synonym is cited. On or after 1 January 2025, a new combination, name at new rank, or replacement name is not validly published unless it is immediately followed by the full and direct reference to the author and place of publication of its basionym or replaced synonym.” We thank the Principal and the Head of the Department of Botany, Madras Christian College (Autonomous), Chennai and the Director, Botanical Survey of India, Kolkata for providing facilities. We also thank Dr. John McNeill, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh and Nicholas J. Turland, Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin for their comments.

(080) Proposal to amend Article H.5.2 concerning a nothotaxon with parent taxa at unequal ranks

Article H.5.2 of the Shenzhen Code (Turland & al. in Regnum Veg. 159. 2018) currently states that “If the postulated or known parent taxa are at unequal ranks, the appropriate rank of the nothotaxon is the lowest of these ranks.” This wording, perhaps unintentionally, creates a problem in certain cases. If the nothotaxon is the only one known for hybrids between the species to which its unequally ranked parent taxa belong, the rule could be interpreted as the author being instructed to publish an autonym at the lower rank, without valid publication of the name of an infraspecific nothotaxon that does not include the type of the nothospecies to which it is subordinate. This would be contrary to Art. 22.3. To clarify this situation, it is proposed that an explanatory clause and a further Example be added to Art. H.5.2. “H.5.2. If the postulated or known parent taxa are at unequal ranks, the appropriate rank of the nothotaxon is the lowest of these ranks, unless the nothotaxon is the only one known for hybrids between the species to which the parent taxa of the nothotaxon belong.” “Ex. 3. Smith & Figueiredo published the name Aloe ×engelbrechtii Gideon F. Sm. & Figueiredo (in Phytotaxa 464: 253. 2020) for the nothospecies with parents A. arborescens Mill. var. arborescens and A. hardyi Glen. If a nothotaxon is described between A. arborescens var. mzimnyati van Jaarsv. & A. E. van Wyk and A. hardyi, it will be at the rank of nothovariety and valid publication of its name will establish an autonym that will apply to A. arborescens var. arborescens × A. hardyi.” Nicholas Turland, Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin, and John H. Wiersema, Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., are thanked for helpful suggestions and refining the manuscript.

Overview of the documentary film "The first audio recording of Kazakh music. Road of people"

Kazakh traditional music has been the research object for many scientists from Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Japan, the United States, and other countries. In the 20th century, due to the establishment of Soviet power, the territory of Kazakhstan was closed for research by foreigners. Simultaneously, such a combination of events contributed to preserving materials collected before the Great October Socialist Revolution. Therefore, today it is vital for the World and Kazakh ethnomusicology to consider unknown materials and scientific sources. Various foreign archives contain materials unknown to Kazakh ethnomusicologists about Kazakh traditional music collected on researchers’ and traveler’s expeditions since the end of the XVIII century. Recordings of the German ethnographer-anthropologist R. Karutz were found in 2016 by the film crew of the Interstate TV and Radio Company “Mir”, and analyzed and published by the doctor of Art studies S. I. Utegalieva in the book” Turkestan collection of songs and instrumental pieces collected by R. Karutz (1905)”. These recordings prove that there are sources about Kazakh traditional music that can change the opinion about the historical significance of the Kazakh culture in the Central Asian region. The famous turcologist Efim Rezvan presented the records in the Pushkin Museum in St. Petersburg. It turned out that the original cylinders with authentic recordings are currently stored in the archive of the Berlin Museum of Visual Anthropology and Ethnology. This article reviews the documentary film "Road of People: The First Audio Recording of Kazakh Music", and sheds light on the possible prospects of studying the problem of research the Kazakh traditional music. Today, the Berlin Phonogram Archive contains samples of music from all over the world, the first recording dates back to 1900. The collection of wax cylinders by Richard Karutz is kept in the Department of Ethnomusycology, Visual Anthropology at the Berlin Phonogram Archive of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The collection is well preserved, and according to its curator Dr. Ricarda Kopal, there are 16 wax cylinders from Turkestan, an area of ​​now southern Kazakhstan, which R. Karuts crossed during his expedition. The film crew brought digital copies of the recordings to Almaty for further study. Kazakh and international scientists and performers, professors and doctors of sciences: S. Utegalieva, T. Togzhanov, A. Berdibay (Kazakhstan), I. Saurova (Karakalpak Autonomous Republic), R. Abdullaev (Uzbekistan) and others were involved to decipher, analyze, describe and evaluate the musical and artistic content of the recordings. The whole process was documented in the film, which was worked on by a whole team of professional journalists, the script was written by Timur Sandybaev and Askar Alimzhanov, directed by Kanat Yessenamanov.

Looking for the missing link in the evolution of black inks

In the transition from carbon to iron-gall inks, the two documents from the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin with shelfmarks P 13500 and P 13501 discussed in this work present an important case. Their inks appear brownish, although they date back to the fourth and third century BCE, when carbon inks are believed to have been commonly if not exclusively used. Using imaging micro-X-ray fluorescence and infrared reflectography, we discovered that the inks in both documents contain a significant amount of copper in addition to carbon. Comparing the extant recipes for black writing inks and the experimental evidence, we suggest that these inks are a transition between the pure carbon and the iron-gall inks. Such inks may have been quite common before the production of iron-gall ink was clearly understood and established.

Otto Warburg and his contributions to the screw pine family (Pandanaceae)

Otto Warburg (1859–1938) had a great interest in tropical botany. He travelled in South-East Asia and the South Pacific between 1885 and 1889 and brought back a considerable collection of plant specimens from this expedition later donated to the Royal Botanical Museum in Berlin. Warburg published the first comprehensive monograph on the family Pandanaceae in 1900 in the third issue of Das Pflanzenreich established and edited by Adolf Engler (1844–1930). The aim of this article is to clarify the taxonomy, nomenclature and typification of Warburg's contributions to the Pandanaceae. Considerable parts of Warburg's original material was destroyed in Berlin during World War II but duplicates survived, shared by Engler and Warburg with Ugolino Martelli (1860–1934). Martelli was an expert on the family and he assembled a precious herbarium of Pandanaceae that was later donated to the Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università degli Studi di Firenze. Warburg published 86 new names in Pandanaceae between 1898 and 1909 (five new sections, 69 new species, five new varieties, two new combinations and five replacement names). A complete review of the material extant in B and FI led to the conclusion that 38 names needed a nomenclatural act: 34 lectotypes, three neotypes and one epitype are designated here. Twenty new synonyms are also proposed. One Freycinetia name and six Pandanus names are considered as incertae sedis. A total of 21 names published by Warburg are accepted: 11 in Freycinetia and ten in Pandanus. In addition, four names published in Pandanus by Warburg serve as the basionyms of accepted names in the genus Benstonea.Citation: Callmander M. W., Vogt R., Donatelli A., Buerki S. & Nepi C. 2021: Otto Warburg and his contributions to the screw pine family (Pandanaceae). – Willdenowia 51: 5–31.Version of record first published online on 15 February 2021 ahead of inclusion in April 2021 issue.

The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship by Derek Scally

Review articles Derek Scally, The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship (Dublin: Penguin-Sandycove, 2021), 336 pages The author of this important book has been writing for the Irish Times for some twenty years. From his long experience of working as a journalist in Germany, he has become familiar with the concept of die Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process of coming to terms with the past, so vital for Germans in the light of all that has happened in their country in the 20th century. His book is a pilgrimage, literal and metaphorical, in aid of making the case for something like this process in relation to Ireland – on his own behalf, in the first instance, and, if he can help to promote it, on that of the country and its culture as a whole as well. He writes as the accomplished journalist he has shown himself to be over the years and with considerable research behind his enquiry. He depicts characters and situations with what can sometimes seem like a novelist’s touch, and he has an eye for the telling phrase. Irish seminaries in the past are, for example, described as having been ‘hothouses of theology and freezers for emotion and sexuality’ (104). The result of his skill as a writer is that, despite its length, The Best Catholics in the World is, for the most part, an easy – if often rather depressing – read. His exploration begins in Edenmore, the parish in north Dublin where he grew up in the 1980s, and ranges as far as the Stasi (secret police) museum in Berlin, the city where he has been living for many years – a certain German frame of reference, often quite illuminating, recurs throughout the book. The journey takes him by way of an instructive, if eclectic, itinerary of places in between, associated in one way or another with the often cataclysmic changes in Irish Christian and Catholic history over the centuries since St Patrick arrived on these shores, not least those in the last several decades. And so, beginning somewhat at the beginning, he finds himself in Trinity College, examining the Book of Kells – ‘even the Book of Kells has a shadowy side’, the author informs us (37), the comment a harbinger of not a little debunking of familiar myths in the pages to come. Later he is in Dingle, en route to Skellig Michael, and later again in Glendalough, iconic sites of Review Articles: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 480 early Irish monasticism and what we think of as Celtic Christianity – although that concept will be questioned in due course too – ‘no such thing as Celtic Christianity … the Church was always utterly subservient to Rome’, one academic historian is quoted as declaring (45). He attends Mass at a Massrock in Hollywood, Co. Wicklow, relic of penal days. He goes to consult the Central Catholic Library in Merrion Square, Dublin. In Baggot St, at one end he visits the office of Judge Yvonne Murphy, who presided over several recent investigations into clerical sexual abuse, and, further along, Mercy International, headquarters of the Sisters of Mercy, a significant Irish religious order, more recently embroiled in other abuse scandals. He goes to several Dublin art galleries, to view the artwork of Patrick Bolger (an abuse survivor) and Alison Lowry (inspired by the mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries). He travels to St Patrick’s College, Thurles, location of the 1850 Synod and ‘symbolic starting-point of modern Irish Catholicism’(205).We find him in Galway Cathedral, where a traditional novena to Our Lady is being conducted by a Redemptorist priest. He goes to Áras an Uachtaráin in the Phoenix Park to attend the President’s garden party for Magdalene survivors. He visits the offices of One in Four, an organisation founded by a prominent survivor of clerical sexual abuse in 2003 to help other childhood victims, in Holles St. He goes to Belmullet in Co. Mayo to meet Fr Kevin Hegarty, whose progressive editing of Intercom in the 1990s, including an article that would touch ‘on every issue that would convulse Ireland for the next...

The Invention of ‘National Antiquities’ in the Late Ottoman Empire. Archaeological Interrelations between Discourses of Appropriation, Preservation and Heritage Construction

In the late 19th century, the German Empire intensified its economic, military, and cultural activities on Ottoman territory. Within the field of archaeology, the Royal Museums in Berlin endeavoured to demonstrate their hegemony. Thus, they focused particularly on the acquisition of ancient objects from the Ottoman territory. The Ottoman authorities’ responses differed between political and cultural actors: While Sultan Abdülhamid II used Hellenistic and Byzantine antiquities as diplomatic gifts to improve his foreign relations to Berlin, the Müze-i Hümayun (Imperial Museum) appeared as an antagonist to foreign claims in the Ottoman Empire. Its directors, Osman Hamdi and Halil Edhem, aimed to rectify the discrepancy between political concerns and the will to preserve antiquities within the Ottoman realm. However, German archaeologists, museum representatives and diplomats strived to benefit from this discrepancy to obtain cultural objects for Berlin. The article argues that Prussia’s strategies of appropriating ancient objects for the Royal Museums correlated and entangled with the valorisation of antiquities in Istanbul.

Scenes from the Lotus Sutra. An Old Uygur Temple Banner with Cartouche Inscriptions

The temple banner IB 4781 of the former Ethnological Museum in Berlin (today: Hermitage Museum ВД 585) originates from Qočo (Dakianusšahri: afterwards D 222). A. Grünwedel gave its detailed description, but after his publication in 1905 it remained more or less untouched. The picture is based on an overall composition in which individual passages from the sutra have been integrated. The groups of figures arranged in the cloud scenes were examined in detail in Grünwedel's description. They are mostly bodhisattvas. In depicting the figures sitting around the Buddhas the painter has included figures seen from behind, so that one can correctly imagine a circle, which of course should indicate that all the figures are concentrated on the Buddha. The 10 text cartouches contain quotations in Old Uygur based on the Chinese text of the Lotus sutra. They are read here for the first time. In the paper these cartouche texts are studied as well as the names of the donors on the bottom of the temple banner.

The Libeskind Jewish Museum in Berlin, the unpresentable and experience

This paper is an attempt to interpret the design or spatial modulation of an important work of architecture in Berlin, Germany, namely Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. This is done by activating the heuristic potential of a number of relevant concepts from a variety of thinkers. After a brief introduction on modern architecture in Berlin, the focus shifts to this specific building, which is briefly described before interpretively introducing the notions of the ‘real’ in the work of Jacques Lacan – which denotes that which surpasses symbolisation, and is encountered in traumatic experiences – and correlatively, of ‘earth’ in that of Heidegger, which suggests something that only manifests itself in so far as it withdraws from scrutiny. The hermeneutic significance of these concepts for the Jewish Museum is explored, followed by a similar examination of the interpretive relevance of the notions of the ‘unpresentable’, ‘unsayable’ and sublime (Lyotard, Kant) for Libeskind’s building. Given the enormity and unpresentable horror of the event (the Holocaust) indexed by the Jewish Museum, any analysis of the meaning of this building would be incomplete without focusing specifically on the experience(s) afforded to visitors. In this regard the work of Arleen Ionescu on the Jewish Museum – on the significance of its ‘voids’, for example – and the (written) work of Libeskind himself (on the relevance of light, for instance) prove to be invaluable. Finally, Karsten Harries’s insights concerning the ‘ethical function of architecture’, ‘a sense of place’ and ‘community’ are employed to draw together the strands of the present interpretive essay

The Golem Awakened

The Golem Awakened Małgorzata Stępnik (bio) I am a guest from afar;I forgot everything that happened to me earlier … (Lejwik [Leivick], 72)1 The text is home; each commentary a return….The seeming nomad in truthcarries the world within him, as does language itself. (Steiner, 102) In Josefov, the Jewish district of Prague, time seems to flow backward, just like the direction of Hebrew script. The golden hands of the clock on the tower of the Jewish town hall are moving from right to left, taking us back into the past, shrouded in a veil of parables and legends. The thoughts of Shylock, a Shakespearean character, travel in the same direction, reinterpreted and in a way appropriated by Roee Rosen in his latest book, The Blind Merchant (2016).2 The town hall is directly adjacent to the Gothic walls of the Old-New Synagogue (Czech: Staronová Synagoga), the oldest active synagogue in Europe. Inside its raw, Gothic interior, in the immediate vicinity of the bimah, there is a chair on which once the chief rabbi of Prague sat—the famous Yehuda Löw ben Bezalel, called the Maharal (c. 1520–1609). It is with the charismatic figure of the Maharal that the most widespread version of the legend of Golem is associated (Hebrew: גלֶֹם); the legend of a monster made of clay and brought to life with the word "truth" (Hebrew: emet, אֱמתֶ), a mute guard of the Prague ghetto. A monster that (and that is essential) rebelled against its creator. The interest in this mythical figure is reflected in literature: from the romantic narratives of Jakob Grimm or Mary Shelley (Frankenstein [End Page 26] or the Modern Prometheus, 1818), to the post-Holocaust literature publications—with the most notable examples being the famous novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Golem, 1969) and Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), which combines the themes of demiurgic actions and escapism. The image of a rebellious android—and sometimes also a gynoid—has also impregnated the imagination of filmmakers for almost a hundred years. After all, the same genre also includes expressionist works by Paul Wegner (Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam, 1920),3 and Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927), some later adaptations, such as Julien Duvivier's Le Golem (1936), as well as numerous science fiction productions, including Rupert Sanders's Ghost in the Shell (2017)—a story of a female cyborg, inspired by a Japanese manga. Recalling further examples would obviously go far beyond the subject undertaken in this article. Yet I will take the liberty of mentioning two other emblematic works from the field of traditional plastic arts. The first one is an oil painting titled The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem), painted in 1980 by Ronald B. Kitaj, a cofounder of the School of London, and, above all, the author of two Diasporist Manifestos.4 The second one is a bronze statue representing the Golem, erected in 2010 by David Ćerny in Poznań to commemorate the birthplace of the great Maharal. It is significant that as many as 136 artworks drawing on the clay monster were gathered at the exhibition Golem! Avatars d'une légende d'argile, displayed at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris (March 8–July 26, 2017). As rightly pointed out by the organizers of the exhibition, where the works of, among others, Ronald B. Kitaj, Philippe Guston, and Christian Boltansky have been presented, "The legend of the Golem has always fascinated artists, who have seen it as a metaphor of their role as creators capable of bringing inert matter to life."5 It is worth adding that, at almost the same time, an exhibition devoted to the figure of Golem was also hosted at the Jüdishes Museum Berlin (September 23, 2016–January 29, 2017). Martina Lüdicke, in chapter 7 of a catalogue published on this occasion, associates this mythical creature with the figure of a doppelgänger, which, incidentally, fits the canon of the psychoanalytic theory perfectly (see Otto Rank's essay on the doppelgänger, 1925, written 1914). As Lüdicke asserts: [End Page...

Curatorial Practices of the ‘Global’: Toward a Decolonial Turn in Museums in Berlin and Hamburg?

Wer definiert den Kanon zeitgenössischer »globaler Künste«? Diese empirische Mixed-Methods-Studie untersucht, wie verschiedene Konzepte des »Globalen« in so genannten »globalen« visuellen Künsten in zwei deutschen Ausstellungshäusern kuratiert werden. Dekoloniale Ästhetiken, postkoloniales Denken und die Provenienz von Museumsobjekten haben Museen in Deutschland in einer Debatte über ihre Eurozentristischen Perspektiven, ihre Situiertheit, die Unterscheidung zwischen Kunst und Objekt und die Reproduktion kolonialen Denkens und Dominanzmustern herausgefordert, ihre Legitimität zu beweisen. Obwohl eine kritische Wende in aktuellen kuratorischen Praktiken sichtbar ist, bleibt unklar, ob dieser Wandel das Ergebnis von Dekolonialisierungsbestrebungen der Kunstorganisationen selbst darstellt. Darauf bezogen werden die Möglichkeiten, Einschränkungen und Anwendungen von akademischen Konzepten wie »anti-rassistische« oder »postkoloniale Kuration« diskutiert. Diese Studie belegt sowohl Ansätze einer dekolonialen Wende in der weitgehend Weißen kuratorischen Praxis als auch die Notwendigkeit zu weiteren Wandlungsprozessen in diesem Zusammenhang.

(2789) Proposal to conserve the name Pomaderris kumarahou (Rhamnaceae) with that spelling

(2789) Proposal to conserve the name <i>Pomaderris kumarahou</i> (<i>Rhamnaceae</i>) with that spelling

Queer Tactics, Handwritten Stories: Disrupting the Field of Museum Practices

Renaud Chantraine, co-Guest Editor of the present volume, initiated a conversation in March 2020 with Birgit Bosold and E-J Scott around their practices as museologists and activists, and centred around their experiences as directors and founders of two community-based museums focused on LGBTQI+ heritage. Bosold is member of the Board of Directors of the Schwules Museum in Berlin (opened in 1985), while Scott founded the Museum of Transology in the UK in 2017. Chantraine, an anthropologist specialised in the construction of LGBTQI+ heritage who is also an activist involved in the creation of an LGBTQI+ archive and cultural centre set to open in Paris, was informed and inspired by Bosold and Scott’s experiences. In the conversation, Bosold and Scott discuss strategies and processes they employed that museum professionals might learn from in conceiving their own LGBTQI+ heritage projects, as well as outline the conflicts and (self-)critiques they encountered along the way. The conversation is a reflection on their practices and how they were put into action. It has been edited and reshaped in consultation with the authors, following an initial video call.

The Core-formed Glass Vessels from Middle Assyrian Aššur

Abstract This paper presents the LBA core-formed glass vessels from Aššur which are part of the collection of the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. Most of these pieces are presented here for the first time. One of the major objectives was to ascribe the vessels and fragments to their original find contexts, to discuss their function, and to make assumptions on their relevance. A detailed typological and chronological discussion of the objects from Aššur is provided; the vessels and fragments are further compared with representatives from other LBA sites in order to provide indications about the duration of the LBA core-formed glass production in general.

Insects, Threads, and Urinals: Polymorphous Desire Flows in Krzysztof Jung’s Work

Abstract The 2019 retrospective of the work of the Polish artist Krzysztof Jung (1951–1998) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin positioned the artist as unequivocally gay in his preoccupation with the male nude. The artist’s body-oriented practice, however, expands far beyond strictly defined homosexual desire. In this article, I discuss complex entanglements of polymorphous desires present in Jung’s work. Introducing the narratives of prostheses, quantum entanglements, and entomology, I look at Jung’s performances known as nitkowania (threadings) and selected drawings in order to trace the free flows of desire beyond identity politics and distinctly disparate sexual categories. Employing posthumanist narratives of bodily extensions, I argue that the ambiguous body in Jung’s practice serves as the artist’s explorations of identity as always—already entangled with desire, sex, sociality, and performativity, and therefore inherently fluctuating and wavering, and blurring bodily boundaries. Through these narratives, I seek to enable an empathic, affective, turned on connections with Jung as the queer archival subject. Such visceral contact across time and space, through a queer archive, grants Jung and his performers agency as we attempt to sense them through their embodiment and through our own, and the fluctuating desire we may share with them, rather than through a limiting set of identity politics.

Notes on the typification of several chameleon taxa (Sauria: Chamaeleonidae)

Abstract The obscure or dubious designation of the name-bearing type(s) and hence the type locality of three valid chameleon taxa, viz. Brookesia superciliaris, Calumma fallax and Trioceros schubotzi, is researched and clarified. It concerns type-material of the natural history museums of Berlin, London and Paris. In the appendix additional information as to the presence of name-bearing types in various museum collections is presented to amend the checklist of Glaw (2015).

Curating Conflict

This article compares four Jerusalem exhibits in different geographical and political contexts: at the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Jewish Museum Berlin. It examines the role of heritage narrative, focusing specifically on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is either openly engaged or alternatively avoided. In this regard, we specifically highlight the asymmetric power dynamics as a result of Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, and how this political reality is addressed or avoided in the respective exhibits. Finally, we explore the agency of curators in shaping knowledge and perspective and study the role of the visitors community. We argue that the differences in approaches to exhibiting the city’s cultural heritage reveals how museums are central sites for the politics of the human gaze, where significant decisions are made regarding inclusion and exclusion of conflict.

Visitor perceptions of European Holocaust Heritage: A social media analysis

This study presents a netnographic discourse analysis of social media content generated around three high profile European Holocaust heritage sites: Ann Frank's House in Amsterdam, The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany. It identifies four salient discourses under the headings of Holocaust heritage as social memory, reactions to Holocaust heritage, obligation and ritual, and transgressive visitor behaviour which frame the values, existential anxieties, emotions, priorities and expectations of visitors. The findings will be of interest to stakeholders involved in the planning and management of Holocaust heritage since they provide unique access to a synthesis of unmediated visitor feedback on European Holocaust heritage experiences.

Minimally invasive bone biopsies of fully wrapped mummies guided by computed tomography and fibre-optic endoscopy: Methods and suggested guidelines

Recent advances in the recovery and analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) and application of isotopic analysis of tissue obtained from mummified human remains has been accompanied by continued advances in non-invasive imaging using X-ray computed tomography (CT) and use of minimally invasive surgical techniques employing small fibre-optic endoscopes. We used these state-of-the-art techniques to examine ancient Egyptian mummies in the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection of Berlin, obtaining bone samples for aDNA, stable isotope analyses and radiocarbon dating. CT and endoscopic guidance were applied to locate and biopsy bones using pre-existing access points in order to avoid any further damage to the precious specimens. Here we provide guidelines to obtain bone samples of fully wrapped mummies in a minimally invasive way, by using a combination of computed tomography and endoscopic guided biopsy.

Bernhard Zepernick (1926–2019)

Citation: Lack H. W. & Raus Th. 2020: Bernhard Zepernick (1926–2019). – Willdenowia 50: 165–171. doi: https://doi.org/10.3372/wi.50.50202Version of record first published online on 24 April 2020 ahead of inclusion in August 2020 issue.