„...ein paar interessante alte Sachen“

The Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Museum of European Cultures) in Berlin possesses one of the largest collections in the German speaking world on everyday culture in Southeastern Europe. It dates back to the photojournalist and later botanist Gustav-Adolf Küppers (1894-1978) who acquired the collection during all in all five collecting trips in the region for the former Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Ethnology). The museum as well as the collector were both following their aspiration of saving a supposedly disappearing “Volkskultur”, which was quite typical thinking for contemporary folklore and ethnology. For Küppers, this mingled with a romantically shaped view of the region, and likewise with set pieces of racial ideology. This was both also biographically conditioned as Küppers was shaped by the German settlement and youth movements of the interwar period. Hence, the first part of the article aims at contextualizing the Küppers collection mainly with respect to the history of ideas and discourse. Adding to this, the article traces the far-reaching networks the collector was maintaining within the rightwing Völkisch movement during the 1920s and 1930s. The article’s second part focuses on the actual collecting on-site: how exactly did the collection come into being? What problems were encountered? And what options to influence the collecting process in their interest did protagonists, including those acting on-site, actually have? The article investigates questions like these on the basis of published as well as archival records.