Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin 9781350226739, 9781350226760, 9781350226746

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Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum

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Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin Magdalena Buchczyk

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Magdalena Buchczyk, 2023 Magdalena Buchczyk has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: European Cabinet from the Collection of Ethnology at the Neues Museum, Berlin, c. 1860. Reconstruction as part of the Fascination Image exhibition, 1999–2005. (© National Museums in Berlin, Museum of European Cultures, Ute Franz-Scarcigli) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-2673-9 ePDF: 978-1-3502-2674-6 eBook: 978-1-3502-2675-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Textiles beyond the folkloric Fieldwork trajectory Textural ethnography The problem of crafting collections Outline of the book 1

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vii ix xi 1 4 8 12 20 22

Sample collection: Dreams and archives Encounter A place for the museum Textile archives World stage Conclusion

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Carpets: Knotted histories, recurrent patterns Nationalist folklore School and museum Regained Territories Post-war reconstruction Truly Polish craft Scraps Recurrent patterns Conclusion

43

28 30 36 39 41

48 51 54 57 60 63 68 71

Contents

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3

4

5

Woven basket: Untethered art Trader in exotica Survivors Waiting Thread Weaving on demand Valuing work Stubborn survival

73 75 77 83 87 88 93 97

Waistcoat: Colour and Cold War Language island Go West Perforating the Iron Curtain? Vestige Conclusion

105

Cook’s uniform: Refashioning the social fabric Renewal Reorientation Blue-collar museum House ghosts Costume/fashion Conclusion

133

108 113 117 122 131

135 141 145 149 155 157

Conclusion: From unification to prefiguration Collection reimagined Other futures Prefigurative collection Conclusion

159

Notes Bibliography Index

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166 173 174 177

183 205

Illustrations 1.1 Rügen as a dreamscape. Two men pointing to the sea (south coast of Rügen, Mönchgut) by Caspar David Friedrich 1.2 Staircase view of the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products (Museum für deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse des Hausgewerbes), Palais Kreutz 1.3 The Palais Kreutz building 2.1 Knotted carpet from East Prussia (today’s Masuria, Poland), collected by Konrad Hahm 2.2 Textile made in the double-weave technique, collected by Konrad Hahm 2.3 Konrad Hahm, the director of the Museum for German Folklore, with a group of Hitler Youth visitors in front of a figure of a Germanic tribesman 3.1 Basket collected by Julius Konietzko in Sinnai, southern Sardinia 3.2 A street in the old town of Sinnai, Sardinia 3.3 A basket made according to the ISOLA design, now in a weaver’s house 3.4 A repair project of Sinnai basketry 4.1 Sheepskin waistcoat from Bistrița County, northern Transylvania collected for the Museum of German Folklore, West Berlin 4.2 Photograph of a young, well-off Saxon girl in her Sunday attire (before 1905) 4.3 Sheepskin waistcoat from Bistrița County displayed in the ‘Colourful’ (Bunt) section of the White Vests, Red Robes (1983/84) exhibition, a name which seems perfect for Cold War-era Berlin 4.4 Entrance hall to the German Democratic Forum in Bistrița 4.5 Discussion about traditional Saxon attire in Bistrița 5.1 Staff member in a cook’s outfit during the Metropolitan Proletariat exhibition (1985) in Museum of Folklore, East Berlin

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33 34 46 47

49 73 85 92 94 105 109

120 123 127 133

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Illustrations

5.2 Cook’s outfit from Plauen (before 1900) 5.3 The display of Servile Ghosts (1981) exhibition in West Berlin with a cook’s outfit, a reproduction of a historic outfit made by a Berlin art school (Hochschule der Künste, Berlin) 6.1 Setting up the new Museum of European Cultures after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Installation of the new signage in 1999 6.2 Tulle dress, probably from German South-West Africa (today Namibia), worn around 1905 6.3 H&M dress on display at the MEK in 2019

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148 159 170 171

Acknowledgements I owe a special debt of gratitude to all those in Poland, Romania and Italy who endured my incursions into their lives during the pandemic, for their hospitality and willingness to let me discuss and observe their histories, and working and personal lives. This book would not have been possible without the advice and support of my hosts, Elisabeth Tietmeyer and Sharon Macdonald, who enabled my project in Berlin as well as all colleagues at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH). Special thanks for the generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and partner organizations: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Thanks to the fantastically supportive and professional team at Bloomsbury Academic and to Judith Barrett for helping to put together this book so beautifully. At the risk of omitting some names, I am enormously grateful to Isabella Atzeni, Christine Binroth, Kirstin Csutor, Anna Czachorowska, Valerio Deidda, Ana Iuga, Corina Iosif, Barbara Grąziewicz-Chludzińska, Iris Edenheiser, Sabine Enders, Ewa Gładkowska, Thomas-Otto Hartig, Salwa Joram, Christian Krug, Anna Filipowicz-Mróz, Jaga Koszutska, Magda Lena Łowkiel, Waldemar Majcher, Nicola Medda, Alessandro Molteni, Gela Neamţu, Helena Piotrowska, Eliza Proszczuk, Karolina Radulska, Jane Redlin, Franka Schneider, Judith Schühle, Anna Szöke, Magda Wałkuska, Jana Wittenzellner, Anna Wiszniowska, Beate Wild, Irene Ziehe, Rafał Żytyniec and many other people and institutions for the research support provided during the challenging time of Covid-era fieldwork. None of those mentioned here bear responsibility for any shortcomings of this work. Presenting my research at ACHS, EASA, Matters of Activity (Humboldt University of Berlin), SPIRALS (University of Cape Town), Fiera Dell I’ntreccio (Museo e Archivio Sinnai, Italy) and the Humboldt Kolleg (Yarmouk University) was a privilege. An earlier version of the Conclusion first appeared as ‘Transforming legacies, habits and futures: Reshaping the collection at the Museum of European Cultures’, in International Journal of Heritage Studies

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Acknowledgements

(2022): 1–15. Thanks to unnamed reviewers who gave me astute feedback on the articles and chapters in which I developed the ideas for the book. I thank the Nobel Foundation for the permission to publish an excerpt of the lecture by Olga Tokarczuk. This book could not have been completed without those who helped me at home during my research and writing. Thanks to my family and friends in Germany, Poland and the UK for supporting me along the way. My deep and loving gratitude to my husband who has always encouraged me and accompanied me through the best and worst adventures, continually going beyond what is expected. This book is dedicated to you, Rob.

Abbreviations BGAEU

Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory)

BVFG

Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge or Bundesvertriebenengesetz (Federal Act on Expellees)

Cepelia

Centrala Przemysłu Ludowego i Artystycznego (CPLiA) (Central Union of Folk and Artistic Handicraft Cooperatives)

ENAPI

Ente Nazionale dell’Artigianato e delle Piccole Industrie (National Organization for the Crafts and Small Industries)

GDR

Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic)

IFI

Cooperativa Nazionale ‘Industrie Femminile Italiane’ (Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise)

ISOLA

Istituto Sardo per l’Organizzazione del Lavoro Artigiano (Sardinian Institute for the Organization of Craft Work)

MEK

Museum Europäsicher Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Museum of European Cultures – National Museums in Berlin)

MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (Museum at the Rothenbaum – Cultures and Arts of the World) Former name: Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg (Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg) SMB-SPK Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation – National Museums in Berlin)

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Introduction During her Nobel Prize lecture in 2019, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk powerfully described the world as a piece of fabric woven daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes. Today the purview of these looms is enormous  – thanks to the internet, almost everyone can take place in the process, taking responsibility and not, lovingly and hatefully, for better and for worse. When this story changes, so does the world.

Museums are powerful tools of storytelling, of knowledge generation and for making tangible ideas such as ‘culture’ or ‘Europe’. They are devices for accumulating things and for presenting and resisting narratives. They use their collections to materialize and visualize stories about the world. They pass objects from the past into the present and the future. But how do museums actually weave the world and craft their collections, and what practices, decisions and timeframes are involved in the process? The book is about the collection crafting at the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin  – Museum Europaischer Kulturen, known to Berliners as the MEK. The story of its acquisitions encapsulates a key problem faced by many heritage organizations – how to present a museum today with and despite its historical legacy? How to mobilize the collection for the future in a place with an especially vexed history? To get to the MEK from the city centre, you need to take a 40-minute metro trip across central and south-west Berlin. One of the last stations on the metro line is Dahlem-Dorf, a quirky piece of the city’s transport infrastructure. Located in the heart of a leafy, affluent district in the Cold War era’s American sector, the station building is designed to resemble a traditional

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thatched farmhouse. After a short walk through the low-rise, modern campus architecture of the Freie Universität Berlin, you finally arrive at the MEK. The museum building is an unlikely match of austere Prussian, neoclassical architecture with a vast modernist extension. This unusual amalgamation in some way reflects the collection. In its current (re)combined form, the MEK was established as a historical merger of the ‘European’ department of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum with two Cold War–era folklore (Volkskunde) collections, from East and West Berlin. Since its first incarnation in the late nineteenth century as the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products, the museum has undergone numerous historical transformations. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany are the most recent of a sequence of transformative events that have led to multiple changes in the museum’s name and location, and repeated reinvention of its curatorial and acquisition practice. The MEK’s collections, as this book will show through the example of textile objects, bear the traces of this complicated past, the innovative practices of earlier collectors, the ambiguous legacies of German history and the ideological uses of collections in the colonial, Nazi and Cold War periods. As a former MEK deputy director reflected, the MEK’s historical collections are both a blessing and a curse: they form the basis of a museum’s very existence, but have originally been collected under the paradigm of ‘salvage anthropology’1, and very often also according to national, regional and/or ethnic categories. (Edenheiser 2020: 15)

While relying on its collection for their institution’s existence, the MEK curators have an ambivalent attitude to the historical material. On the one hand, they care for it and recognize its potential for exhibition and research projects. On the other, they feel that some of these objects might not represent what the museum would like to say about diverse histories or what it would wish to reveal about current societal developments (Edenheiser 2020: 15). Speaking about the ambiguous nature of the historical objects with one of the curators, we talked at length about the museum’s textile collection. Textiles

Introduction

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were the key objects of the MEK’s foundational collection and to this day remain a significant part of its heritage. Praising the diversity of textile cultures in the collection, the curator explained how her predecessors could acquire objects according to their personal preferences and expertise. The MEK’s current collection strategy, known by the staff as the museum’s ‘Collection Concept’, confirms this assessment: Overall, the MEK collections  – as is the case with most other museums  – are characterized by a high level of subjectivity: which objects were added to the collections depended to a large extent on the interests and passions of individual directors and collectors. (Collection Concept: 5)

The curator explained that this unchecked practice led to the acquisition of thousands of textiles, resulting in the largest collection of traditional dress in Europe, for example. In the early months of 2019, at the outset of my research project at the museum, the director scheduled a visit to the museum stores. We entered through the metal door and showed our identity cards to the security staff. The director swiftly took me through a labyrinth of bunker-like corridors into the first storage space. As she switched on the light, I realized that we stood in a monumental hall, divided into long lines of glass cabinets. We began our walk through the different sections of the cavernous space filled with both textiles and wooden implements. Confronted by hundreds of Slovakian embroideries, I started to understand the challenge the collection posed. Long glass cases full of traditional shirts and nineteenth-century samplers appeared as strange remnants of a bygone era. What kind of European cultures do hundreds of woollen coats or colourful embroideries represent in a museum in twenty-first-century Berlin? What can they possibly contribute to pressing social debates about the violent redrawing of borders in Eastern Europe, the global histories of european colonialism, or the contested politics of gender? A blessing and a curse: these collections offer the potential for many future exhibitions, but their ‘folkloric’ character makes it hard to connect them with MEK’s aspirations today. One curator told me that she had a visceral reaction to these objects and that they weighed

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heavily on her mind. Her reaction, she admitted, had something to do with their potentially dangerous nature: It would really be the stuff of nightmares if the political tides turned in such a way, that someone would again come up with the idea to understand the costumes and objects as a mark of German identity.

For this curator, these objects had a menacing, spectral quality. Under some disturbing future circumstances, they could be instrumentalized for political goals. Apart from the horror of such a potential identitarian scenario, textiles with the ‘folkloric’ label trigger a range of emotional responses among the curatorial team. For some, they constitute an untapped resource for investigating textile cultures. For others, they appear as indicators of a particular idea of Europe, connoting an old-fashioned curatorial toolkit with objects indicating ideas such as ‘peasant traditions’, ‘people’s art’ or ‘cultural landscapes’, as well outdated, conservative exhibition practices.

Textiles beyond the folkloric The central challenge I pursue in this book is to delve deeper into the MEK’s textile collections, beyond viewing them as a straightforward expression of folkloric material culture, to understand how the museum crafts its collection. As Sharon Macdonald (2016: 7) recently argued, museums and collections of folk life are widespread, yet remain overlooked in museological debates. In the museum, such collections often designate an outlandish world of customs and habits. From Bucharest to Lisbon, much European textile culture continues to be displayed as ‘folk art’, ‘folklore’ or ‘traditional textiles’ without any indication of the stories of the objects’ makers, wearers, users or traders. When cultural production or material culture becomes folklore/folk art, it gets revaluated, becomes safe for acquisition, display and research, but also practices of revival and nostalgia. While research highlights ‘folkloric’ textiles as illustrating processes of historical revival, invention and appropriation (Schneider 2015, Trevor-Roper 2012), exhibitions still tend to show them as examples of archaic livelihoods. This way, the very term ‘folklore’ is an indicator of archaization, signalling a

Introduction

5

particular relationship to the object ‘marked by burlesque, nostalgia, irony or dismay’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 8). Perhaps the ways in which ‘craft’ or ‘folklore’ occupies the fringes of museological scholarship reflect the processes by which commoditized and nationalized ‘folk’ material culture continues to occupy the margins of the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004). As cultural expressions, they reflect these ambiguities: celebrated by modernity yet isolated from its benefits; hailed by the state as repositories of noble virtue yet seen as backward and parochial (2004: 19). Although some ethnographic objects have left this ahistorical anthropology land (Cohn 1980) through research in critical museology, material culture studies or provenance research, folkloric collections continue to be presented across Europe as examples of a static ‘tradition’ or ‘community’. Textile material culture has long been explored as social skin, a performative, contested frontier between the individual and society (Küchler and Miller 2005, Turner 2012). Despite these insights, display practice rarely addresses the social struggles or complex dilemmas related to this textile culture. Even though scholars have long revealed ‘traditional costumes’ as objects of knowledge constructed in particular epistemic communities (Keller-Drescher 2015), many museums continue to present mannequins in costumes as direct reflections of regional textile cultures. Despite the fact that researchers have for some time been writing about folklore as a resource for the construction of romantic nationalism, settler colonialist or gendered imaginaries (Filipová 2011, Kaneff 2004, Kligman 1988, Murawska-Muthesius 2021, Waters 2019), I have yet to visit an exhibition on the negotiations of statecraft or unsettling history through ‘folk’ textiles. I dream about a museum display with succinct, engaging stories about the complex issues of intangible heritage (KirshenblattGimblett 2004, Nas 2002) and discussions about the politics of authenticity (Bendix 1997, Smith 2006). The everyday, ‘folkloric’ textiles still seem to dwell in a fantasy world. Spaces across Europe from which these textiles are typically acquired, such as Sardinia or Transylvania, are envisaged as bucolic, authentic and timeless. Their textile cultures are termed ‘traditional’, seemingly far from the metropoles of fashion, industry or trade. Such places are examples of Europe’s internal exoticism (Bausinger 1961), representing arm’s length, nextdoor alterity and quirky, pre-industrial ways. On Lonely Planet or Airbnb,

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they appear as dreamscapes with thatched cottages, authentic customs and ancient crafts. Occasionally, they feature in imaginaries as cradles of nations or cultural sources of tradition or Europe itself (Herzfeld 2004). They are populated by people seen as representing the original core or the very frontiers of Europeanness, picturesque fusions of West and East or North and South. These perspectives reveal a much distorted view. Through this lens, places and people continue to be apprehended as ‘not quite’ European, usually included in Europe as a broadly conceived geopolitical space, but … deemed to fail in various ways in relation to the normative trope of ‘Europe’ as a measurement of ‘civilization,’ or moral, political, or economic conduct. (Dzenovska and de Genova 2018: 10)

One way that recent museum ethnography has challenged the dominant perception of folkloric material culture is by exploring the relations of folk art objects with traumatic memories related to the Holocaust (e.g. Lehrer and Sendyka 2019). Focusing on the Shoah-themed folk art predominantly made by Polish vernacular artists for the German market, this research highlights how revisiting folk art collections can offer an entirely new perspective. This includes an insight into the negotiations of victim, witness and perpetrator positionalities in post-war Europe, as well as the nuanced negotiations taking place in the making, collecting and displaying of such artefacts. Such studies shed light on the potential of examining folk art as an understudied source for exploring material culture as an area of historical inquiry, a site of investigation of social distinctions, affects and mnemonic processes, as well as a sphere of negotiation, reinvention, political mobilization and exchange (Buchczyk and Nicolescu forthcoming, Geering 2021, Klekot 2021, Kozak 2017, Urdea 2018). This book aims to counteract the dominant, distorted view of material culture placed in the folklore or folk art category through anthropological research on museum collections. We need to recognize that these collections constitute bundles of relations, connecting particular ways of knowing, curatorial desires and decisions, as well as relations between places, histories, mobilities and social life-worlds (O’Hanlon and Welsch 2001, Shelton 2001). A museum’s collections are entwined with patterns of past curatorial activity but also the wider epistemologies and moral economies of collecting

Introduction

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(Macdonald  2006). Moreover, they embody the implicit and explicit orders of things and legacies of knowledge production, many of which are colonial, sexist or ableist (Kros 2014, Lynch and Aberti 2010, Rieger and Strickfaden 2018). They carry the traces of the past practices of acquisition from selection, documentation, classification to valuation (Bennett et al. 2017, Harrison 2015). Further, they are not insulated from asymmetrical encounters, acts of violence and dispossession, dramatic social changes and practices of boundary-making (Barringer and Flynn 2012, Colwell 2015, Coombes 1994). Rather than marking unchanging marginal worlds of insular utopias, backward eastern provinces or pictures of southern ‘ethnographic zones’, this material culture can reveal difficult pasts about the bloodlands of Europe (Snyder 2011), Cold War relationalities (Buchczyk 2018) or situated processes of marginalization (Herzfeld 2004). As the current war in Ukraine and the violent border regimes in the Mediterranean demonstrate, the notion of Europe, with its utopian visions and complicated legacies, creates new boundaries. These invoke a ranking of lives, social experiences, and material cultures. As the first Russian bombs were falling on Ukraine in February 2022, a CBS journalist expressed his shock that such attack would happen in a ‘relatively civilized, relatively European city’. Much of the coverage in the first days revealed both racist and Eurocentric undertones of the apparent shock of war on the continent, disregarding the duration of the conflict, the continuity of Russian imperialism in the region and the recent history of conflict in Europe. The ignorance about Ukraine and the qualifier of ‘relatively civilised’ deserves our attention, revealing its ‘not quite’ European status, its ambiguous position as a grey zone and geopolitical buffer periphery (Knudsen and Frederiksen 2015, Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021). For Dzenovska and de Genova  – and I follow their lead in this book  – what appears as ‘not quite’ European needs to be re-examined as a site of questioning, critique and hope (Dzenovska and de Genova 2018: 11). History shows that these areas are repeatedly launched into the very centre of struggles over different formulations of Europe. This book delves into such apparently peripheral spaces in Europe and their objects forgotten in museums. The MEK’s textile collections require our attention as a diagnostic arena at the heart of critical questions about Europe (de Genova 2014), perhaps even probing our understanding of ‘the museum’ itself.

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Fieldwork trajectory The question of crafting the MEK collections was not originally the issue I set out to explore. When I came to Berlin to do this research, I intended to write about ‘the everyday’. Having focused my postdoctoral project in Bristol on day-to-day learning in the city, I proposed to research changing concepts of everyday material culture and how they were played out in the MEK’s collection. Yet, as is the case in so many ethnographic projects, the material took me in many different directions. My research started in March 2019 in the museum’s library and archive, attending workshops, conferences, farewell parties, team coffee meetups and the regular curatorial meetings concerned with current curatorial tasks and discussions about exhibition plans and potential acquisitions. During this time, I realized that my fieldwork came at a point of MEK’s institutional transformation. A key context for this study were wider changes in Berlin’s museum constellation (MacDonald 2016). In 2019, it was clear that the MEK would be the only museum remaining in suburban Dahlem after its neighbouring institutions, the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, were moved to the controversial, monumental new exhibition space in the Humboldt Forum (El-Tayeb 2020, von Bose 2016). As the journalist Karlheinz Schmid provocatively asked: would you rather proudly present looted art from other continents than legally acquired traditional costumes or tools from Europe? The relocation of the contested museums into the Forum meant that the MEK needed to create a compelling, competitive exhibition programme on its own to attract visitors to the seemingly hard-to-reach suburb. In addition to occupying this new position within Berlin’s museumscape, the MEK was undergoing a process of self-reflection. Twenty years after the creation of the museum in its current form, the team reviewed its collection policy and coordinated a conference called ‘What’s Missing?’ about collection legacies, and the new challenges in mounting displays on the topic of Europe. The MEK staff organizing the conference argued that ‘the museum has just come out of puberty, which is always a time of overt self-awareness and selfcriticism, and of struggling to find one’s own path’ (Edenheiser 2020: 15). The 2019 event critically probed the museum’s historical collections, examining their relevance, storytelling capacity and how they could influence the very

Introduction

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methods and structures of the museum (2020: 15). The presentations explored the problem of the collections’ legacies and suggested ways of challenging the internalist representation of Europe as a bounded entity and its implicitly Eurocentric politics. As Edenheiser argued: The political ‘European project’ is being increasingly called into question, and conflicting ideas about European cultural heritage are the subject of heated debates in many arenas. What social role do folk or popular art and culture museums and collections want to play in these debates about a Europe in transition? And how can a reinterpretation and contemporization of these types of collections and exhibitions through (post)migrant, queer, decolonial, refugee or non-ableist perspectives be established in mainstream museum work? This is to name only a few often marginalized perspectives. (2020: 15–16)

The conference signalled a need within the museum to address the problem of exhibiting Europe within the unfolding public debate about the changing politics of heritage and memory in Germany and Europe (Bach 2019, Förster 2016, Kaiser, Krankenhagen and Poehls 2014). As Edenheiser suggested, Europe was a contested, fast-moving object, requiring new approaches and positionalities to tell its story. At the same time as this internal debate, in 2019 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) announced a new definition of the museum,2 which became the subject of heated debate within the curatorial profession. What became clear during this initial phase of my fieldwork was that it was vital to address collection legacies in both the institution and the wider museumscape (Macdonald 2016). With a growing interest in the MEK’s history and the museum’s emerging collecting practice, I was increasingly drawn to its textiles in all their manifestations. Dress and household textiles were core to the initial concept of this museum (see Chapter 2) and were used as key exhibits during significant exhibitions, including the anniversary displays showcasing the institution’s history (see Chapter 4). After its renaming as the Museum of European Cultures in 1999, the museum’s textiles were imagined as the leading objects for telling the collection’s story, in an unrealized large-scale project conceived by the curators. Textiles appeared everywhere, from historical material to key case studies and new purchases. They occupied a vast amount of space within the museum’s stores, dispersed across different

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locations. They were crucial objects for the curatorial discussion about the ‘everydayness’ of its everyday collections. Paradoxically, most of the vast rural collections constituted highly decorated, pristine outfits that any respectable villager of Slovakia or Norway would keep well away from mundane chores. Rather than representing everyday material culture, the textile collections told a story of a museum focused on Sunday-best and ceremonial events. Through this institutional concentration on textiles, my project shifted its focus to the woven parts of the MEK collection. The artefacts selected for the ethnographic study emerged from my discussions with the MEK team. The objects were variously mentioned as key to long-standing patterns of curatorial practice (see Chapter 2), markers of important changes in the museum (see Chapters 5 and 6) or potential exhibition candidates (see Chapter 3). The choice of objects has to do with the temporality of crafting the museum. Each of the case studies in some way represents a different incarnation of the museum, a particular phase of institutional life in its ever-changing history. To explore these incarnations, the museum staff gave me unparalleled access to archival material, including historical catalogues, brochures, press articles, museum documentation and images, and the objects themselves. I consulted textual and archival records of past exhibitions, including the images of installations and display plans. The curators, librarians and conservators patiently explained to me how to read these traces, including the numbering systems, acronyms, and collection groups – but, to this day, I have not fully learnt how to navigate this complex space. Each institutional incarnation has left its traces in today’s museum and, throughout the book, I will try to explore this in more detail. What is essential to know for any fieldworker in a museum like the MEK is that these traces, from multiple types of documentation systems, dispersed storage space, to a whole range of objects for which information was lost in the Second World War, affect the day-to-day work of the museum staff in very real ways. Take the library, for example: there, the past is sedimented in the placing of the material. The books of the former East Berlin institution are catalogued separately as the ‘Island’ (Sachkatalog Insel) and are placed in a different space on the mezzanine of the library. The collections of the former West Berlin museum and the Ethnological Museum’s have their own numbering systems. The library thus constitutes a fascinating archaeological site of the layers of

Introduction

11

materials and institutional histories. The librarians and documentation staff tirelessly engage in the work of harmonization and systematization to make sense of the resources. The team’s generosity with their time enabled me to learn much about the current challenges of working with the MEK’s patchy collections. I was invited to an internal workshop about developing the museum’s acquisition strategy and talked to many team members about their working document, its benefits and limitations. Due to my own research focus on Romanian material culture, heritage and politics (Buchczyk 2014, 2018), I was also drawn to the Romanian collection (see Chapter 4). When I started working on the MEK, I learnt that it had not only built up an extensive collection of artefacts from Romania but also developed a range of recent travelling exhibition projects on the topic through the expertise of one of the curators, Beate Wild. My journey to follow the thread of an uncanny sheepskin waistcoat was prompted by our conversations about the material culture from Romania in the museum and questions prompted by the 2008 exhibition Discover Europe! (Europa Entdecken!), one of the reunited museum’s key exhibition experiments post-1989. It puzzled me that out of the many thousands of artefacts offering a means to explore Europe, Beate chose an item of Romanian leather clothing. I wanted to know what this type of material culture could tell us today. In January 2020, I set out on a year of ethnographic fieldwork following objects from the collection (see Chapters 2 to 4) in Poland, Italy and Romania. This research initially took me to local museums, municipal archives and digital spaces – but also private homes, where I could explore how objects analogous to those in the MEK collections were perceived, used and interpreted. This included haptic encounters with objects such as the reproductions of carpets held in the MEK’s collection in a weaver’s living room and in museums in Olsztyn and Warsaw. The time I spent learning the basics of weaving a basket in Sinnai, Sardinia, gave me an insight into the tactile, careful labour of this craft, from its starting point in the environment of the lagoon and the subtle multispecies entanglements between the weaver and her material, the spiny rush. This book aims to weave together some of the stories and the relationalities of museum objects across these localities and contexts within the frame of crafting the collection.

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Textural ethnography This fieldwork is based on the MEK’s textile collection, like my previous work with Romanian fabrics in London, has prompted me to question some of the concepts we use to describe the museum in collection ethnography. For some time, the templates of infrastructure, discourse analysis or assemblage have provided powerful, guiding metaphors for grasping the complexity of the museum. This scholarship has revealed the mechanisms of meaning-making and discourse formation that reflect broader regimes of representation and disciplinary relations of knowledge production (Bennett 1988, Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Additionally, such research has provided new avenues for investigating the human and more-than-human collectives within collections, allowing for the surfacing of the processes leading to their formation (Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013). It has also unpacked the bureaucratic structures and routine practices of classification and cataloguing that underpin museum data formations (Nadim 2021, Turner 2020). Finally, it has provided crucial insights into the ethics of collecting, and the violent and unjust contexts in which collections came into existence (Förster et al. 2018, Lange 2011). However, while these forms of imagining museum-making processes have provided various ways of thinking about collections, knowledge production and institutional histories, the understanding they offer is limited. The emphasis on infrastructures and assemblages guides us to datasets, objects, networks and archival presences, rarely tracing the object relations and the complex histories of material culture outside the institution. Such research thus risks reaching archival dead ends, as collection studies reliant on museum infrastructure, such as provenance research, might be hindered by missing information or archival silences. As others have demonstrated, research conducted on this basis might paradoxically reproduce and consolidate the asymmetrical relations of knowledge that it seeks to challenge (von Oswald 2020). Lastly, approaches based on discourse analysis or the ethnography of infrastructure might miss the opportunity to apprehend the collection beyond the ocular-centric habits of the museum (Candlin 2008). If we are to reconceptualize the institution of the museum for new ways of knowing, we need to think again about the metaphors and sensibilities used

Introduction

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in our scholarship. For this, we need to move beyond our current museum knowledge models, such as the cabinet of curiosity (Basu 2017). Rather than viewing textiles as reflecting narratives established by other means, this book seeks to recognize that museum-making is ‘born out of particular matter and embodied intimacies’ (Perez-Bustos 2018: 186). For this, we need to take the tactile and the material seriously and develop concepts and metaphors from the material under study (Tilley 1999: 271). What might a textile-based perspective, attentive to weaving knowledge, offer as a way of understanding the museum? How can it help us reimagine the craft of collection? Textile metaphors have in fact long been part of social scientific conceptual frameworks concerning social and political meanings (Weiner and Schneider 1989: 2). Eduardo de la Fuente (2019) recently argued that social research requires a new textural sensibility, capable of capturing the entwined dimensions in which the world is shaped and sensed (2019: 553). Astacio (2021) has reminded us that knowledge is constructed beyond the representational boundaries, and we need to pay closer attention to knowing through touch. Metaphors of weaving and knotting have been mobilized for thinking about the nature of politics and the state, as well as relational histories and uneven modernities (Adam et al. 2019, Danto 2006, Gilroy 2015, Randeria 1999, Santos and Boatcă 2022). Multispecies perspectives in anthropological research highlight the meshing of histories and temporalities of more-thanhuman worlds (Gan and Tsing 2018, Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, Tsing 2015). Textile concepts of folding and entanglement have provided productive ways of thinking about materiality, global circulation and chains of matter but also long-term interdependency between people and things (Friedman and Schäffner 2016, Hodder 2012, Tarlo 2016). The anthropologist Tim Ingold (2002) used the language of weaving to rethink the orthodoxies of scholarly research about the process of production. By challenging the idea of making as imposing forms onto the formless material, and highlighting that all forms are generated through movement and interaction with the material, he convincingly argued that all making could be considered a modality of weaving. Moreover, being in the world is for Ingold a process of the ‘ongoing, temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the manifold constituents of our environment’ (2002: 347). This way, weaving is not just about making but also about world-making. Museum

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anthropologists have also reached out for textile imaginaries. Thinking with the notion of entanglement allows explorations of how collections constitute relationalities of inequality, appropriation and agency in the colonial encounter (Thomas 1991). It provides a metaphor through which to investigate the ways in which museum artefacts are part of entangled trajectories, dislocations, social relations, ecological knowledges and cosmologies (Basu 2011, Bell 2017). In the context of these insights, the museum cannot be reduced to a discursive or visual machinery of knowledge, an infrastructure or an assemblage of things. If weaving and entanglement are key metaphors for world-making (Haraway 1994, 2003, Ingold 2002), could this help reimagine museum craft in the MEK? What would a museum like the MEK be if it was considered woven rather than just assembled? Let us imagine a museum through the materiality of textiles. Let us explore it as a textural device, one that participates in the weaving of worlds by acquiring, preserving, describing and putting together collections. All museums are generative of particular configurations in the form of aesthetic norms, habitual collective action (such as heritage bureaucracy) and frameworks of knowledge and practice (taxonomies and classifications). Such configurations are situated and tied to particular places and collections (be they natural history or everyday life), embodying disciplinary histories (folklore or ethnology) that make up the parameters of their own craft of collection and display. These lineages matter as they perform and sustain established rhythms of practice such as the notion of an acquisition trip. What do such metaphors mean for our description of the crafting of a collection in particular? In the textural representation of museums, collections emerge as made of the threads and traces of the complex weaving activity (Ingold 2010). By tethering groups of artefacts to material worlds and narratives (like religion or art), a museum’s collections work to assure visitors about particular realities, thus actively partaking in a cosmological performance (Haraway 2016: 91, Macdonald 2021). If weaving processes are full of habits, we need to explore how the museum practice habitually orients things and people within existing patterns of thought, action and understanding (Ahmed 2006). All weaving is both individual and collective (Bauchspies and Bellacasa 2009: 335–6); it is an art and form of labour enmeshed with economy and power relations. Museum collections are often founded on extractive practices and forms of gathering matter. A weaving perspective foregrounds the embodied

Introduction

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labour of museum-making, both as a matter of individual performance (such as a particular collector’s story) and social convention (such as the dominant museological or curatorial conventions or institutional arrangements of its time). At the same time, just as in the weaver’s attentive handling of fragile threads, much of museological knowledge-making and labour is embedded in practices of care, be it for objects, places, ideas, people and environments (Morse 2020). Like any craft, museum-weaving is an inventive and creative activity, expressing a generative, subversive potential and an ability to shape alternative worlds for the future. The collection, then, is not just a pattern of activity but also a generative force for reforming social relations. In what ways could the textural sensibility enrich museum ethnography? Firstly, because it offers us a new way of thinking about different types of collections and material culture and is mindful of the fact that methods need to match their objects (Lury and Wakeford 2012). Secondly, by describing museums only in museum terms (e.g., as a cabinet of curiosity), we are moving within a hall of mirrors, never really inquiring into the material culture in question. I first encountered this problem when researching woven objects in Romania (Buchczyk 2014). From within the museum, the knowledge about these textiles seemed well organized – there were catalogues upon catalogues about pattern types belonging to the so-called ethnographic zones with their own pattern worlds. There were museum specialists who could take a quick glance at an object, immediately order it to a place and assign it a correct name. Yet, when I went to the ‘source community’ in Viștea de Sus in 2011, the weavers just used the word ‘flower’ as a substitute for all kinds of patterns, distinguishing the latter instead by the technical terms of the weaving process. They acknowledged they knew about the different types of designs and objects assigned to their particular locality but, most of the time, despite the meticulous work of museum experts, the weavers were just going about their craft business. In the 1980s, many of the older women I spoke to were doing piece work weaving jobs for the state cooperatives. In Viștea, these objects were ironically called the ‘red things’. Once the supplier from the cooperative left, the work proceeded in a way to ensure that ‘red things’ were made with minimum thread. With what was leftover, the women made things they valued as gifts, household decorations or pieces they could sell informally in the area. The crafty weavers also had an ambiguous view on traditional patterns.

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Many preferred showing me their innovations and synthetic-thread designs, all dreaded by the curators. Back in the museums of Sibiu or Bucharest, this kind of production was seen as kitsch and a betrayal of tradition. In Viștea, the patterns were talked about in technical terms, and it took me some time at the loom under the training of the severe teacher to grasp the basics of the technique and terminology. Coming back to the ‘source community’, now being able to talk to them using these terms opened new lines of conversation, further troubled the singular curatorial story about the weaving and the museum collection. By this example I do not mean to say that any researcher working on a particular raw material needs to learn to make something with it – it would be unsustainable to require construction work experience for researchers of brutalist architecture, for example. I believe that we do need to critically address the separation of thinking and making (Sennett 2008) and look for ‘materially innovative’ approaches to collections (Law 2004: 153). The focus on relations shaping collections, separating and mediating objects (2004: 84) necessitates the development of critical, inventive and lively methodologies relevant to the ‘artful craftiness’ of the processes and things under study (Back and Puwar 2012, Lury and Wakeford 2012). Rather than just archival texts and infrastructural figures of the museum database, the materials themselves, the ongoing practice of crafting collections and the making of objects through a range of social practices need to be made present in our research. To ensure that is the case in this book, I aim to critically expand the debates on entanglement (Bell 2017, Ingold 2001, Thomas 1991) by drawing on insights developed by feminist scholarship. That research helps to blur the boundary between making and thinking. Instead, it provides an opportunity to refocus on the mutually implicated practices of knowing and being. From laboratories, pottery workshops to museums, knowledge is always made in practice (Lave and Wenger 1991, Marchand 2010). Knowledge is not a property but more like a craft, an ongoing performance and material enactment (Barad 2007, Haraway 1994, Lindström and Ståhl 2016). Thinking about weaving knowledge, Donna Haraway draws our attention to the game of cat’s cradle in which different figures can be made by knotting and twisting a loop of string. Cat’s cradle is about patterns and knots; the game takes great skill and can result in some serious surprises. One person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands; but the cat’s cradle figures can be passed

Introduction

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back and forth on the hands of several players, who add new moves in the building of complex patterns. Cat’s cradle invites a sense of collective work, of one person not being able to make all the patterns alone. One does not ‘win’ at cat’s cradle; the goal is more interesting and more open-ended than that. It is not always possible to repeat interesting patterns, and figuring out what happened to result in intriguing patterns is an embodied analytical skill. The game is played around the world and can have considerable cultural significance. Cat’s cradle is both local and global, distributed and knotted together. (Haraway 1994: 69–70)

The cat’s cradle metaphor highlights multidirectional, generative forms of thinking and researching with others (human and nonhuman), creating more intricate, interwoven patterns of knowledge. Playing such an epistemic game, we can knot and twist knowledge by paying attention to the different actors who encounter each other and, through this interation, worlds (Haraway 1994: 64). For Haraway, knowledge-weaving is not just about following the thread of entangled objects. Instead, it entails engaging oneself in an unpredictable, dynamic, heterogeneous process of enactment and emergent knowledge. Producing knowledge through performative materiality generates new relationality between what is to be known and ‘how we are making what is to be known’ (Lindström and Ståhl 2016: 67). This includes re-articulating questions and problems through collaboration, troubling linear narratives and opening the linear narratives up for situated knowledge (2016). Similarly, in an interview the anthropologist Susan Leigh Star mentions the importance of spinning in research. For her, ‘[t]o spin is to stretch, to co-develop our imaginations and thus build and weave new ways of knowing’ (Bauchspies and de La Bellacasa 2009: 335). Inspired by the possibilities of textural performing of knowledge developed in feminist theory, this book proposes an approach foregrounding material practice, adjacent to the expressivity of textile-making. The textural sensibility has implications for research on museum collections and some of its established pathways. Beyond imagining the collection as a line to follow through places, objects and encounters, let us also consider it a thread for weaving knowledge. The artist and weaver Anni Albers once stated that a thread is not a line to follow but an event and a site of ever-extending relationships (Albers 1965:  15).

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The textural perspective invites us to critically examine the paradigms that underpin the practice of anthropological research on museum objects. Doing collection ethnography is often imagined as an act of following a thread from A to B to reach a ‘space wherein the host community, researcher and holding institution can revisit and rework intersecting histories as they are embodied and displayed by their various by-products’ (Bell 2003: 120). In recent decades, there has been an explosion of projects seeking to follow the collection from the museum to the source community (Brown and Peers 2003, Golding and Modest 2013). These communities are imagined as stakeholders, mostly framed as groups with a ‘sense of belonging’ and identity by association and participation (Watson 2007). Much of this work has involved ‘source’ or ‘originating’ communities from which the objects were acquired or their contemporary descendants (Brown and Peers 2003: 2). Although these projects have helped to reimagine museum collections and contribute to social justice work, scholars have highlighted that such models might lead to different relations and even conflicts, sometimes perpetuating the inherent inequalities (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008, Onciul 2015). In addition to these profound ethical and political complexities, the source community might prove elusive (Buchczyk 2015). In the case of collections with a patchy paper trail, resulting from dislocation, expropriation or an unjust acquisition history, the pursuit can lead to a dead end. Engaging in knowledge-weaving with the collection requires paying attention to the problems of traceability. Rather than a researcher’s path following a line of inquiry from A to B, collection research is a relational performance that ‘requires heterogeneous players, who cannot all be members of any one category, no matter how mobile and inclusive the category seems to be to those inside it’ (Haraway 1994: 69). Beyond an interaction model which assumes pre-existing entities, this approach foregrounds a model of mutual co-constitution through collectionbased fieldwork encounters (Barad 2007). It refrains from the aspiration of tracing things to any given source or destination. Rather, the approaches we take need to account for a world that might be a knot (Haraway 2003: 6), but in a continuous motion and too slippery to trace. This necessitates insight into a complex relationality of not only connection but also expropriation,

Introduction

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dislocation, implication and oppression (Basu 2017, Lehrer 2020, Rexhepi 2018). Recognizing the knotted relationality allows for an opening up to how practices of collaboration, political agency, recognition, mutual care and empowerment can be generated through collections and their complex, situated stakeholders. As all knowledge is situated and embodied, so is the craft of following collections. The insights of ethnographic fieldwork cannot be unknotted from the twists and turns that occur during research. The recent debates on patchwork ethnography (Günel, Varma and Watanabe 2020) encourage us to account for and assess the impact of the transformations in our living and working conditions on ethnographic knowledge production. With the start of my fieldwork coinciding with the global pandemic, this study was significantly affected by the rhythm of restrictions and openings. Due to the sequence of lockdowns, I was unable to pursue some threads, such as undertaking weaving apprenticeship ethnography in Poland or accessing some of the research participants in Sardinia. These decisions made on the grounds of safety, although appearing as ruptures in knowledge, were driven by a recognition of fieldwork dependencies and duty of care responsibilities. Acknowledging the wider interdependency of ‘home’ and ‘the field’, the study was influenced by my long-standing interest in weaving (Buchczyk 2014) and tracing the origins of textile objects in ambiguous Cold War–era collections (Buchczyk 2018). The project was also informed by my own positionality as a scholar from Upper Silesia in Poland, a region with a complicated history as a former inter-imperial borderland. Researching the themes of contested identity, shifting borders and dislocations for Chapter 2 and 4 resonated in many ways with my own family history, its various national and regional descriptors, and how those affected actual people’s lives and mobilities. Another part of the project-weave was my own body with its overgrowing tissues and nodules, dangerously tangled with the pandemic, leading to a pattern of field trips and fieldwork interruptions caused by lockdowns, tests, check-ups, scans and (pandemic) waiting. These rhythms of my personal health and the global health emergency necessarily informed the way in which the final project came into being, as well as the field encounters with people, objects, materials and environments.

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The problem of crafting collections Asking the question about how museums craft their collections, one has the privilege of scholarly abundance. There is a vast literature about museum collections, exploring collecting cultures and different modalities of collecting practice, from acquisition to appropriation and loot (Colwell 2021, Elsner and Cardinal 1994, Macdonald 2006, O’Hanlon and Welsch 2001, Selheim 2012, Shelton 2001). At the time of heated debates about the legacies, roles and future responsibilities of museums (Brulon Soares 2021, Janes and Sandell 2019), contemporary collecting becomes a challenging arena of uncertainty. With awareness among curators of the path dependencies arising from their predecessors’ unethical appropriation practices and mistakes, collection development constitutes a site of curatorial self-questioning (Clifford 2011, Morgan and Macdonald 2020, Wastiau 2017). In this increasingly charged space, even curators with a high degree of seniority and privilege are forced to question their habitual practice, and revealing the repressed ‘knowledge of the brutality of “acquisition” in the form of loot, a knowledge that, when we see it, shatters our image of the museum’ (Hicks 2020: 51). Next to these complex questions of ethics, social justice and the shift from postcolonial to decolonial museology, curatorial decision-making faces challenges ahead in terms of acquisition focus and profiling, and future value and representativeness (Colwell 2015, Kowal 2019, Macdonald and Morgan 2018, Were and King 2012). Acquiring objects for museums not only poses problems of picking the right ones and letting stolen artefacts go but also provokes anxieties about curatorial omissions that might foreclose a particular future or inadequately address endangerment or loss (DeSilvey and Harrison 2020). As the ethical, museological, social and financial pressures (Rex 2020) pile up, museum collection futures appear very undecided. Despite this lack of certainty, museum and heritage scholarship has also highlighted the strong potential of collection work as a means to effect change, recreate worlds and enact visions of a better future (Brumann 2014, Chipangura and Mataga 2021). In this hopeful account of the curatorial craft, collecting emerges as a potentially transformative social practice, requiring an engagement with contemporary social issues and public debates about

Introduction

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heritage justice (Hart and Chilton 2015, Vlachou 2019). As collections have the potential to play a significant role in society, working with collections necessitates a commitment to new relational ethics, social justice and repair, participation and integration, as well as dialogue and mediation (Sarr and Savoy 2018, Simpson 2009). As the field develops, critical perspectives feed into innovative formats of participatory collecting, community museology or decolonial curating (Gaupp et al. 2020, Robinson 2017, Tietmeyer and Meijervan Mensch 2013, Wajid and Minott 2019). To understand how curatorial choices enable or hinder the potential of collections, or constitute an arena of both problems and prospective solutions, we need to develop an insight into the historical processes of crafting collections and the day-to-day institutional settings in which collections emerge. Sara Ahmed (2006) argues that institutions are orientation devices, shaped by the people and things who inhabit them. Through everyday action, museums develop habitual ways of working with things. As orientation devices, museums then frame and order artefacts, narratives and the collection’s stakeholders. For Ahmed, orientations can shape the ways we inhabit space, apprehend it and the things we direct our attention to. They are both effects and sites of potentiality, as orientations are about which way we are facing in the present, they also point us toward the future. The hope of changing directions is always that we do not know where some paths may take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow, makes new futures possible. (Ahmed 2006: 554)

As this demonstrates, orientations mark space and time. At the same time, they are embedded in an institution’s daily routines, in museums’ case, the collecting and display practices. Bryant and Knight (2019) reflect on the role of orientation in examining the interrelations between everyday practice and the future. They see the future as a figure that saturates all present activity. The presencing of future takes place through a range of orientations such as anticipation, expectation, speculation, uncertainty, potentiality, hope and destiny. These orientations influence how we act in everyday life, some demanding urgency, engaging imagination or improvisation, others causing exhaustion, disillusion or fatigue (2019: 19). As

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in textile-making, they are performative and rhythmical, depending on longstanding commitments, repetitive performances, bodies, processes, decisions and path dependencies. Scholars of weaving have long explored it as a performative way of organizing knowledge. As habitual, embodied practice, weaving connects the present with patterns from the past and performs them into the future. Weaving not only acts into the future but also has the capacity to prefigure it. For example, research on weaving histories has demonstrated how it foreshadowed other information technologies, from algorithmic computation to coding (see Plant 1995, 1997, McLean, Harlizius-Klück and Jefferies 2017). Could the collection, like weaving, prefigure things to come or craft the future? I will explore this question in the final chapter of the book, in light of the current MEK’s collection strategy. In heritage studies, the concept of prefiguration is used to explore how desired futures are performed and enacted in the present (Borck 2019, Holtorf 2020, Yates 2015). In prefigurative practice, means are seen as having the potential to create ends, from constructing experimental social arrangements to embodying values in order to ensure their future relevance. Prefigurative practice explores the possibility of everyday action to inhabit the future in the present. Researching the crafting of collections requires an understanding of the intertwined museum’s history, present and future. With this book, I aim to explore the main threads of historical collection craft at the MEK and point to the prefigurative potential of museum objects to weave new futures.

Outline of the book The book is focused on five sets of objects that have been key to the interwoven story of the museum and its collection. The chapters follow a chronological line through the main phases of the MEK’s development and its predecessor institutions, ranging from the nineteenth-century ‘sample collection’ through ethnographic acquisitions of the interwar era, the dramatic transformation of the museum during the Nazi Germany period and the Second World War, through the Cold War rupture of the collection’s history up to the museum’s current incarnation in reunified Berlin. This historical thread of the collection’s development acts as a filament for the entangled stories of the objects. Each object explores a different aspect of the museum’s craft.

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Chapter 1 explores the complex texture of the museum’s sample collection that initiated the Museum of German Traditional Costumes and Handicrafts, the MEK’s nineteenth-century precursor. This private initiative of the Prussian medic, politician and anthropologist Rudold Virchow and his collaborator, Ulrich Jahn, led to the establishment of the predominantly textile collection. The chapter follows the twists and turns in their vision for a new museum, the various sites of display, the contested status of the objects, the negotiations and relations, agendas and affects associated with the objects. It highlights that this knotted story cannot be untangled from a bundle of curatorial desires, nostalgic perspectives and scholarly aspirations that led to the sample collection’s coming into being. Chapter 2 focuses on the museum as part of a broader pattern. It follows a carpet collection from the region of Masuria (now in Poland, formerly in East Prussia) to explore the role of textiles as carriers of narratives about belonging and place. Focusing on a collection assembled in the 1920s by Konrad Hahm, subsequently director of the museum during the Second World War, the chapter shows how knowledge about objects was bound up with political upheaval in Europe and the processes of redrawing borders in the region. It situates the carpets in the cultural politics and ideology of Nazi Germany. It follows their tumultuous wartime and post-war history, including the collection’s partial destruction after 1945 and its scattering around the Soviet Union and UScontrolled West Germany. Tracing the afterlife of the carpet techniques in post-war Polish Masuria and beyond, the chapter shows how the meanings ascribed to objects change according to political circumstances and social contexts. The complex, ambiguous sequence of destruction and reinvention is a recurrent pattern, interweaving seemingly disparate and distant resources including a book, an artist, a set of weavers and the socialist economy. Chapter 3 turns to knots and frayed ends in the collection of woven baskets. It investigates an object acquired in the 1930s by a Hamburg-based trader of ethnographica who collected for museums across Germany. The basketry craft is explored through a history of interconnections between the maker community and the outside world. It sheds light on the complex relationship between museumification and modernization in Italy’s southern periphery, as well as how long-standing hierarchies impact the livelihoods of the craftspeople. The woven basket is not only a repository of skills and

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cultural techniques but also a material record of cultural hegemony, failed modernization initiatives and the frayed ends of development. Chapter 4 explores colour and boundary. Focusing on a Romanian waistcoat, it demonstrates the ways in which textiles mark the boundaries and ambiguities of political divisions across the Iron Curtain. Such objects are frequently used to display the colour of idyllic countryside countryside and the boundaries of ethnic identity. The waistcoat entered the museum’s collection during the Cold War era when the textile collection was placed into two separate museums, one in East and the other in West Berlin. The object marks a fractured community and the tension between politics and affect, destruction and preservation, and remembering and forgetting. The chapter offers an alternative understanding of colour beyond the picturesque, marking contrast and transformation. In Chapter 5, I follow creases and folds of the collection’s texture. I investigate a cook’s dress to examine how textiles articulate social status. Following the Cold War division of the museum into two separate institutions, while that in the West was in Dahlem, the museum in the East was housed in the basement of the prestigious Pergamon Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island. In the 1970s, the institutions in both East and West started to introduce working-class textile culture into their exhibitions. The dress, part of the East Berlin collection, was displayed in the museum’s 100th anniversary exhibition in 1984, ‘Dress – Between Costume and Fashion’. The chapter reflects on the ways in which objects like this dress marked a significant paradigm change in the museum’s practice, exploring how clothes can express notions of social stratification. The concluding chapter reflects on the craft of working with MEK collections today. It turns to the institution at a time of celebration and reflection  – the twentieth anniversary of the MEK and the collection’s post-1989 reunification. Reforming the collections under a new umbrella institution, the Museum of European Cultures, creates new challenges for the curators. What kind of Europe do the collections represent? What do the collection filaments afford and what threads should be pursued in the museum’s future? The chapter sheds light on the dilemmas of the curatorial craft in the context of the changing societal role of museums, offering possible ways forward prefiguring a collection futures at the MEK and beyond.

1

Sample collection: Dreams and archives

Figure 1.1  Rügen Island as a dreamscape. Two men pointing to the sea (south coast of Rügen, Mönchgut) by Caspar David Friedrich. Courtesy of Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photograph by Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut.

There is a drawing made in 1815 by the artist Caspar David Friedrich, of two men standing on a beach on Rügen Island, on Germany’s Baltic coast (Figure 1.1). The wanderers in long capes are placed in the foreground, surrounded by a hazy maritime landscape. The person on the left leans against the second observer, placing a telescope on his shoulder, supported by a walking stick.

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Their gaze is directed east, beyond the coastline and the visible edges of the drawing. The viewers cannot be sure what the men are looking at – possibly the tiny ships on the horizon. Instead, we are invited to look at the background – the beach with its vegetation, the forests and the majestic cliffs. Rügen is a dreamscape for any artist. The roaring sea and white chalk cliffs were a source of inspiration not only to Romantic painters and musicians such as Caspar David Friedrich or Johannes Brahms, but also featured in numerous poetry collections, exchanges of philosophical letters and travelogues (Harper 2019). Passed between its near neighbours Sweden and Denmark over the centuries and handed to Prussia in 1815, the island became a symbolic German landscape, a site of longing and a place to experience the sublime (Shell 2014: 191). Svetlana Boym (2001) has explored how Romantic longing became entwined with affective geographies, nationalism and sentimentality. The Romantic wanderer, according to Boym, is only able to recognize the wholeness of a place like Rügen from a distanced perspective, a particular vantage point that creates an image of ‘the native idyll’ (2008: xx). The link between the distant perspective and nostalgia conjures up Caspar David Friedrich’s image with its wanderers’ gaze focused on a faraway space on the horizon. The romantic nostalgic insisted on the otherness of his object of nostalgia from his present life and kept it at a safe distance. The object of romantic nostalgia must be beyond the present space of experience, somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock. (2001: 13)

For the German Romantic imagination, Rügen came to be a place imbued with a thick sense of time, embodying a utopian, rural past. In the ‘Letters of a shipwrecked man’, an allegorical travelogue written by the poet Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, Rügen appears as Atlantis and a place of spiritual rescue (Shell 2014: 190) – a place where Germany came to dream. The notion of the island as an antique clock was bound up with ideas of ancient, unspoilt folk culture created by the national Romantic Movement. Rügen was envisioned as the true source of uncorrupted national culture to

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be preserved for posterity, revived and nurtured (Stoklund 2003: 24). This imaginary view was reflected in depictions of both breathtaking landscapes and peasants posing in their elaborate outfits. Such images travelled across the country through mass-produced postcard photographs, drawings and newspaper illustrations (Schulz-Berlekamp 1989). Paired with this proliferating island village aesthetic was a drive to know and understand the island, and its inhabitants. For example, in a diary of ‘A trip to Rügen: Nature, inhabitants and history of the island’ from 1856, Gustav Rasch wrote about the traditional outfits that, as he noted, had been worn by the islanders for centuries (1856: 58). His account provided a detailed description of the local dress that he saw as evidence that long-standing tradition continued on the island. Schulz-Berlekamp (1989) demonstrated how the traditional Mönchgut outfit from the south coast of Rügen became an attribute, a symbol of a particular type of people (Volkstyp). Like many other rural spaces within Germany and Europe, the island of Rügen became a site of Germany’s Binnenexotik,1 an internal exoticism (Bausinger 1961) that projected distant otherness, natural purity and rural authenticity onto the discoverable, local world. The island has attracted not only travellers and city dwellers in general but also members of the learned societies in particular. Many came to explore the island’s prehistoric sites, collected traditional folktales and material culture (Baier 1886, Jahn 1885, Rosenberg 1880). One such exploration took place in 1886 as part of the Seventeenth Congress of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory (Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte – BGAEU). Although the Congress took place in the town of Stettin on the mainland (now Szczecin, Poland), the society organized a special excursion to Rügen. One of the BGAEU members on the steamship heading to the island was Rudolf Virchow, a prominent medical doctor and pioneer of German anthropology who was to play a key role in establishing the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products (Museum für deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse des Hausgewerbes), the MEK’s institutional ur-incarnation (Gingrich 2005). The creation of this museum and its collection owes much to Virchow’s trip to Rügen’s wind-swept shores. The original idea for the museum came from an

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earlier BGAEU trip to Stockholm, in 1874, where Virchow had an opportunity to visit the newly opened Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection (Skandinavisketnografiska samlingen), later called the Nordic Museum (Nordiska Museet). Its visionary curator Arthur Hazelius collected and displayed rural clothes, furniture and toys from Sweden and other Nordic countries. As Virchow later reflected, he was fascinated by the presentations of people in their traditional dress, surrounded by their furniture and tools. For him, this museum was innovative as it enabled an understanding of both current and past periods of cultural development (Quedenfeldt et al. 1888: 467). Impressed by the lifelike displays, Virchow felt that such collections and exhibitions should also be created in Berlin. Collecting expressions of rural life had long been part of the Romantic desire. A hundred years before Virchow, when Johann Gottfried von Herder collected Lithuanian peasant songs, he saw them as archives of the people, a treasury of religious practices and ancient ways of thinking. For Herder, these records possessed an indescribable living presence and so became objects of culture and nostalgic longing (Boym 2001). This Romantic idea of psychological folklore was embedded in an urban yearning for a folk culture that is a ‘historically undifferentiated functioning peasant substratum’ (Jacobeit 1991: 69). The Herderian tradition, pursued by nineteenth-century Volkskunde (folklore studies),2 led to research into expressions of folk spirit, embedded in distant history. Folklore studies aimed to salvage its living relics in rural areas. Like the Romantic dream of a bucolic, utopian past, the collecting of rural objects was part of a nostalgic perspective that later became institutionalized in the form of folklore museums (Boym 2001).

Encounter It was during the excursion to Rügen that Virchow met Ulrich Jahn. Reflecting on the importance of the encounter of Virchow and Jahn for the museum which a century later became the MEK, I am reminded of Caspar David Friedrich’s depiction of the wanderers on Mönchgut beach. Resembling the man pointing his finger towards the distant horizon, Virchow was the key

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visionary of the museum initiative. However, he could not realize it without the assistance of Ulrich Jahn, his protégé and collaborator. Like the wanderer resting his telescope on another’s shoulder, Jahn was supported and mentored by Virchow. But Jahn had the tools and practical abilities to make the museum a success, driving its day-to-day management and collection activity. In particular, he had the field experience and passion to bring collections to Berlin and beyond. When the two museum initiators met in Stettin, Jahn was an active member of the area’s local history societies. He came from the Züllchow (now Żelechowa) district of Stettin; studied theology, German philology and philosophy in Leipzig, Berlin and Breslau (now Wrocław); and by 1876 was working in his home town as a grammar school teacher. He had developed an interest in local folk tales inspired by stories told to him by the inmates of a Christian centre for destitute and disabled people run by his father. Upon graduation from university, he started collecting oral narratives across the whole of northeast Prussia’s Pomerania region. Compiled into a book, the stories and folk tales were innovatively arranged by subject matter and theme rather than geography. As the publication gained prominence due to its wealth of material and novel approach, Jahn acquired the nickname of ‘the Pomeranian Grimm’. As a result, the 24-year-old humble grammar school teacher was welcomed as a member of the local learned societies. Recognized for outstanding writing skills and his involvement in the intellectual life of Stettin and Pomerania, in 1885 he was appointed to the editorial committee of the journal Baltic Studies. In this role, Jahn had co-organized the Seventeenth Congress of the BGAEU where he presented his work on witchcraft in Pomerania (Tietz 2001). The meeting with Virchow during this Congress was about to change the life of the aspiring folklore collector. In 1887, Jahn moved to Berlin to become Virchow’s right hand in creating a collection of material folklore and setting up the museum. In the summer of 1888, Jahn returned to Rügen with a mission to collect a so-called sample collection (Probesammlung). Acquired from inhabitants of the Mönchgut peninsula, it included a number of weaving tools and items of traditional dress. Virchow seemed delighted by Jahn’s acquisitions: The collection has been brought together with surprising success by Mr. Ulrich Jahn, who has been paying attention to the entire household for years on

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his travels to investigate the Pomeranian legends. He succeeded in finding a surprising abundance of products of the domestic industry in Mönchgut. (Quedenfeldt et al. 1888: 467)

With such abundance of objects, the sample collection deserved a proper exhibition space. Finding this, however, proved more challenging than expected.

A place for the museum Initially, Virchow saw the sample collection as an integral part of the Ethnological Museum already established in Berlin (Museum für Völkerkunde) in 1873, another initiative led by the BGAEU. However, the political establishment in Prussia was not convinced by the idea and in 1878 rejected Virchow’s proposal. It is very likely that Virchow’s reputation as a liberal politician, a critic of Bismarck’s government, a promoter of better living conditions and well-being for the poor contributed to this rejection by the Prussian cultural bureaucracy (Walter and Scott 2017). The museum was seen as a suspicious part of his free-spirited mass education agenda. Virchow’s idea of saving the material culture of the rural underclasses, his premise of recording history ‘from below’ and his focus on the ‘history of work’ might have been seen as radical and unpopular. The decision-makers also at the time might not have been prepared to recognize in these objects any achievements of their own or anything worth preserving (Hartung 2010: 12). Other reasons for their refusal could be resistance to the idea of exhibiting rural German outfits alongside the objects of non-European populations (Hartung 2010: 70). Or, perhaps the newly established Ethnological Museum (Völkerkundemuseum) simply did not have any additional exhibition spaces where such collections could be presented. Whatever the reason, no place for the objects could be found. The Anthropological Society therefore decided to find an alternative. To place the collection, they established an association to secure independent funding for the museum, envisioning it as the first Prussian institute for folkloristic collections. The association was a carefully selected elite network anchored in the art market, business and academia,3 able to mobilize the necessary resources and connections with the imperial court and the authorities to secure the future of the museum (Imeri 2019: 131). Several

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members of the association had pre-existing personal relations with Virchow and Jahn through collaboration in other learned societies. In particular, ethnologist Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow had worked together on the establishment of the Ethnological Museum, and Jahn had been a student of the famous philologist Karl Weinhold at the University of Breslau. The presence of Albert Voss, the director of the prehistorical section of Ethnological Museum, suggests that the association saw this department as the anticipated home for the collection. Two other members of the association – Louis Castan, co-owner of the Panoptikum (a network of private exhibition spaces) and the banker, Alexander Meyer-Cohn – contributed the financial resources, lobbying power and influence key to securing the museum’s sustainable future. Louis Castan also provided the first home for the collection  – Berlin’s Panoptikum, as Virchow discussed in his report to the Anthropological Society. A fellow member of the society, Castan was one of the strongest supporters of a sustainable museum future for the collection. The Berlin Panoptikum, primarily a wax-work gallery, was one of several that he and his brother owned in German cities between 1869 and 1922. At that time panoptica were a form of mass entertainment combining shocking, entertaining, morbid and at times illuminating public displays (McIsaac 2015). They presented a mixture of exhibitions of bodies, medical specimens, arts and crafts, wax figures of historical persona, ‘monstrosities’ and human zoos (Völkerschauen). The exhibitions included sensationalist depictions of notorious criminals such as Jack the Ripper, exhibitions of death masks (Regener 1993) and anatomy including a ‘Hall of Abnormalities’ (Zimmermann 2001: 18), and displays of real people. The performers and people from colonial settings presented in the ethnographic exhibitions were also often presented and examined during the Anthropological Society meetings (Zimmermann 2001: 73). It was considered uncontroversial that German anthropologists sourced knowledge from the human zoos and panoptica displays (Gingrich 2005: 86). Rudolf Virchow and the members of the BGAEU not only endorsed and visited human zoos but also saw those on display as research subjects to be examined. The displays of those seen as Naturvölker (‘natural people’) in the eyes of the nineteenth-century metropolitan Berliners provided a basis for BGAEU research activities. The examinations undertaken during the commercial ethnographic exhibitions, from taking anthropomorphic measurements and

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photographs to audio recording and the manufacturing of plaster casts of bodies without consent or considering the ethics of such practice, frequently purported to ascertain racial and ethnic typologies of people on display (Bruckner 2003). The impresarios, exotica traders and organizers of the human zoos were also tasked to collect for museums (Corbey 1993: 358). In this way, the wax work, the university, the museum and the laboratory formed a complex web of collecting, knowing and developing popular and scientific forms of display. This bundle of institutional relations was steeped in a colonial vision and practice. The Berlin branch of the Panoptikum was located right in the centre of the capital, the prestigious Imperial Gallery in Berlin’s Friedrichstraße. Visiting it, the Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus evocatively described the uncanny and eclectic nature of the displays: In the Berlin Arcade, there is no grass growing. It looks like the day after the end of the world, although people are still moving about. Organic life is withered, and in this condition is put on display. Castan’s Panopticon. Ah, a summery day there, among the waxworks, at six o’clock. An orchestrion plays mechanical music to accompany Napoleon Ill’s bladder-stone operation. Adults can see the syphilitic chancre [genital ulcer] of a Negro. Positively the very last Aztecs. Oleographs. Street youths, hustlers, with thick hands. Outside is life: a thirdrate cabaret. The orchestrion plays ‘You’re a Fine Fellow, Emil.’ Here God is made by machine. (Cited in Benjamin 2002: 541)

In his Arcades project, Walter Benjamin suggested that the Panoptikum could be seen as a quintessential manifestation of a total work of art. For Benjamin, it was a cultural form representing its time: ‘The universalism of the nineteenth century has its monument in the waxworks. Panopticon: not only does one see everything, but one sees it in all ways’ (Benjamin 2002: 531). The popularity and profile of its first exhibition space contributed to the recognition of Virchow and Jahn’s collection. Given the growing fascination with traditional dress in the metropole (Schneider 2015), the backing of Castan and the Association, the museum’s future seemed more possible. Indeed, by 1889 the iterant collection had finally found a home in Palais Kreutz on Klosterstrasse 36, the seat of the Hygiene Institute (Müller 1992). The collection had also received a new institutional name: the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products (Figure 1.2). The institute building housed the founding father of modern bacteriology Robert Koch’s  study and

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Figure 1.2 Staircase view of the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products (Museum für deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse des Hausgewerbes), Palais Kreutz. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Unknown photographer.

other prestigious scientific laboratories, academic departments and lecture halls. On the ground floor of this multifunctional shared home, you could find the stables and the cages for animals used in scientific experiments, a chemistry department, as well as the offices of the porter, the curator  – and the rooms belonging to the museum. Most of the space within the building, however, was dedicated to the hygiene exhibition with educational displays on questions of

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water and sewage, food and other themes of hygiene and public health (Hahn, Gaida and Hulverscheidt 2010: 10). A review in a north German newspaper remarked that the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products seemed to fill the last gap in the great series of museums and collections dedicated to the sciences and arts in the capital (cited in Neuland-Kitzerow 2002: 112). Virchow’s and Jahn’s museum dream had become a reality and allegedly closed an important gap, yet that reality was, in truth, quite humbling: sharing Palais Kreutz (Figure 1.3), Klosterstrasse, with the Hygiene Institute was not a prime position in the existing museum landscape. Despite the museum dream’s underwhelming realization, Virchow and Jahn were forcefully making a case for the museum, promoting its vision in both the academic and popular press. In the Gardenlaube magazine, Virchow (1889b) discussed the museum collection as a unique record of the history of work. He argued that art and everyday labour were situated on the same spectrum. The objects presented in Palais Kreutz could be seen as a physical manifestation of this continuity between aesthetics and work (89b: 447). In

Figure 1.3  The Palais Kreutz building. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Unknown photographer.

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the introduction to the first museum guide, Virchow saw the collections as an archive with unique ‘materials for the inner history of people’s lives’ (Virchow 1890: 104). This introduction shows that the museum was deeply enmeshed with Virchow’s political work: the archive for people’s history was linked to the agenda of recognition in relation to the cultural contribution of the poor in the German countryside. The objects were part of his political programme to acknowledge their makers and users and to provide more support to the rural population (Virchow 1890: 104). Complementary to Virchow’s politically reformist agenda, Jahn was elsewhere making a scientific case for the new museum. Addressing psychology and linguistics audiences in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, he stated that German scholars had developed much knowledge of their own linguistic and folkloric heritage through recording legends and fairy tales, songs or proverbs. This documentation provided detailed insights into folk beliefs, ideas, customs and traditions. At the same time, he argued, academia continued to neglect material culture or ‘tangible folklore’: We know how our people think and feel, believe, speak, sing and dance. But how about the objects they have created, how people assemble and build their houses, how they have laid out their farms and villages, gardens and halls, how they work in their living rooms, kitchens and cellars, and how their household goods are made, how they dress, how they breed cattle, cultivate the land, hunt and fish, and how they do the artistic manual work and housework of the farmer, the farmer’s wife … – this knowledge is still hidden. (Jahn 1889: 336)

Jahn argued forcefully that these unanswered questions could be addressed. But the potential for research inquiry based on material culture was hindered, he continued, by the difficulty in accessing dispersed and fragmented material. However, collections could be brought together to provide a new resource, an ‘objective’ archive of tangible folklore for future researchers, all to cast a new light on local points of view. He envisioned that the display cases of the museum should represent all parts of the country to reflect the ‘specificities of German people’ (1889: 336). Jahn’s concept of tangible folklore aimed to bridge the material gap in research and aspired to create an exhaustive display showcasing regional diversity. Together, these display cases would form an archive to assist

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new research on a variety of areas from dwelling and household, clothing and food, arts and crafts, movement and trade, to customs and beliefs.

Textile archives Given that the museum name for the collections emphasized ‘German National Costume’ (and ‘Domestic Products’), what role did textiles play in the creation of such an archive? To understand how the MEK came to hold such an extensive textile collection, now the largest museum collection of traditional dress in Europe, we have to go back to Virchow’s trip to the windwhipped shores of Rügen. During his stay on the island, he became particularly interested in the local female attire reminiscent of traditional dress from the west coast of Norway. Virchow’s encounter with the Mönchgut dress during the 1886 Congress inspired him to make a comparison with the outfits seen in Norway: Whether these facts have any significance for the question of settlement or at least of the traditional costumes introduced into Mönchgut, or whether, conversely, the fashion on the Sognefjord was originally German, may be decided by further investigation. In any case, the distinctive features of the Mönchgut people, which have been in existence for a long time, offer ample material for examining the question of the origins of their ancestors’ families 600 years ago. (Virchow 1889a: 106)

For Virchow, the Mönchgut dress could lead to further investigations of Nordic  influences. Writing about the available fabric, Virchow used the German term Stoff which indicates both stuff (material in general) and fabric in particular. In this way, Virchow argued that textiles could be sources for the investigation of key questions about history, material culture and patterns of migration. Clothing was of particular importance for Virchow for two reasons. Firstly, like many museum initiators of that time, he practised ‘salvage collecting’ (Edenheiser and Tietmeyer 2019) and was concerned by the destruction of traditional, rural culture by rampant industrialization. Dress constituted one of the main visible signs of difference (Tarlo 2007b); it marked the gap between

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pre-industrial livelihoods and the experiences of nineteenth-century urban collectors. Traditional dress, or folk costume, became a symbol of peasant culture, an easy-to-understand index of rurality, guaranteeing a big crowd in the museum (Hauser 2015, Stoklund 2003). Secondly, for Virchow, the costume was a potent epistemic object affording particular ways of understanding material culture (Keller-Drescher 2015). It was conceptualized as a thing or a data point for a comparative, scientific project within Germany, but also as in the case of Rügen and Norway, internationally (Bauer, Kohlmann and Müller 1975: 95). Within this epistemic grid of the costume, the first display of the museum represented dress from both Rügen Island in the north and Alsace on the western borderland between Germany and France. The comparison highlighted the distinctions between the different forms of costume along the boundaries of the Prussian state. Such comparative and geographical principles provided an overarching framework for the regional categorization of the collection. The museum’s catalogue was divided into a number of German and European regions. Collecting, researching and displaying examples of weaving tools or front shirts from different regions were envisioned as a means to shed light on different ‘cultural landscapes’, imagined as bounded, local worlds or bundles of people, material cultures and customs. The listing of the regional catalogue from 1904 demonstrates the priorities of the curators: I a East Prussia, I b West Prussia, I c Pomerania, I d Posen, I e Silesia, I f Brandenburg/Berlin, I g Province Saxony/ Magdeburg, I h Province Hessen/Nassau, I i Rhine Province, I k Westphalia, I l Hannover, I m Schleswig-Holstein, II a Mecklenburg, II b Oldenburg, II c Hamburg/Vierlande, II d Bremen, II e Lübeck, III a Sachsen, III b Anhalt, III c Braunschweig, III d Thüringen, III e Lippe/Detmold, III f Schaumburg/ Kippe, IV a Bavaria, IV b Württemberg, IV c Baden, IV d Alsace, IV g Hessen/ Darmstadt, V a Estonia, V b Tyrol, V c Russia, VI b Turkey, VI c Greece, VI Transylvania/Bosnia/Hungary, VI f Upper Austria/Bohemia, VI g Salzburg/ Tyrol, VI h Italy, VI k Switzerland, VII a France, VII Spain, VII Holland, VIII a Denmark, VIII b Norway, VIII c Sweden, IX b Belgium. This long catalogue shows that the museum’s collection from the very first decade of its existence included objects from across Europe. Secondly, the geographical ordering – all the first categories are towards the east (East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen, Silesia now part of Poland)  – shows a bias towards East European material

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culture. Perhaps this reflects Virchow’s and Jahn’s own background: Virchow came from Pomerania and Hahm was born in Silesia, both regions marking areas of Prussia east of Berlin. The geographical categorization also shows that collecting activity was linked to the paradigm of distinct cultural areas (Kulturlandschaften), where objects were considered attributes of particular spaces. Although the museum claimed to focus on labour and everyday textiles, Virchow and his team decided to exclude industrially produced fabrics and dress types as well as those, worn in the countryside, which had been influenced by fashion. This self-imposed restriction, as Hartung noted, was clearly connected to the salvage agenda of the museum (Hartung 2010: 70). The institution was the product of a very vivid dream – an image of unspoilt rural life, unaffected by industrialization, mechanization and the urban society in which the curators lived. Virchow and Jahn consciously turned a blind eye to any signs of change and adaptation in the villages. Perhaps we can better understand this drive towards unchanged, rural lives through a brief examination of its urban counterpart. As Mark Twain, upon visiting Berlin for Virchow’s birthday in 1891, remarked: I feel lost in Berlin. It has no resemblance to the city I had supposed it was. There was once a Berlin which I would have known, from descriptions in books – the Berlin of the last century and the beginning of the present one: a dingy city in a marsh, with rough streets, muddy and lantern-lighted, dividing straight rows of ugly houses all alike, compacted into blocks as square and plain and uniform and monotonous and serious as so many dry-goods boxes. But that Berlin has disappeared. It seems to have disappeared totally, and left no sign. The bulk of the Berlin of today has about it no suggestion of a former period. The site it stands on has traditions and a history, but the city itself has no traditions and no history. It is a new city; the newest I have ever seen. Chicago would seem venerable beside it; for there are many old-looking districts in Chicago, but not many in Berlin. The main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week, the rest of it has a just perceptibly graver tone, and looks as if it might be six or even eight months old. (Twain 1892)

For Twain, Berlin with its impressive 1.5 million residents was the epitome of newness, a place where nothing stood still. This was perhaps a reason why the museum solely focused on pre-industrial ‘original’ material culture that, it was assumed, had been unaffected by all-consuming change. One of the gifts

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presented at Virchow’s pompous birthday celebrations, attended by Twain, was a large collection of peasant dress for the museum (Bauer, Kohlmann and Müller 1975: 96). Textiles offered an opening into the disappearing world and were compact enough to be studied in quantity, comparatively. They were light and portable, which facilitated the creation of a large collection that could aspire to be allencompassing. They were also particularly vulnerable in their materiality, prone to rupture and disintegration, rendering them fragile like the livelihoods they were supposed to embody. The worn-out textures of the clothing, formerly covering a peasant body, could be seen as symbolic of the longing to preserve the traces of old ways of life. The textiles were part of a faraway, bucolic reality for Virchow and the urban crowd visiting the museum. In the countryside, these textile cultures were condemned to disappear.

World stage As Twain walked the streets of the ‘German Chicago’, the city across the Atlantic was preparing for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Also known as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, this mass display was visited by over 27 million people. The Columbian Exposition was part of the ‘monstrous’ international competition for prestige conducted in displays of industrial grandeur, imperial might national pride (Benedict 1981). Walter Benjamin saw the world exhibitions as modern ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’ designed as a festival to entertain the working classes (Benjamin 2002: 7). Bennett (1988) considered the world fairs as part of a wider ‘exhibitionary complex’ of museums, dioramas, panoptica and department stores that together constituted new technologies of vision, nodes of disciplinary relations and sites of reordering knowledge. Commemorating 400 years of Columbus’ first trip to America, the Chicago World’s Fair confirmed the New World’s high standing and modernity. As showcases of imperial aspiration and newly available mass commodities, the world exhibitions aimed to be all-encompassing. This included finding space for applied arts and folklore collections, from displays of farm houses to examples of woodcarving, weaving or other forms of rural crafts to stimulate their revival (Stoklund 2003).

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And this part of the immensity of the Chicago Fair involves our collection. The German exhibition in Chicago was organized by a scientific committee under Virchow’s leadership, and curated on the ground by Ulrich Jahn. In 1892, Jahn went on an acquisition trip to collect traditional outfits, household goods, folk art objects, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bourgeois furnishings from across Germany, Switzerland and Tyrol. This was one of the richest collections of festive costumes, embroidery, peasant jewellery, carvings and masks ever shown. In Chicago, it was placed in a special building next to prehistoric antiquities and a collection of weapons. There were also faithfully reproduced farmhouses from the Spreewald, Westphalia, the Black Forest and Upper Bavaria, which contained Lüneburg, Swiss and Tyrolean parlour furnishings. A Hessian town hall was used as a restaurant. (Steinmann 1967b: 77)

The German Village, an impressive exhibition complex, included thirty-six buildings with reconstructions of town houses, cottages, a Hessian town hall, several peasant rooms, a model of a sixteenth-century castle with several turrets and spires, and a rowdy beer garden (Stoklund 1999). Several rooms of the castle were devoted to a folk-lore museum, in which were to be seen many illustrations of peasant industries. The collection of headdresses was particularly interesting, as well as that of the recently discovered masks used in the winter festivals of South Germany. (Culin 1894: 58)

At the same time as the rural exposition, there was a German artillery pavilion showing the evolution of weaponry and the newest innovations of the German arms industry and a government building, decorated with the imperial eagle and a motto: Fruitful and powerful, full of corn and wine, full of strength and iron, Tuneful and thoughtful – I will praise thee, Fatherland mine. (Culin 1894: 54)

This juxtaposition of the dreamworld with industrial and military strength shows how the German Empire aimed to represent itself through this event with the help of Jahn’s acquisitions. The museum collection was exported to the fair to participate in this interconnected display of an economically and militarily competitive posture with a self-image of nationhood and dreamlike rural life.

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Following the Chicago exhibition, a conflict broke out between Jahn and Virchow over the return of the fair’s collection to Berlin. The transportation to Europe dragged on, and Jahn himself never really returned to the museum. He distanced himself from the institution as he had discovered much better prospects in the English-speaking world, and he ended up settling in London as an antique dealer. His last reluctant, anonymous contribution to Virchow’s dream was forty-three traditional outfits that travelled back to Berlin from the World’s Columbian Exposition (Bauer et al. 1975: 96). Almost none of these objects were assigned to his name and are missing the precise information about their origin or place of acquisition (Wörner 1999: 264). So, after the Chicago World’s Fair, Virchow and Jahn never resumed their collaboration and Jahn died seven years later at the age of thirty-nine, still estranged from his former mentor. He was buried in his home town of Züllchow but his grave can no longer be found (Tietz 2001: 177). When Virchow died at the venerable age of eighty-one just two years after Jahn, he was seen as ‘the Pope of medicine’ with innumerable accolades in medicine, politics, biology, and anthropology. However, his mixed legacy includes both liberal, democratic ideals and a significant contribution to race studies and colonial science in imperial Germany (Gingrich 2005). Virchow’s dream for a Berlin Museum of German National Costume and Domestic Products was at the time only partially fulfilled  – the museum remained in the Hygiene Institute. Nor did he manage to realize his vision of a German National Museum for Antiquities and Folklore (Deutsches Nationalmuseum für Altertümer und Volkskunde) nor to move parts of the folkloric collection into an open-air museum to make room for more acquisitions (Stoklund 2003: 31). Despite the long-term efforts of Jahn and Virchow to secure the position of the collection on the national and world stage, the status of the fledgling museum remained precarious.

Conclusion The story of Virchow’s and Jahn’s acquisitions demonstrates the complex texture of the museum’s sample collection. Tracing the twists and turns in the story, from the BGAEU, the Berlin Panoptikum, and the Hygiene Institute to the Chicago World’s Fair, we can map the seams of relationality, agendas

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and dreams brought into being in this collection and the early museum. This history highlights the interweaving of collecting practices with nostalgic vantage points, scientific aspirations and institutional desires. Virchow’s and Jahn’s dreams partook in the museological construction of cultural landscapes, bundling ideas of lost rural life, nation and island locality. These bundles resulted in new knowledge objects and ways of thinking, for example, conceptualizing dress and acquired fragments of textile culture as costume (Keller-Drescher 2015). Yet Virchow and Jahn not only dreamt about an imagined vanishing idyll but also undertook long-term efforts to secure a permanent place for rural textile culture in Berlin’s scientific and museological landscape. Rather than a record of exclusively nostalgic visions, the sample collection can be seen as an innovative form of interpreting and archiving textiles and material culture generally. In an era of a folklore boom, Jahn recognized the knowledge gap in ‘material folklore’. To address this gap, both Jahn and Virchow were advocating for the recognition of textiles as scientific material, or data for comparative research into localities. This raises wider questions about what forms of knowledge emerge from considering textiles as sources, and what histories and social phenomena can be described through a fabric sample or a weaving tool. For Jahn and Virchow, such an archive had the potential to tell stories ‘from below’, through the products and objects made by illiterate rural communities. This material record could reveal a ‘history of work’ and prompt new questions about the creation of daily material culture, everyday sartorial practices, ritual and belief (Jahn 1889: 336). As Jahn and Virchow advocated for the positioning of the collection within Berlin’s emerging museum landscape, they highlighted the value of ‘textural knowledge’ (de la Fuente 2019). The next chapter explores the prospective uses of the textile archive during the museum’s difficult wartime history, examining the ways in which the Second World War transformed the museum and the people who produced the objects.

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Carpets: Knotted histories, recurrent patterns In November 2019 I interviewed a retired MEK curator about an unfulfilled curatorial dream: We always wanted to do an exhibition with the Masurian carpets to take up Hahm’s project again and to see how the different developments had worked. … A European project to see what happened there, where the things met, of course in terms of craftsmanship but also in the design, and how it developed further.

The curator explained that this major project idea did not get off the ground and, she thought, could never be realized. On another occasion, I spoke with a current staff member who mentioned that the Masurian carpet project had initially been conceptualized as a key MEK exhibition. Acquired during the 1920s and 1930s for the then Museum of German Folklore (Staatliches Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde) by its director, Konrad Hahm, the collection’s significance for MEK today became apparent to me as I explored its past exhibition catalogues. Beginning with the unrealized dream of the MEK curator, this chapter explores the wider story of the Masurian textiles, and the double-weave and knotted techniques. It explores the striking examples of these objects, now in the MEK’s collection, through historical records in Berlin and various locations in Poland,1 as well as through ethnographic fieldwork in the lake district of Masuria, a region which once was called East Prussia.2 The fieldwork was undertaken during the summer and autumn months of 2020 between the first and second Covid-19 lockdowns in Germany. During the field visit of this patchwork ethnography (Günel, Varma and Watanabe 2020, Smolka 2021), I interviewed twenty-four craftspeople and local heritage activists and practitioners to trace the changing weaving technique in the region.

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Moving through the different contexts, from the archives of key players in past weaving revivals to social media conversations and exchanges of images with contemporary weavers, I encountered the many different facets and afterlives of Hahm’s project, as alluded to by the former MEK curator. How did Konrad Hahm become interested in East Prussian weaving and why did he have such an influence? We can find an explanation of his interest in his 1937 book on the topic, East Prussian Peasant Carpets (Ostpreußische Bauernteppiche). In it, Hahm mentioned that his passion was triggered by an accidental find in 1925 while reading a newspaper local to the province of East Prussia. Turning the pages, he came across a short text with an illustration of an impressive woven carpet. The article argued that it was made according to a technique dating back to the seventeenth-century Tatar conquest of this territory. Hahm was captivated. He was familiar with the Scandinavian style of carpet weaving from Finland, a technique practised by his mother-in-law. The object in the newspaper bore some design similarities. This resemblance and the question of the design’s origin and the distribution of the type of weaving, he tells us, piqued his interest in the object. Hahm was a passionate researcher of the growing area of folk art. The son of a small-town mayor in the Silesia region of Prussia, he developed an interest in rural life through visits to his grandparents in the countryside. Having completed his studies in German, theology, art history and philosophy in Breslau (today’s Wrocław, in Poland), he managed the local folklore association (Schlesisches Verein für Heimatschutz, Breslau), establishing networks with artisans, folk artists and museum professionals across the region. In 1922, Hahm came to Berlin to work in the office of the Imperial Art Protector (Reichkunstwart). This was a civil servant position within the Ministry of the Interior of the Weimar Republic concerned with regulatory matters linked to artistic production. With his work predominantly focused on folk art, he soon rose to become the general director of the German Folk Art Commission (Deutsche Volkskunstkommission), as well as an active member of its international counterpart (the Internationale Volkskunst Kommission or Commission Internationale des Arts et Traditions Populaires) and a co-organizer of multiple exhibitions, such as a presentation of folk art during the 1929 German Annual Labour Exhibition in Dresden (Karasek 2003: 122). In 1928, Hahm was appointed curator of the successor collection of Virchow’s Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products

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which meanwhile had already been reinvented a couple of times, subsumed in 1904 by the Prehistoric Department of the Ethnological Museum and then again in 1918 by the Museum for Prehistory and Early History (Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte). When Hahm took up his new role, the collection was still based in the dark and cluttered rooms of Palais Kreutz, and its development was impaired by the economic crisis of the post-war era (Karasek 1989: 9). Hahm worked tirelessly to improve its situation by sending multiple applications to the Ministry of Culture and personally engaging the Prussian finance minister to lobby on the museum’s behalf for a new venue. As a result, the museum was moved to the neoclassical Schloss Bellevue,3 a prominent, spacious and centrally located, building in the heart of Berlin’s Tiergarten Park. Renamed as the National Museum of German Folklore (Staatliches Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde) and with Hahm as its director, the transformed institution opened on 1 October 1935 with an exhibition entitled German Peasant Art (Deutsche Bauernkunst). Hahm envisioned the new institution as a mobile museum of work (bewegliches Arbeitsmuseum) with a vibrant programme of changing exhibitions and public lectures. Within the new space, he created separate temporary and permanent exhibition areas, built up the study collections, developed the educational section and the events programme, as well as creating a library open to the public (Tietmeyer and Vanja 2013: 393). Crucially, he also oversaw the development of a new, detailed collection management system. Rather than being categorized according to the region, Hahm wanted the objects to be clearly indexed by their material characteristics and social functions (Pretzell 1962: 106). He established different criteria for preservation and classification to improve conditions for storage and care of the collection. The creation of proper conditions in the museum depots allowed him to free up exhibition space (Mentges 2005: 153). The displays’ previous, much criticized cluttered look was abandoned and replaced by a clear, modern and open presentation of the collections (Tietmeyer and Vanja 2013: 393). Additionally, ensuring the right conditions made space for new collection objects. The acquisitions continued to focus on traditional attire, samplers, patterns and household textiles as well as special collections. The first exhibition, German Peasant Art, allowed Hahm to showcase the new collections. One of the key displays was of two East Prussian artefacts: a knotted carpet (Figure 2.1) (Stief 1952: 10) and a double-weave fabric (Figure  2.2), hanging vertically in a display of German folk art and

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wedding customs (Karasek 1989: 11). The unique collection, put together at Hahm’s request, comprised thirty-one knotted carpets and several doubleweave fabrics. The double-weave technique uses two sets of warps to form a two-layered cloth. The hand-picked pattern can be as complex as the weaver wishes and it appears on both sides of the piece. The works thus represented

Figure 2.1  Knotted carpet from East Prussia (today’s Masuria, Poland), collected by Konrad Hahm. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Christian Krug.

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two complex and unusual weaving techniques and a range of locally specific patterns. As Dr Werner Stief, a subsequent, West German curator later wrote, Hahm was the first to ‘recognize the real value of these rare pieces of East Prussian household furnishings, and for the first time, to make them accessible to science and to preserve their last examples’ (Stief 1952: 9).

Figure 2.2  Textile made in the double-weave technique, collected by Konrad Hahm. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Christian Krug.

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Most of the objects came from members of the East Prussian local elite such as the medical doctor or veterinarian and were collected with the help of the district administrator (Landrat) in the town of Lyck (now Ełk, in Poland). With the collection close at hand, Hahm embarked on a research project exploring the fine detail of the double-weave. He delved into the technique, its development, and the history of the use of the acquired objects. The results of this decadelong study formed the content of his 1937 monograph, East Prussian Peasant Carpets. As well as explaining his personal interest in the topic, the book proposes a hypothesis for the development of the Tatar carpet, arguing for its Nordic origin and history. The textiles, Hahm demonstrated, were the product of craft techniques and part of a material culture present across the Baltic region. In what follows below, I will show that the book had a far-reaching influence not only on research, but also on the weaving practice itself.

Nationalist folklore The idea of a Nordic textile culture was well received in the political climate of the time. The publication of the book came at the time of the burgeoning Völkisch4 Movement, seen as preventing Germany’s political and cultural decay (Kamenetsky 1972: 225). The book’s main argument that the knotted carpets were not a product of the ‘Orient’ but part of the ‘cultural region of the North’ (Stief 1952: 8) chimed with the Nazi-era notion of folklore, seeking out Nordic-Germanic roots of rural material culture. Already, in 1933, Hahm had signed a paper prepared by Völkisch theorist Max Hilderbert Boehm and the Berlin’s Institute for Border and Foreign German Studies (Institut für Grenzund Auslandsdeutschtum). In this document, the academic community pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler and the ethnic German movement (Karasek 2003: 134). Hahm had also been quick to renounce his Social Democratic Party (SPD) membership and on 1 March 1934 had joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  – NSDAP) (Karasek 2003: 128). This political self-fashioning was giving him a new chance to step into the limelight (2003: 128). One significant benefit of outright politicization was the improvement of the museum’s position in Berlin’s heritage landscape.

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Demonstrably attuned to the governing regime’s propaganda, the Museum of German Folklore continued to gain visibility and clout. The extent to which the museum reimagined its collection for political reasons can be seen in Figure 2.3. In it, we can see a group of men and women in uniforms with swastika armbands surrounding Hahm. He stands in front of an oversize mannequin, described as an ancient ‘German’. This athletic, bone-white tribesman, holding a spear in the right hand, greets the guests with a Roman salute. Elsewhere, a whole room was dedicated to the ‘great contributors’ to German folklore, featuring busts of key figures from the Grimm brothers to Adolf Hitler (Roth 1990: 139). Under Hahm’s directorship, the museum collected objects that became available due to Nazi violence, including a collection of Jewish religious and everyday objects from the Galicia region in southern Poland. As Werner Stief remarked in 1961, this collection was created with the members of

Figure 2.3  Konrad Hahm, the director of the Museum for German Folklore, with a group of Hitler Youth visitors in front of a figure of a Germanic tribesman. Photograph was taken in Schloss Bellevue as part of the ‘Deutsche Bauernkunst’ (1935–1938) exhibition. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Unknown photographer.

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Berlin’s Ethnological Museum assisted by the Secret Police. As a gift from the Führer, the museum also received over 2,000 items of traditional dress and embroidery objects from the newly ‘annexed’ territories of Sudetenland, today’s Czech Republic (Karasek 1989: 10). Although the 1940 exhibition of this collection never took place, its proposed name, Die Große Heimkehr (‘The Great Homecoming’), shows how Hahm actively worked within Nazi political discourse (Karasek 1999: 10). The official opening attracted prominent ethnologists and museum directors from around Europe, such as Georges Rivière from Paris, Sigurd Erixon from Stockholm and Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș from Bucharest. The exhibition focused on the continuity of ‘Germanic’ culture through vernacular architecture, dress, patterns and household objects from the Neolithic period to the present day (Pretzell 1962: 107). The exhibition catalogue connected peasant art to ‘race and space’, with selective archaeological arguments used to justify the ongoing 2,000-year-old German settlement and right to territory (Ausstellung Deutsche Bauernkunst 1935: 9). The displays emphasized the themes of expatriate Germans (Auslandsdeutsche) and ethnic Germans living in the territories of other states (Tietmeyer and Vanja 2013: 389). The newly acquired collection of Masurian textiles played an important part in the show. It occupied a separate room to mark the first presentation of these acquisitions in Berlin. Dedicated to the knotted carpets and double-weave fabrics, the space aimed to showcase that both techniques demonstrate the continuity of German presence in this area. At the same time, this continuity of material culture serves to provide ‘the richest possible evidence of exclusions from the basic historical habitat of the Germanic tribes’ (Ausstellung Deutsche Bauernkunst 1935: 9). In line with Hahm’s monograph, the catalogue explained that the knotted carpet-making technique could not possibly come from the East. Instead, it highlighted the widespread presence of weaving across the Baltic region and its ‘Nordic’ nature. It shed light on the meaning of the objects used during weddings, baptisms and funerals. It described the ancient, symbolic nature of the traditional pattern, pointing out its swastikalike elements. The exhibition claimed exclusive Germanness even for pieces that included Polish inscriptions: the catalogue does not make any remarks about the presence of Polish writing. Indeed, in their first public exhibition, the Masurian textiles served to support Nazi Germany’s notions of folklore.

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Infused with propaganda, display areas were aligned with the Nazi perspective on culture with a Völkisch glorification of peasantry and ethnic nationhood (Karasek 2003), ignoring evidence within the pieces which might point to a much more complex and entangled picture of the region. Despite such a politically aligned museum practice, the institution enjoyed its prestigious Tiergarten venue for a very short time. In 1938, Hahm’s team received an order to immediately relocate the museum to the premises of the Princesses’ Palace (Princessinnenpalais) in Unter den Linden; Schloss Bellevue was turned into an official guest house of the so-called Third Reich (Karasek 1989). Given the significant reduction of storage space in the new location, many objects were moved to the recently nationalized Freemason Lodge, the House by the Three Globes. It also seems that Hahm’s writing was not fully appreciated in the febrile anti-Semitic climate of the later 1930s. The 1938 German Folklore in Literature: a Guideline for the Training and Educational Work of the NSDAP mentions two of Hahm’s publications. The summary of his German Folk Art (see Hahm 1928) starts with a note that ‘the book is dedicated to a Jew, James Simon’. The review of the 1928 edition also criticizes the unnecessary use of images of Jewish objects in the volume. If the alignment with NSDAP was indeed an opportunistic attempt on Hahm’s part to take centre stage, the removal of the museum from its prime location four years later must have been a crushing disappointment.

School and museum In 1939, the Museum of German Folklore celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the setting up of Virchow’s original Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products. Its further change of venue also hailed an era of programme redevelopment and a focus on school exhibitions (Schulaustellungen). These craft shows were organized by Adolf Reichwein, a new staff member responsible for education and the museum and school department. Having been dismissed on political grounds in 1933 from a post at a Teachers’ Training College in the city of Halle, Reichwein was running a small village school in the Brandenburg area up to the time at which he took the post at the museum. As Hahm was taking up an appointment as honorary

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professor at Berlin University in 1940, Reichwein immediately took a lead in the museum’s exhibition programme. Hahm’s university commitments, combined with his declining health (leading to an early death in 1943), gave Reichwein a significant influence in the museum. A proponent of ‘reform pedagogy’, Reichwein argued for progressive, place-based education and hands-on learning (Steinmann 1958, Werler and Baraldsnes 2019). He applied these educational principles in a series of craft shows focusing on clay and pottery (October 1939), wood (1940), weaving and knitting (November 1941), and metalwork (1943). Reichwein’s school exhibition programme between 1939 and 1943 was less suffused with explicit political content. Practice-oriented and focused on material knowledge, the exhibitions were accompanied by a programme of guided tours and practice-based workshops. One example of the ideological shift within the museum under Reichwein’s influence is his presentation of East Prussian carpets and double-weave fabrics in the 1941 Weaving and Acting (Weben und Wirken) exhibition. The objects were no longer displayed as indicators of Nordic-Germanic textile culture. Instead, Reichwein presented a detailed look at the double-weave technique: Here, two layers of differently dyed wool fabric are placed on top of each other; to create a pattern, they are interlocked so that the lower light threads on the dark upper side create the image, which then emerges as dark – i.e. negative – on the light lower side. Since not only a single pattern, but the whole fabric is produced by picking it with different narrow and wider shafts, the pattern design is very free, but shows a stylization determined by the rhythm of warp and weft. (Weben und Wirken 1941: 43)

The exhibition catalogue shows pattern-making within the double-weave technique in minute detail, including diagrams of different types of production stages. For Reichwein, less than signifying Baltic origin or national belonging, weaving was a marker of embodied knowledge and craft technique. The exhibitions were envisioned as forms of craft education and the curator often collaborated with community and vocational schools (Volkshochschulen). One such partnership connected the Berlin museum with the Lyck Weaving School in Masuria, East Prussia. Bertha Sytttkus, the school director, had established a similar craft course as early as 1916. From 1928, she had led a

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training programme in a community school in the nearby village of Jablonken, an initiative closed down by the Nazi Party. However, as folklore and craft gained new political relevance for the so-called Third Reich, the textile educational project gained new momentum. Set up in 1939 with the support of a local folk art association (Verein für Volkstümliche Arbeit), the weaving school ran a three-year programme for forty-five students. The school also offered a range of specific, e.g. six-week-long, courses focused on particular techniques. Over the five years of the Lyck Weaving School’s operations, it set up other branches in the local area, in Hohenstein and Nikolaiken (now Mikołajki, in Poland). The school aimed to rejuvenate textile production in the region by reviving its traditional weaving craft. In the archive of the German Minority Association in Lyck, there is a handwritten autobiographical note by Bertha Syttkus. In it, the director noted that expatriate Germans (Auslandsdeutsche) were a significant part of the weaving cohort. She pointed out that the school’s mission was linked to völkisch national character-building (Volkstumarbeit). Through material practice, the school participated in the wider goal of reinforcing the identity of German-speaking communities in the areas outside the German-speaking state. The ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), although not possessing Third Reich citizenship, were to learn about German values. Traditional art education and folklore were imagined as a vehicle for connecting communities to the nation (Nolzen 2017, Penny and Rinke 2015). In this way, the school assisted in forging a new national body, aligned with the Nazi policy of nurturing ethnic Germanness. In the note, the director mentioned Adolf Reichwein as a friend and supporter, regularly visiting the weaving school. Reichwein instructed the weavers about plant-based dyeing methods and patterns that, as Syttkus stated, enhanced the value of woven objects and rendered the traditional patterns more authentic. These experiments with natural colours were also part of Reichwein’s museum and school education under increasingly difficult wartime conditions. Reichwein was working in extremely challenging circumstances, and his personal history of dismissal resulted in a degree of adaptation to the regime (Hohmann 2007). In the context of increasing mass production, the growing use of synthetic and substitute materials in manufacturing and dominant, monotonous factory work, the artisan

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ethos  was propagated  with greater intensity in the Third Reich (Roth 1990: 140). Reichwein’s emphasis on craft and close cooperation with the school in the East Prussian borderland seemed to follow the Nazi premise of folklore as part of the Völkisch Movement. At the same time, as his 1939–1943 craft exhibitions demonstrate, he used his education work to carve out a degree of political autonomy. Reichwein’s museum and education work was undertaken simultaneously with involvement in discussions about the future government of Germany, on the assumption that the war was already lost (Henderson 1955). In 1944, he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the Kreisau Circle resistance group. In 1945, as the war front approached Berlin, the remaining museum team desperately tried to save the collections from war damage. Objects had been placed in the basements and vaults of country estates, in bunkers and flak towers. Despite these safekeeping attempts, many artefacts did not survive the war. Some estimates suggest that the museum lost up to 80 per cent of its collections (Pretzell 1962: 108). The only remaining signs of the lost artefacts are their photographs in Hahm’s book and the small museum catalogue cards marked with red ‘war loss’ crosses. The rest of the collection was dispersed in the post-war chaos. Some objects taken from their hiding places landed in the US Army-controlled Central Collection Point in Wiesbaden; others were taken to the Soviet Union by its Red Army soldiers, to be returned many years later to the new East Germany. As the political situation in post-war Germany settled, the surviving artefacts landed in separate East and West Berlin museums (discussed in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6). The West German curator Werner Stief (1952) wrote that out of thirty-one East Prussian knotted carpets from the 1937 collection of the Museum of German Folklore, half of the collection was in the ‘lost East German territories’ with eight remaining in West Germany.

Regained Territories In 1944, the Red Army made its way towards Berlin through East Prussia. As part of the concept of Total War, Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of the region, opposed local evacuations until the last moment. He believed such an order

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could send the wrong message to the population and ‘weaken the will to win’ (Sakson 1998: 17). In October 1944, under the conditions of an apocalyptic defeat, the German authorities finally decided to evacuate civilians from this border strip. In January 1945, the Red Army found itself for the first time within the borders of the Third Reich. As Ivan Chernyakhovsky, the general in command stated, the army saw itself as standing in front of a cave from which the fascist aggressor had attacked the Soviet Union (USSR). In his order we will stop only once we have put things in order. There will be no mercy for anyone, just as there was no mercy for us. It is futile to ask the soldiers of the Red Army for mercy. They are burning with hatred and revenge. The land of fascists must be laid waste. (Sakson 1998: 23)

As the Red Army was looking for retaliation for the brutal crimes committed in the East, the Soviet soldiers vented their hatred on the fleeing East Prussian population, mainly the women, elderly and children who had stayed behind until then. The spring of 1945 was marked by acts of revenge, including looting, rapes, executions and deportations to slave labour in the USSR. Already during the 1943 summit meeting in Teheran (Winkler 2015: 810), Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt decided to annex the northern part of East Prussia to the Soviet Union. This way, the USSR would gain the region surrounding the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, in Russia), the only non-freezing port in the north. At the Potsdam Conference in July and August 1945, it was decided that Poland should receive the southern part of East Prussia in compensation for the Soviet takeover of territories belonging to Poland’s Second Republic (now in Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine). As a result, the East Prussian areas of Lyck and Nikolaiken in Masuria, where Hahm once sourced his collection, became incorporated into the Polish state, at that time heavily dependent on the Soviet authorities. In a speech to the House of Commons on 15 December 1944, Churchill remarked that the East Prussian region, now part of the Soviet Union and Poland, would involve forced resettlement of the German-speaking population: Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause

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endless trouble. … A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions. (Levene 2013: 392)

In the post-war decade, the ‘clean sweep’ of expulsion was soon to be implemented across the region. Stalin instructed the USSR-controlled government in 1950s Poland to ‘create such conditions for the Germans that they will want to escape themselves’ (Snyder 2011: 321). The Germanspeaking East Prussians who did not agree to ‘voluntary repatriation’ could face time in forced labour camps. In 1946, over 60 per cent of this diverse district were still German-speaking Masurians. Over time, however, so-called population verification, including targeted repressions and relentless political pressure, led to further departures. The Regained Territories were to be fully ‘repolonized’ or made Polish by settlers from the now Soviet East. The process of repolonizing the population was already underway in the tumultuous postwar years, as refugees and looters entered abandoned Masurian houses. Given the chaotic movements of people, plunder, corruption and lawlessness, the area gained a reputation as a Polish ‘Wild West’. The empty Masurian villages thus provided new homes for those fleeing the ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe (Snyder 2011). These settlers had to learn to live with their own displacement and the traces of driven-away people whom the Stalinist government deemed culprits, responsible for their own tragedy. As Basia, one of the Ukrainian-Polish settlers in post-war Masuria, reflected in an interview with me in September 2020: Nations were supposed to be monochromatic – we were, we are, we will be. And at that time the culture of the Masurians was destroyed … and the settlers from Operation Vistula buried their clothes because people were laughing … much was destroyed because of it.

Basia remembered the sheer chaos and randomness of the resettlement. Trains were taking people in any direction, people landed in unexpected places and it took quite some time for them to learn to live with each other. She spoke in a slow, quiet voice: Who came here voluntarily? The harmed one, the hurt one, the wounded one. And would they be here if it weren’t for the war? Everyone would be sitting in their own cottage and wouldn’t even know what was going on over the fence.

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Who knew about the Regained Territories? Nobody knew. And who had a map in their head? … They went to one place and landed somewhere else.

For Basia, this forced repolonization led to the destruction of both the Masurian and settler culture. She remembered the destruction of East Prussian belongings in settler homes. She also recalled how people from the East who now lived in Masuria hid their heritage to avoid comments and mockery. The dramatic transformation affected both the population and the local material and cultural heritage. The Stalinist authorities of the former East Prussia saw the space as shaped by a hostile Germanness and were anxious that its material remnants could affect the incomers. New Polish settlers should remain vigilant, and rather than blending into this dangerous cultural landscape, they should work to break the ‘spirit of Prussia’ (Lewandowska 2018: 194). This fear of a residual threat of Prussian cultural contamination led to several destructive policies. The local authorities ordered the removal of all traces of Germanness, from tearing down statues and buildings or refusing their upkeep, to changing buildings’ use and renaming towns and villages (Gładkowska 2015, Lewandowska 2018, Yoshioka 2007) – for example, Lyck was renamed as Ełk; Nikolaiken became Mikołajki. The Regained Territories of post-war Masuria became ‘a polygon of pure Stalinism’ (Sakson 1998: 229), a land of expelled and driven-away people as well as a suppressed and devastated heritage.

Post-war reconstruction In the autumn of 1954, a young artist and her partner, a loom technician, were en route to start a new life. After a long journey from Warsaw, they reached the infamous ‘Wild West’ of the Masurian Lake District. Their destination was the fishing village of Mikołajki. As they arrived they were spellbound by their new surroundings: We stood on the shore of the lake, holding hands. Mighty waves were beating against the shores, dangerous clouds were rushing from the forest straight towards us. Autumn leaves were dancing under our feet. We welcomed another, new life. The unloading of our property was very modest, we did not have much.

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The small luggage of the aspiring artist included a book, the German edition of Hahm’s (1937) monograph on the East Prussian carpets from Masuria, Ostpreußische Bauernteppiche. She had received it from her art school professor as a guidebook for her key task in Mikołajki – to reconstruct the knotted carpets collected by Hahm. Her arrival came almost ten years after Lyck Weaving School’s demise and the expulsion of its teachers. These were remnants of the same school where Bertha Syttkus and Adolf Reichwein had previously worked to revive the production of East Prussian textiles. Mikołajki, then known as Nikolaiken, as we have seen, had hosted a branch of the pre-war weaving school, which also made new versions of the textiles in Hahm’s collection. Before Barbara and Andrzej called Mikołajki their home, they had been associated with Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts. In June 1954, Barbara Hulanicka graduated from its Faculty of Interior Design where she focused on textiles. She met her future spouse through Professor Eleonora Plutyńska. Andrzej assisted in the professor’s studio, building and repairing looms as well as providing technical support for the art students. Eleonora Plutyńska was a key figure in the revival of traditional textiles, specializing in ancient weaving and dyeing techniques. Coming from a wealthy Polish oil business family in the area of Lviv (now in Ukraine), Plutyńska was linked to the Association for the Support of Folk Industry Council in the 1920s and 1930s. She was also part of the Harmony design cooperative (Spółdzielnia Artystów Plastyków – Ład) and the vibrant Polish arts and crafts scene (Crowley 1994: 189) where she experimented with natural dyes and fibres in textile design. Plutyńska focused her practice on collaborations with weavers in the villages in the Sokółka area of north-eastern Poland. Looking for traditional weaving patterns in the countryside, she could only find small fragments of textiles or ragged cloth used for covering animals in the winter. Instead, rural women were making pieces inspired by factory production, copying Jacquard patterns on manual looms. Plutyńska embarked on a mission to revive the doubleweave textile technique. She discouraged the weavers from reproducing machine-made, ‘degenerate’ cloth and motivated them to think about their own patterns. She encouraged them to use the loom to invent patterns to represent their experiences, surroundings and dreams. This way, Plutyńska aimed to recreate Polish double-weave artefacts and inspire innovative designs (Kordjak 2016: 11).

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In 1938, Plutyńska had an opportunity to meet Konrad Hahm. During a visit to Warsaw, Hahm presented his forthcoming publication about East Prussian weaving to a group of ethnology scholars and Harmony design cooperative members. The night before, Plutyńska hosted Hahm for dinner, as reported by her husband: Professor Hamm [sic] explained in detail the meaning of the symbols on the East Prussian tapestries, i.e. the sun and the fish, and about the custom of weaving into the right-hand border of that used to cover the table the animals brought by the groom as a nuptial endowment, and on the left side those representing the bride’s dowry. But of what use was this vanished pre-Nordic technique which could never be resurrected? After dinner the hostess led the guests to the drawing-room; and there the astonished professor beheld a score of beautiful new tapestries spread out over the chairs and hung on the walls – tapestries woven with this same ancient Nordic technique, which had been forever lost! ‘Who made them?’ he exclaimed. ‘This is the work of my friends, the village artists near Grodno’, replied Madame Plutyńska. … So in the face of this revelation, the Director of the Volkskulturanstalt was obliged to amend the last sentences of his lecture the following day. He related: ‘In my book I stated that the technique of the reversible tapestry had been irretrievably lost. Yesterday to my utter amazement I ascertained that it still exists in Poland and is developing splendidly. What would my country not give to have revived this technique of the pre-Nordic spinners! But that can never be; for in Germany no countrywoman has such fresh eyes, nor could there be found among the artists anyone capable of conducting such work. (Plutyński 1943: 202)

The pre-war encounter was described as a triumph of Plutyńska’s project of an aesthetic revival of double-weave technique and its elevation to artistic practice (Kowalewska 2018, Surdacka 1979). This revival was accompanied by a creation of double-weave mythology in which Plutyńska positioned herself not only as a saviour of the craft but also as an expert capable of unravelling the mystery of the double-weave and driving the creation of authentic and aesthetically ‘correct’ objects (Klekot 2021). After the war, Plutyńska continued to use traditional weaving techniques as inspiration for professional art (Kordjak 2016: 14). In the 1950s, in line with Stalinist-era ideas of cultural production, the revival of vernacular weaving

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was to be instituted and take place beyond the salon or the gallery. The new socialist Polish culture needed to be rooted in rural, vernacular design (Crowley 1998). Plutyńska’s art gained a new role in this political climate. In her studio, Hulanicka and a whole generation of students at Warsaw’s Academy of Art were learning to emulate rural masters. They were designing directly on the loom without drawings, using homespun wool and plant-based dyes, and weaving in a traditional technique with modern patterns. The pieces held vernacular culture in ‘suspended animation’ as if it was an immutable and authentic feature of Polish life, resistant to historical change. (Crowley 1998: 76)

The artists were trained as future leaders of collective cultural production, and supervisors of peasant-artist cadres. The craft cooperatives aimed to make new art  – national in form and socialist in content (Crowley 1998: 75). This artistic and craft revival played a vital role in the cultural work of Polishness in the Regained Territories. The threatening spectre of Germanness in the former East Prussia required cultural workers. It needed employment opportunities and new cultural resources for the Polishness of the region. Barbara Hulanicka, one of Plutyńska’s most brilliant students, accepted the challenge of reactivating the weaving tradition and recreating a textile culture in Masuria. To fulfil the task with the right precision, paradoxically she needed Hahm’s German monograph.

Truly Polish craft The collections of reconstructed textiles are now held in the archive of the Museum of Warmia and Masuria, a former Teutonic castle in Olsztyn (formerly Allenstein). With the local curator, I visited the textile archive and rolled out the knotted carpets and double-weave fabrics made by Hulanicka and the weavers of the Mikołajki cooperative. These reconstructions were very similar to the originals, attesting to Hulanicka’s exactitude. Though Hulanicka only had black-and-white photographs to work from, the colour schemes were just slightly different. Most of the carpets were copies of the original designs, except for one piece. That carpet had two dates woven into its pattern – 1788 and 1955 – clearly referring to the act of reconstruction.

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The museum has also gathered documents belonging to Hulanicka’s personal legacy. To explore these, the young curator offered me a room in the museum. The small office with an arched ceiling and a gothic window overlooked a court where confusingly, actors were rehearsing for an open-air show. On the desk, the curator prepared a bundle of yellow paper folders tied with a red ribbon, stamped and marked ‘Tkanina’ (Fabric). As I opened the folders, I flicked through various images and slides of familiar textiles from the Berlin museum. Several images of the Hahm collection replicas have notes at the back: ‘Masurian kilim from 1789. Reconstruction from 1955’. There are other accompanying handwritten comments. Some of the text is hard to decipher, and the notes include scribbles punctuated by numeric descriptions of the weaving technique, such as 6–2–2–6. A key image from the museum’s folder also appears in the biography of Hulanicka written by Helena Piotrowska. In the photograph, Barbara Hulanicka and Andrzej sit at a table with a cup of coffee and an illustration of a carpet from Hahm’s collection. They seem to be working out the number of knots for the pattern reconstruction, translating the design into a drawing on a piece of graph paper (Piotrowska 2010: 62). Based on interviews with Hulanicka, the biographer noted that Hahm’s Ostpreußische Bauernteppiche, on loan from Eleonora Plutyńska, was the only material at hand used by the couple. The reconstruction was an outcome of labourious deciphering of Hahm’s technical documentation, charts and photographs (Piotrowska 2010: 48). The biographer emphasized that the restoration of Hahm’s pieces was a collaborative endevour. The design expertise of Hulanicka was complemented by the technical know-how of Andrzej and his ability to reverse-engineer a slanted loom for weaving knotted carpets. Without the constellation of skills in woodworking, design, mathematical analysis and local weaving techniques, the reconstruction of the patterns from the very small book illustrations probably would have failed. Several of the archive folders contained press clippings collected by Hulanicka. Flicking through these, two reports caught my attention. One dated 3 June 1955, published in Olsztyn Life (Życie Olsztyńskie), bore a sensationalist title in bold letters: ‘The FIRST after 200 years, Masurian carpet made in Tkanina’. The piece mentioned the weavers’ names, highlighting that they worked at the Tkanina cooperative under the supervision of Barbara Hulanicka. It stated that the rug was made according to traditional

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techniques and the original green, yellow and white colour palette. It contained 250,000 knots, weighing as much as 30 kilogrammes. Prepared for the Fifth International Youth Festival, the carpet was apparently completed ahead of time, thanks to the commitment of the weavers working from 5 a.m. each day. Masurian carpets with their specific patterns were made in the past by the local population of Polish origin. This is evidenced by their clear affinity in design with Polish patterns. They were woven for family celebrations. … It is worth mentioning that the German ethnographer Konrad Hahn [sic] in his source work devoted to the history of folk carpet-making in Masuria clearly states that it refers to contemporaneous Polish production.5

The report is typical of Stalin-era journalism, mentioning a target met well ahead of the deadline. Although socialist in content, the article pointed out, the reconstruction was national in form. The patterns were typically Polish, the piece concludes, as was confirmed even by a German ethnographer – referring to the expertise of Konrad Hahm. At the time of publishing this article, Hahm’s competence was the subject of controversy. Writing about the vexed heritage of the neighbouring regions of Warmia and Masuria, Gładkowska (2015) has traced the development of postwar intellectual debates in the light of efforts to establish the Polish character of the region. The discussions about Hahm and the carpets were part of a politicized cultural policy and its programmatic archaeology of Polishness that selected Polish fragments from a wider heritage environment. This is illustrated by a review from 1955 of a folk art exhibition in Olsztyn’s museum. Discussing a collection of waistbands with the characteristic grid pattern, the reviewer suggested that one of the objects should probably have been eliminated from the display. She argued that this artefact strongly connoted German patterns, introduced by the Ełk weaving school (Przeździecka 1955: 315). Instead, the focus should be on the development of Polish folk art in the cooperatives. Przeździecka praised Hulanicka’s work on the knotted carpets as an attempt to bring back to life long-extinct varieties of weaving and drew attention to further possibilities of such work (Przeździecka 1955: 316). Gładkowska demonstrates that folk art was key to the strategic downplaying of Germanness and overemphasis on the Polishness of the land. Folk art became a privileged area of material culture

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because in this kind of artistic activity the most references to Polish art could be found. Thus, folk art played a critical role in the process of legitimization of Polish raison d’état. The controversy stirred about the origin of the East Prussian carpets proved how significant folk art was in the debate about the dissonant heritage discussed from different national perspectives. (2015: 131)

Although Hahm’s book on ‘East Prussian’ carpets did not attract controversy at the time of its publication in 1937, it caused a heated debate when revisited within the scholarship of the post-war archaeology of Polishness. In 1947, after the trauma of the Second World War, the art historian and curator Marian Morelowski wrote that the German scholar robbed the art of its Polish identity and creative spirit. At the same time, Morelowski accused Hahm of plagiarism, as he was not the first to argue for the Baltic-area origin of the textiles. For Gładkowska, the dispute over the textiles highlights the ideological turn taken in academia. Once again, the local fabrics were used to perform on a national stage, to legitimize Polish rule over the complex and contested region, just as a decade earlier on the other side of the border, material culture was deployed to prove the right to territory and works of art were linked to the national character. Paradoxically, the German pre-war fascist-era curator and the Polish post-war socialist art historian followed the same pattern. Both were making a case for the connection between textile culture and national claims. In these competing assertions, material culture was seen as analogous to an exclusionary nationalism linked with territorial aspirations. This pattern of thinking about textiles as national (both in socialist Poland and fascist Germany) ignores the complexity of the region and its diverse population.

Scraps On 24 August 2020, I found myself standing by a green metal gate that separated the country lane from a small, lush front garden. Its ginger-orange and violet field flowers were neatly arranged. I went through the gate, approached the modest house with its cherry-red pitched roof and pressed the buzzer. This might be awkward, I thought, as I was arriving completely unannounced. Earlier that day, I had been told at the local post office that I could find former

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staff of the textile cooperative here in what were once its workers’ quarters. The postwoman explained that many still live in these houses opposite the nowclosed cooperative building. I pressed the buzzer again, the creaky door opened and I was greeted by a diminutive figure in an orange T-shirt, hazel chinos and a green, polka-dot headscarf. ‘Please come inside’ – she spoke decisively with a Kresy6 accent – ‘do enter as I am unable to stand on my feet for long’. This is how I came to meet Rufina, the octogenarian forewoman (brygadzistka) of the Tkanina cooperative in Mikołajki and her former colleagues. We sat down in Rufina’s tidy living room, keeping a Covid-safe distance. While Rufina opened the window for ventilation and went to the kitchen to get the coffee, I examined her living room, so similar to my grandmother’s in the southern part of Poland. The dominant feature of the room was the towering, cluttered wall unit with carefully arranged trinkets. Like a personal museum, it presented its own order of things  – with separate sections for china figurines, small shot glasses on decorative green legs, crystal bowls and baskets, and books. The side table was covered with a floral pinkish-orange oilcloth, with a sugar bowl placed precisely in the middle. All the upholstery was covered by diamond-shaped, cream-brown fabrics with matching runners under the furniture’s feet. This was the house of a jocular, albeit perfectionist, retiree. I remembered the time as a child when I was dusting the shelves of my grandmother’s wall cabinet – she always noticed when any object was moved from its rightful place. As Rufina returned from the kitchen with two coffees in dark orange glasses, I asked about a picture on the wall. The black-and-white framed photograph showed four farm workers standing in front of a chain-drive tractor. Rufina carefully placed the coffee on the side table and pointed at the young woman: ‘While I was staying there in Belarus, I worked as a tractor driver’  – she laughed  – ‘I had a driving licence’. Having left the exhausting work on her home village’s state farm, she came to Mikołajki in search of a different life. Similar journeys were taken by many men and women after the war to settle in the Regained Territories. Rufina and her sister were following their brother, who was already in Poland. The sisters came to Mikołajki to work in the textile cooperative. At this point, Rufina disappeared into a back room, raising her voice to continue her story. She came back with a blonde plait and a fabric sample. She gave me

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the plait, which resembled pale golden hair, but thicker. My brain took time to process the uncanny sensation of touching the coarse, disembodied strands. Rufina looked amused at my awkward reaction and explained that this is not human hair but flax for spinning. She brought it with her from her village, a memento of her parents’ farm, later taken over by the state. Working with the material, spinning and weaving were crucial skills for every household. These abilities, key to rural, gendered education, provided an opening to a very different life in the newly industrialized Regained Lands. Rufina’s story was emblematic of the post-war transformation of Masuria. As the former Polish Borderlands had been incorporated into the Soviet Union, Rufina like many others moved into the Regained Territories, filling the employment gap left by emigrating German-speaking Masurians. When we arrived, there were still very many Mazurki [Masurian women]. Then they started to leave. But they were very pleasant, so pleasant that I don’t know … only a couple of Polish women initially worked here. … For us, when the Masurians learnt that we had come from there [Belarus], and one of their fathers was in the First World War in our area, they even invited us to stay with them, because they knew that there were very good people in our area.

For Rufina, the Mikołajki cooperative was a microcosm of the surrounding area, with local Masurians trained in the wartime weaving school, nuns from the local Philippian7 nunnery and newcomers from Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine all weaving together a unique maker community. The cooperative, as Rufina and other former workers told me, had a unifying effect for the area as, through their work, the disparate groups were able to create a sense of comradeship and neighbourliness. This story of conviviality between the newcomer women and the local population contrasts with others’ memories of oppressive authorities harassing the Masurians in their own lands. In the 1950s, the cooperatives provided immediate employment to post-war migrants and refugees who arrived in the depopulating region. At the time of visiting Rufina in Mikołajki, I was equipped with photocopies of the archival material from Olsztyn’s museum. I showed her the images of the original pieces collected by Hahm and Hulanicka’s reconstructions. Rufina remembered the making of the copies and told me that the 1955 reconstructions were undertaken by a team  of

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Masurian and settler women. The textile cooperative and similar facilities used the traditional abilities of the different populations for the new goals of socialist industrialization. In this way, women like Rufina could not only work as a spinner or weaver but also become industrial specialists – for example, as in her case, taking up the responsibilities of a forewoman well versed in different phases of the production process, in particular industrial dyeing. A few days after that initial meeting, we sat in Rufina’s tidy living room with Julia, one of the former design supervisors, and Alina, a former member of the cooperative’s senior leadership. We discussed photographs they showed me of the production process – young women inspecting the loom, presenting the showroom or drawing designs on large sheets of paper. Rufina, Julia and Alina had each brought their own personal archives of the Tkanina cooperative, consisting of images, newspaper articles, brochures and scraps of fabric. Although Hahm, Morelowski and various curators and scholars frequently used the woven fabrics as canvases for projecting nationalism, my respondents never used the terms ‘Polish’ or ‘German’ when referring to fabrics or people. Rather, their descriptions were rich with diverse local denominations, like the Vilnius region (Wileńszczyzna), Hrodna region (Grodzieńszczyzna), the Borderlands (Kresy), Masurians (Mazurki) or repatriates from the East. As Julia explained in her slightly shaky voice: ‘These were Regained Territories, some went to Germany, and repatriates from the East took their place. They brought, among other things, the fabrics.’ For her, the textiles produced at Tkanina had a distinctly regional character, a unique Masurian flair derived from its complex history. The cooperative workers searched for old fabric pieces to learn about local and regional techniques and designs. They knocked on the doors of Masurian families in search of small swatches. They looked for crumpled throws found in abandoned houses or washed out bits of tablecloth used as rags on the farm. These scraps, alongside drawings, notes and photographs like those from Hahm’s book, became the treasures of the cooperative’s pattern room (wzorcownia). These remnants helped the cooperative team develop different versions of the typical Masurian pattern. At the same time, other kinds of textile fragments were flowing into the treasury from the East. Many of the repatriates came with their own bits and pieces. These fragments of Grodno or Vilnius fabrics, Rufina explained, were transformed through the

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cooperative. For example, a bedspread of the Vilnius area that she and her sister brought with them became an inspiration for one of the cooperative’s key designs. Tkanina’s wzorcownia was never a closed mausoleum for patterns but a starting point. Julia talked about the excitement of using old patterns for fresh design proposals and taking the rolled-up fabrics with the woven samples on the train to the city of Gdańsk or even Warsaw. The Tkanina cooperative in Mikołajki was part of a wider Cepelia network (Centrala Przemysłu Ludowego i Artystycznego, the Central Union of Folk and Artistic Handicraft Cooperatives). This centrally run association of craft production facilities produced folk-inspired craft and design objects. The products were sold in a large-scale network of shops across Poland and abroad. In Masuria, Cepelia infrastructure built on the legacy of East Prussian craft education and the skills of the diverse population in the area. The work of the Mikołajki cooperative began in the buildings previously used by the village’s branch of the Lyck Weaving School. The Orthodox nuns, Mazurki and different groups of settlers brought their diverse skills and designs, even their own fabric fragments; the inspiration came from both Masuria and the East. The threads of the women’s former lives were picked up and bound into the new life of the Regained Territories. The cooperative wove together the fragments, interlacing the different strands of displacement and relocation. Through the cooperative, patterns and lives were reworked into a new material and social fabric. As one of the respondents mentioned, it was a joy to see the pieces in the showrooms, shops, or even exhibitions across Poland or in the United States. The story of the cooperative took a dramatic turn after the fall of socialism, however. In the 1990s, the post-socialist economic transition, mismanaged privatization process and Cepelia’s demise led to the closure of Tkanina. Our discussion turned melancholic: ‘there was this family … it was a community of people who respected each other and created. People came and went, but in general they lived for work, for all this stuff.’ For the weavers of Mikołajki, the closure of the socialist cooperative meant not only an economic rupture but also an end to the wider community that had been held together by textile work. Discussing the disastrous end of Tkanina and the recent news of the last Cepelia branch closing in Warsaw, we were unable to maintain the thread of the conversation. In the silence that followed,

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I surveyed the various scraps spread around the table, on the sofa and the floor. Rug samples, documents, brochures, and thread, resembled the detritus of a crime scene, evidence of a social fabric torn apart.

Recurrent patterns In 1999, at the time of Cepelia closures, a local museum in the northern Masurian town of Węgorzewo organized a weaving course. The classes were led by Teresa from Janów, the same village that had once been ‘discovered’ by Plutyńska. Throughout socialism, Janów weavers continued to make commissions for artists and Cepelia cooperatives, many collaborating with Barbara Hulanicka. Using Hulanicka’s designs, they made double-weave pieces for art exhibitions and museums. Many were engaged in reconstructing Hahm’s pieces for Polish museums. Teresa, by 1999 an acclaimed master weaver, learnt the craft from her neighbour who was one of the key early collaborators of Plutyńska. A weaver since her youth, Teresa’s early work mostly involved simple utilitarian rugs and throws. Moving to Janów when she married, there she discovered the distinctive double-weave technique. In an interview on 24 September 2020, Teresa spoke to me passionately about the double-weave: ‘You can weave anything into these threads – your thoughts, dreams, memories and fantasies.’ She explained how the technique gave her creative freedom and provided opportunities to travel. Through her various collaborations, Teresa has participated in various cultural events and sells her art in craft markets across Europe and Asia. She regularly teaches new weavers in her studio – the students come from across Poland, as well as Germany and Japan. She explained that the double-weave pieces of Janów makers have a repertoire of patterns. The Janów community shares tacit knowledge of designs. These patterns are seen as belonging to particular makers and adapted for different commissions. Each maker develops a unique style, a signature of patterns and compositions. Most of Teresa’s current work is made for the Japanese market. These are mostly smaller items for interior decoration. The traditional designs are translated into a range of furnishings, table covers, carpets, cushions or wall hangings. Teresa also creates bespoke pieces for private clients, including contemporary artists.

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One such commission was a co-production with Eliza, a Warsaw-based artist originally from a city located around 45 km from Janów. I met Eliza in late September 2020 after a conversation with Karolina, another of the double-weave practitioners. At the time of my interview, Karolina was making a piece based on the artist’s design. As I visited the studio on the first floor of her house, I saw a fragment of this artwork on the loom. The greyish, linen warp was decorated with a vivid red pattern resembling parts of the female body and amorphous, botanical and animal motifs. On the side of the loom, I noticed a small double-weave sample with two patterns in the shape of a uterus. The weaver shared the artist’s contact details with me and a few weeks later, I met the artist, Eliza, in a cafe in Warsaw. During the conversation, Eliza told me that she was an art lecturer specializing in textiles, working in the department where Eleonora Plutyńska used to teach. Inspired by Plutyńska, she had set out to co-create a series of double-weave fabrics. Coming from eastern Poland, she was very inspired by the traditional weaving technique and wished to collaborate with numerous double-weaver makers. For Eliza, the pieces were dialogical encounters between the two art worlds, the world of folk art and the world of visual culture. Eliza supplied the design for the weavers to work on – in some cases, this involved full-size drawings of the piece – and then had conversations with the folk artists about how to put these into practice. The main theme was related to femininity and nature through a set of botanical and animal motifs in a composition with aspects of the female body. Over the next few months, I had several conversations with Eliza and we discussed the genealogy of weaver–artist collaborations and the potential tensions that might emerge. During a call in 2021 she was quite upset by an unexpected development related to one of the artworks with a sisterhood theme. As the piece was ready, Eliza noticed that the weaver had worked her own initials into the piece. Teresa couldn’t fit some parts of the artist’s design into the woven piece as it was a technical impossibility. Eliza and the weaver discussed these changes, and the weaver explained that she felt her contribution to the artwork meant that she was co-author of the work. On the recommendation of the local museum staff and a designer with longstanding experience of collaborating with the weaver community, the weavers follow an unwritten rule to sign each piece they make. After a conversation between Eliza and the weaver clarifying their perspectives, they agreed that

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Eliza would embroider her own initials next to the weaver’s. As the artist later wrote in a message to me, such interactions were productive for her own practice. They made her reflect on what can be drawn from collaborations between visual artists and contemporary rural artists and makers. Rather than imposing a ready-made image, she was inspired by the values and skills of the weavers. This way, the final artwork became a relational trace of both artistic styles and compositions. In a conversation with Marta, a weaver and artist from south-western Poland likewise fascinated by the double-weave, I learnt about the subtle negotiations between the makers and potential partners. Marta became interested in double-weave as a technical and aesthetic challenge and came to the region to learn. She felt that it took some time and ‘interrogation’ from the weaver community before they were able to open themselves up for the collaboration, which is now based on very warm relationships. Marta went on to train with Teresa. The stories of Eliza and Marta demonstrate how artist– weaver partnerships have significantly changed over time. In contrast to the anonymous makers within the socialist cooperatives or those who created early pieces for Hulanicka or Plutyńska, the Janów weavers now understand the added value to them of identifiable authorship. They recognize their personal signature within a design as well as the uniqueness of their craft. They do not use each other’s patterns without permission, choose which projects to participate in, and negotiate their status within collaborations. In this way, they not only claim authorship for the craft, but also present a different modality of heritage in which creativity and uniqueness play a significant role. The makers do not see these pieces or techniques as belonging to the nation, as past curators and writers such as Hahm or Polish post-war folk art scholars wished them to. Rather than a national fabric, the double-weave is deeply personal, belonging to the weavers, marking individual creativity and, in particular, the maker community of Janów. Alarmed by rising Covid-19 cases in early October, I shortened my fieldwork in northeast Poland and returned to Berlin. However, I continued the conversations with the Janów weavers over the phone and on social media. During a phone call with Danuta, a former student of Teresa, she told me about how she made her first Masurian double-weave for Barbara Hulanicka in the 1980s. Since then, she has undertaken many similar reconstructions.

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Over time, she has gathered a set of Masurian designs in her pattern book. After our conversation, she emailed me examples of her past work. To my surprise, the images included new versions of Hahm’s pieces and patterns on woven objects made for private customers, galleries, and shops. There were wall hangings and woven designs as part of upholstery for trendy mid-century armchairs. After my return from fieldwork, I was contacted by Danuta’s daughter-in-law, one of the youngest weavers in Janów. She was looking for inspiration for an annual weaving competition and asked about images of Hahm’s carpets. I sent her a link to the MEK’s photographs. A few months later, her weaving studio’s Facebook page showed the winning carpet made with the help of these images. The 2021 piece used a combination of patterns from Hahm’s collection with her own, innovative designs, a sign of ever-changing, entwined practice.

Conclusion The textile scholar Janis Jefferies has argued that ‘pattern cannot be precisely located, but becomes a device that troubles categories, disturbs the boundaries between fixed meanings and chafes at rational constraint’ (Jefferies 2012: 126). The pattern of disappearance and renewal of the double-weave and the knotted techniques of Hahm’s collection of Masurian textiles disturbs the categories of the curatorial imagination. It disrupts the attempts at fixed meanings of various nationalistic projects imposed on the region; it points to blurred boundaries between techniques, populations, traditions and notions of ownership. The many instances of disappearance and reinvention of this art complicate Masurian textiles’ place-based character. Rather than embodying a lost authentic, national art, the weaving reoccurs, is transformed, renewed and creatively reworked by the weavers. The story of Masurian weaving also reveals a complicated and dynamic relationship between the actors. Rather than a fixed relationship between the maker, the loom and the threads, the weaving of the textiles resembles a complicated tangle of those who wish to preserve, replicate and reinvent this textile culture. Donna Haraway draws our attention to the metaphor of the cat’s cradle – a game in which different figures can be made by knotting and

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twisting a loop of string. Thinking about the complexity of knowledge as a cat’s cradle allows us to pay attention to the changing patterns, their performative nature and the ‘differently situated human and nonhuman actors and actants that encounter each other in interactions that materialize worlds in some forms rather than others’ (Haraway 1994: 64). The recurrent pattern and technique of Masurian weaving resemble a tangled game in which they depend and tug on seemingly elusive resources – local skills, Hahm’s monograph, raw material sourced from the corners of the Prussian empire or socialist economies, the Warsaw art school or the politically embedded Nazi, socialist and post-socialist development programmes. The textiles are not static actualizations of a place or a culture but rather the outcome of entangled mobilities and performances. The dynamic nature of Masurian textiles includes the movement of collectors through the villages of East Prussia, the displacement of pieces to the stores and exhibitions of Berlin’s museum, Reichwein’s trips to the Lyck Weaving School, the march of the Soviet army taking the carpets to Moscow, the journeys of Plutyńska and relocation of Hulanicka, the setting up of cooperatives, the resettlement of people from and to Masuria, and the transposition of Hahm’s collection-inspired pieces to museums across Poland and into homes in Europe and Japan. Only by tracing the intricate patterns of multiple actors, the translocation and performance of this weaving, can we understand the complex political, social and physical lives of these textiles.

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Woven basket: Untethered art

Figure 3.1  Basket collected by Julius Konietzko in Sinnai, southern Sardinia. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Christian Krug.

The story of a museum is interlinked with the story of collecting and collectors, their choices and encounters. Yet collectors never operate in a vacuum but depend on, for example, institutional funding and diplomatic channels to help move objects between localities. Collectors, be they curators, donors, suppliers or fixers, often navigate specific political environments and profit from particular economic relations. Their lives and experiences are, in different ways, interwoven with places, people, plants, animals and objects that become part of the collection. The art of weaving is itself also an art of collecting, involving a range of human and nonhuman encounters. Although the typical image of

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a weaver predominantly involves the maker interlacing threads, the complex operation starts with the procurement of the plant or animal material through technologies of planting, nurturing, harvesting and processing: a process of collecting the materials required. I first came to know about the MEK’s collection of Sardinian basketry during a visit to the museum’s stores. The baskets were located in a separate case with a sticky note stating:

Cabinet 4 Compartment 1–6 MDS OK! Konietzko Sardinians

This enigmatic note, the sheer number of objects and the vibrancy of some of the artefacts drew my attention. At the time, the museum was documenting objects for its upcoming exhibition about basketry and the collection was being checked against the museum’s documentation system. The ‘MDS OK!’ on the note meant that the basket collection was in the online database. The word ‘Konietzko’ indicated the surname of the collector and the category ‘Sardinians’ was a marker of a particular subset of the MEK’s collections, the former European Department of the Ethnological Museum (Völkerkundemuseum). This collection divided Europe into separate ethnic and regional groups, such as the ‘Sardinians’ or the ‘English’. As with many historical collections, the name of the collector is indicated but not the name of the object’s user or maker. Following the visit, I consulted the old, yellowing object documentation cards for the collection. The card for object II A 214 (Figure 3.1) with pre-printed sections stated in typed font that its ‘origin’ (Herkunft) was Sardinia. Somebody had put brackets around the word ‘Sardinia’ and added in ball pen ‘Italien’. Next to it, in different handwriting, ‘Sinnai’ indicated the particular location. We also learn from the section on the card headed ‘acquisition type’ that the collection to which the basket belonged was purchased and that it was the 435th object purchased in the year 1935. The categories of ‘collector’ and ‘previous owner’ indicated Konietzko. The card also included the dimensions of the object, a short description and a name, ‘crobedda’, which I later learnt was incorrect.

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In this chapter, then, I am investigating the Sardinian basketry by weaving together the stories of two types of collectors – Konietzko who acquired woven objects in the 1930s from Sardinia as ‘cultural survivors’ (Rückzugsgebiet) and the contemporary Sardinian weavers who continue to collect, glean, harvest, and plait the raw material. I explore some of the historical knots that led to the development of this basketry, the aftermath of which continues to affect the work today. The woven basket is not only a repository of ‘surviving’ cultural techniques but also a material record of the frayed ends of modernization projects and the ways in which the makers creatively negotiate similar projects today.

Trader in exotica The first knot in this interwoven story is a place. The collector Julius Konietzko was born in Instenburg, East Prussia – the same area where Konrad Hahm acquired his carpets (see Chapter 2). However, Konietzko’s life became detached from the eastern edges of the German Empire and joined instead to its very commercial centre in the city of Hamburg. The Hamburg of the 1910s was a dynamic Atlantic port, an outpost of both German and British colonial trade (Ferguson 2002). The burgeoning exchange with the Americas and the constant flow of European emigrants and goods from the colonial territories transformed Hamburg into a city of seafarers, merchants, auctioneers, brokers and artisans, all facilitating trade. The pre–First World War port of the German Empire was also a centre of traffic in ‘curiosities’ and ‘ethnographica’, material culture that had been acquired as the spoils of colonial conquest. Following a period of trade apprenticeship in a large shipping company, and stints of work selling vacuum cleaners, Konietzko developed an interest in the ethnographic objects passing through the port. He studied the curiosities acquired by seafarers and displayed in the Käpt’n Haase pub in the infamous Reeperbahn district. He frequented the rarities shop of Carl Hoppe, a well-known trader. Hoppe specialized in so-called exotica, much of which were acquired in the context of colonial violence and genocide. In 1903, Hoppe acquired a richly carved ivory tusk from the Kingdom of Benin, part of one of the ancestral altars from the court of Benin destroyed by the British. In 1904, the year of the Herero genocide, Hoppe sold Herero

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objects to the Basel-based ethnographic museum. Following his passion for exotica, Konietzko opened his own business specializing in the acquisition of ethnographica for the museum sector and the art market (Zwernemann 1986:  18). His growing  expertise is often associated with his personal acquaintance with the Berlin-based anthropologist Felix von Luschan, now known as a key figure in the construction of racist taxonomy in anthropology (Beatty and Hristova 2018). This is the second knot of the story, as von Luschan, like Rudolf Virchow and Ulrich Jahn in Chapter 1, was also a member of the BGAEU. Although, due to his lack of higher education, Konietzko was never embedded in the formal structures of anthropological associations or academia, most of his collecting work was nonetheless commissioned and purchased by Hamburg’s Museum of Ethnology (now the Museum am Rothenbaum, Kunst und Kultur, MARKK). Many of his acquisitions were also sold on to other ethnographic museums across the country, including the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Such collections were commonly an outcome of not only curatorial work but also the collecting and cataloguing undertaken by freelance, commercial collectors like Konietzko (Penny 2002: 105). It was mid-February 1911 when Konietzko travelled to the Lapland region of Finland to acquire Sami objects (Zwernemann 1986: 18) – the inaugural trip of a long-term relationship between Konietzko and the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. Between 1911 and 1931, this self-taught ethnographer travelled and collected for the museum across Europe (Scandinavia/Lapland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Balkans), Africa (Sudan) and Asia (India, Tibet). During several trips, he was accompanied by one or other of his three different spouses, two of whom, following divorce, continued to trade in ethnographica and sales of ‘exotic’ art on their own account. Lore Kegel, who was with him on the trip to Sardinia, specialized in African and Oceanic art (Corbey 2000). She was a trained painter, one of the first female graduates of the renowned Düsseldorf art school, and was active in the artistic circles of the time. Her friends and customers included German expressionists, members of the Vienna Workshop and Hamburg Secession group. Lore supplied ethnographic objects to the artists who sought exoticism and primitivism. Her own practice was steeped in this colonial aesthetic with depictions of ethnographic objects, often titled according to ethnicity. The naming of these artworks bears

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similarities to the epistemic practices of the Konietzko and Kegel’s purchases for the museums. Like many modernist artists fascinated with an image of the pre-modern, Lore had an avid interest in traditional attire (Enders and Masala 2019).

Survivors In a letter dated 14 February 1931 written to Georg Thilenius, the director of the Hamburg museum, to update him about the arrival in Sardinia and the progress of the collecting trip, Konietzko candidly wrote that he was treading on completely alien ground (Enders and Masala 2019: 8). Five days later, he sent another letter to Thilenius describing the challenging conditions in the village of Cabras near the town of Oristano: he was caught in the rain and wind, unable to continue his work. He complained that the paths were under water and he had to wait. He also mentioned that the Sardinian population was suffering under Italian rule and tight police control. Despite these unfavourable political and weather conditions, Julius and Lore acquired many rural objects across the island. Of these, just three became part of the Hamburg museum’s collection; more than 200 artefacts landed in the European Department of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, now forming part of the MEK collection. The Ethnological Museum (Völkerkundemuseum) was founded in 1873 from the collection of the Royal Prussian Art Cabinet (Königlich Preußische Kunstkammer). Already by 1859, the collection was on display in the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island.1 This included a separate ‘Europa Cabinet’ with a selection of objects, including a shield, a bottle, musical instruments, a figurine and items of traditional dress. In 1886, the Ethnological Museum moved to a new building. Originally, the collection of its 250 European objects was intended to be on display but the exhibition space was limited (Karasek and Tietmeyer 1999: 14). At the same time, after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, both national, and later also colonial interests in Germany led to an intensified academic engagement with the cultures of non-European peoples on the one hand, and rural culture on the other. (1999: 16)

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The European collection seemed to fall through the cracks. The Ethnological Museum continued to acquire ethnographic objects from Europe but the collection grew quite haphazardly (Tietmeyer 2013: 62). A look at its inventory from the year 1935 demonstrates this miscellaneous and perhaps slightly random approach. In addition to multiple gifts, auction purchases, acquisitions from individuals and exchanges with museums in Vilnius and Kraków, Berlin’s Ethnological Museum purchased as many as 672 objects from Julius Konietzko, including: 15 objects from the Basque Country, Naples, Abruzzo, Portugal, England for 120 Reichsmark 217 objects from South and Central Sardinia as well as 55 objects from Spain for 2300 Reichsmark 365 objects from Scandinavia (Jämtland, Dalarna, Norway) for 4300 Reichsmark 76 objects from the Carpathians and Russia for 500 Reichsmark

As the Berlin records show, the Sardinian objects were acquired four years after Konietzko’s trip. The Sardinian trip was Lore’s and Julius’s last acquisition trip together, undertaken almost exactly twenty years after Julius’s inaugural Lapland excursion. The trip was commissioned by Arthur Byhan, the curator of the Eurasian department in the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. The museum, as director Georg Thilenius stated, was collecting ‘in the twelfth hour, rushing to gather the remnants of the disappearing worlds’ (Penny 2002: 32). This sense of urgency led to a radical acquisition policy. Byhan had already visited Sardinia in 1926 and bought as many as 700 objects for the museum (Köpke and Schmelz 1999: 37). With a curatorial interest in comparative approaches, he saw Sardinia as a cultural survivor (Rückzugsgebiet). For him, the island was a repository of material culture that had already disappeared in other parts of the Mediterranean. In an article on cultural survival in Sardinia (‘Überlebsel bei den Sarden’), Byhan argues that the techniques used in the making of boats, houses and tools on the island could be compared to those developed in ancient Egypt or Persia (Byhan 1928). Sardinia served as a last bastion of practices long gone elsewhere. The idea of cultural survivals and the comparative study of surviving material

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culture had already been proposed in 1871 by Edward Burnett Tylor. One of the first theoretical imaginaries in anthropology, it highlighted the evolution of culture on a scale progressing from savagery and barbarism to civilization. In museums, this theory resulted in comparative exhibitions presenting stages in the development of material culture. Despite anthropology’s abandonment of Tylor’s ideas within the academic discipline, many museums continued this nineteenth-century evolutionary approach (Buchczyk 2015: 67). Although Konietzko did not leave a diary from Sardinia and we do not know why the Hamburg museum did not decide to purchase the acquisitions, the MARKK has an evocative photographic record of Konietzko’s trip. The photographs present a view of Sardinia as an exotic European hinterland. They depict the coarse landscape of the mountain interior, the salty lakes of the coastline and the nuraghe stone circles crowning the hills. They capture glimpses of everyday life in the villages, children playing in the muddy streets and fierce fishermen in front of their woven boats. There are multiple staged portraits of the village residents in their folkloric attire. There are exotic fauna and picture upon picture of roadside prickly pears. Alongside those of unspoilt, wild nature, there are photographs of peasant landscapes with cows, sheep, donkeys and pigs. There are dilapidated huts and curious rituals  – masked horsemen performing the acrobatic antics of a Mediterranean carnival, for example. There are careful snapshots of architectural detail, including a detailed series of building elements protecting against the evil eye. There are women sitting outside their houses, doing needlework or sieving flour. There is Lore Kegel posing in front of a rock with the raging sea in the background. At different points of their journey through the island, Julius and Lore were accompanied by Mr Faraone, a Sardinian antiquities trader and local guide. One photo shows Konietzko and Mr Faraone in a conversation with a peasant in a traditional costume. There are images entitled ‘old man’, ‘village street’, ‘the making of wooden spoons’ and ‘peasant selling melons’. Sardinia’s status as a storehouse of cultural survival, an isolated island holding the keys to unlocking the past, seems to have been easy to depict. Sardinia appears as a space of timelessness and a sanctuary for the past with its own particular ways of life and rural aesthetics. It acted as a resource for reading the past and understanding other places, as if the material culture of the 1930s Mediterranean island could illuminate ancient objects from Africa and Asia.

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This depiction of Sardinia as an isolated wilderness frontier and the embodiment of cultural otherness is part of a long-standing trope in representations of the island (Heatherington 2011). Perhaps we could read the ‘survivals’ as traces to delve into how these notions were inscribed onto spaces, histories and bodies to start to challenge some of their inherent narratives (Napolitano 2016). In 1926, as Arthur Byhan made his acquisitions for the Hamburg museum, the communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, himself a Sardinian, wrote about the ‘Southern question’, a political and intellectual discourse within Italy. The ‘Southern question’ concerned the underdevelopment and backwardness of the south. The industrial north, Gramsci argued, had exploited and expropriated the south, reducing places like Sardinia to relations of colonial dependency. Over time, the economic dependency between the industrial north and the rural south had been naturalized and imagined in racialized terms: [T]he Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric – only tempering this harsh fate with the purely individual explosion of a few great geniuses, like isolated palm-trees in an arid and barren desert. (Gramsci 1926: 4)

The southern question, emerging in Italian debates around 1874, was related to a long history of orientalizing representations of the area (Farinelli 2017, Schneider 1998). An example of this narrative is ‘Sea and Sardinia’ by D. H. Lawrence, who saw the island as a ‘nowhere’ place. For the British traveller, Sardinia had no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of the civilization. (1999 [1921]: 9)

The nineteenth-century writers and politicians of the new united Italy routinely referred to the island as ‘Italian Africa’ or compared the Italian peasant to the ‘American savage’. Within this colonial perspective, the burden of Italy was to bring modernization efforts to the progress-immune lands of the south. As the

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reformers were working tirelessly to transfer the northern moral economies to the ‘stubborn little sister’ (Schneider 1998: 10), scholars saw the south as a way of apprehending the ‘primitive’. The south figured as the proximate other, serving to roll out pseudo-scientific descriptions of the population not as historical subjects but as a ‘natural people’. Under Mussolini, the fascist mythology both perpetuated and transformed an idea of Sardinia as an authentic, original space. Yet, despite the myth of nonhistory, the island was at the heart of modern-day Italy and its new politics. The island was considered a cradle of virility and rurality, values attributed to the Ancient Roman society considered the core of the new Italian identity promoted by Mussolini (Nelis, 2007). Much like D’Annunzio before him, Mussolini was convinced that islandness would automatically guarantee the preservation of authenticity, and that Sardinians were and would remain uncorrupted by such modern ideologies as socialism. To symbolize this connection between the islanders’ purity and rusticity and the new Italian identity, he ordered that the Blackshirts’ uniforms be made using raw Sardinian sheep wool. (Farinelli 2017: 26)

Under the fascist regime, the island continued to be imagined as outside of civilization. However, its originary nature was seen as a ‘cradle’ or ‘prototype’ of a new superior Italian race. This new Italian nature, based on the brave traditions and survivals in the regions such as Sardinia, was capable of controlling the whole Mediterranean as well as leading a fascist restoration of the Roman Empire (2017: 26). Folklore studies in the fascist era aimed to track the traces of such survival in the rural communities and record traditions unspoiled by the threat of cosmopolitanism (Simeone 1978: 552). This search for survival aimed to identify traits of ethnic unity prefiguring political integration of the fascist regime (Herzfeld 2005: 108). It was in western Sardinia, in the vicinity of the town of Oristano, where the fascist state began its modernization programme. The new settlement of Mussolinia was the first of a series of New Towns, surrounded by newly developed rural areas (Caprotti 2007). As Fuller (2004) demonstrated, these modernization projects and fascist designs were sites of simultaneous dismantling and invention of tradition. As the regime went about redeveloping land and establishing settlements in different locations across western Sardinia,

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these projects (Fertilia, Mussolinia and Carbonia) embodied planners’ desires about ‘the traditional’ as well as ‘the modern’. The development projects by the fascist regime were presented as unending victories in tackling the ‘southern question’. Yet, at the time of Mussolini’s fall, the south was in dire straits, comparable to the pre–First World War situation that drove the Great Migration to the USA (Davis 2015: 57). Reading Gramsci, Harootunian (2020: 148) evokes the 1930s literature that presents the south as a space of a different timespace, situated in an archaic temporal register. These indices of the backward south, a long-established narrative (Dainotto 2007), are recorded by Konietzko, the collector. The ‘surviving’ wilderness of the landscape was imagined together with the vanishing material culture and the backwardness of the peasantry. The work of collecting and documenting demonstrated how the south of Italy was viewed in terms of its material culture and imagined as a peripheral formation (Boatcă 2021). Dream-like islands in the south might be presented as unchanging, even if this meant ignoring what was happening on the ground. The focus on the archaic and unchanged/unchanging remnants of earlier civilizations, still visible in the south, allowed the collector/photographer to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of the subject matter. Konietzko’s camera, sensitive to the nuanced detail of rural everyday life, captured none of the modernization projects in Sardinia at the time. It paid no attention to the large-scale transformation of the Oristano area with its New Town, Mussolinia, for example. His lens never focused on the Veneto migrants brought to the area to modernize agriculture. With a preference for quirky town alleys and ritual gestures, he did not record the rise of the new architecture of power in its monumental eclecticism, incorporating elements of both neoRenaissance and modernist styles, as preferred by Il Duce. Later fascist-era images also presented Sardinia as a locus of tradition and material culture. Ideas of timelessness and wilderness constituted a blank canvas for the radical gesture of modernity. Encouraged by Mussolini, the engineers,  the planners and the reformers from around Italy were to bring Sardinia into the new era. This they did by building infrastructure, irrigating unused land, and constructing monumental power stations and modernist churches (Carta 2012: 65) – none of which found a place in Konietzko’s records. The travelling collector kept to his limited museum brief, acquiring samples of weaving and basketry in the Sardinian countryside.

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In the digitized files of Konietzko’s photographs, I come across one of the first images he took upon disembarking in Cagliari. This photograph, the label tells us, was taken in the city’s harbour. We can see a large sailing ship in the background with three men standing on the shore, engaged in a conversation. They are located in front of two horse carts packed with wheelbarrows and wicker baskets. Could this be the first image taken by the collector in Sardinia? From a brief exchange with Philipp Konietzko, the collector’s grandson, I learn that Julius had been particularly interested in basketry. Philipp sends me photographs of some of the contents of the family archive, such as a bag woven from birch bark collected in Lapland and photographs of Swedish and Bulgarian Roma basket-weavers. That particular interest was the main focus of his trip to Sardinia, and Konietzko captured further scenes with people in the streets and interiors working with baskets, a portrait of a fisherman carrying baskets on his head and his back, baskets scattered around a market stall and baskets used by women preparing food in a dark kitchen. Another image shows a group of women and children, sitting on the floor in front of a building, all gathered around very large, flat baskets containing grain. The interior’s simplicity filled with rustic utensils appears as a perfect example of Byhan’s cultural survival. If Konietzko was in search of ancient material culture, the image collection ticks all the boxes. Konietzko’s excursion to Sardinia was embedded in collecting an invented Mediterranean past and timeless south through the Sardinian present. The collector pursued his work as if walking into a living museum containing the surviving artefacts of other forms of everyday life and material culture.

Waiting A third knot: almost ninety years later, I embarked on a journey in the footsteps of Konietzko to learn about the social life of Sardinian basket-weaving techniques today. I arrived in Cagliari in the last days of February 2020 directly from Romania (see Chapter 5). The plane flew above the harbour and the vast lagoon on the outskirts of the town. Working in the Romanian archive a few weeks before, I had been confronted with a very cautious archivist. Apart from

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the usual identity check at the entrance, all those using the archive’s reading room were required to disinfect their hands and wear a mask. These measures appeared excessive, given the small number of cases of a ‘novel’ coronavirus somewhere in Asia and northern Italy. On arrival in Cagliari, the situation was looking even more serious. I collected my luggage and joined a queue where we were greeted by airport staff in full personal protective equipment, measuring everybody’s body temperature. After this surreal experience, I took the train from Cagliari to the town of Oristano where I aimed to explore the traces of Konietzko’s trip. That first afternoon, Oristano was tranquil and picturesque. I walked through the narrow back streets in the historic centre, wheeling my suitcase noisily over the cobblestones. I admired the low-rising, richly decorated historic buildings and the town square, Piazza Roma, with an austere Spanishera tower, a gelateria, a fish bar and a few shops and cafes. The Oristanese seemed to have dissolved in the balmy afternoon, with only a few people sitting outside the bars and small cafes whose cave-like interiors I viewed dimly behind. The town’s centre appeared to have ironically embraced this back-of-beyond feel as a plaque in the square proudly presented the following words from John Ernest Crawford Flitch: Oristano is one of these cities in which one might well expect the melancholy fit to fall. It is full of the symbols of decay. In point of age it is more juvenile than most Sardinian towns, for it has not yet celebrated its thousandth birthday. But then, it had the misfortune to be born old.

The town’s serenity  – not melancholy  – seemed a perfect antidote to the rush of travel and the frightening medicalized experience on arrival. The virus was somewhere else, in the metropoles of Milan or Wuhan. Over the next few days, I scheduled interviews with some of the local basketmakers in order to learn about the craft’s technique and how knowledge of it was transmitted. I wanted to explore possibilities for embodied learning of weaving. I hoped to trace some of the families in Cabras whose members hosted Konietzko or became the subjects of his photographs. For the initial meetings discussing basket-making techniques I was accompanied by Domingo, a local anthropologist, who was both providing his car and assisting with Sardinian translation. Equipped with my interview schedule, we drove to the nearby

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village of Zeddiani. Domingo drove along the wet fields of the Oristano plain, with the sides of the road overgrown with canna or the giant rush (arundo donax). After a quarter-hour drive, we reached the village of Zeddiani with its low-rise, terraced houses and narrow roads, typical in the southern Sardinian flatland called Campidano di Oristano. Domingo drove past the village’s main square with a palm tree, a small roundabout and Café Caprice, and we soon reached the house of the basket weaver. There I met Romeo who gave me a demonstration of his basketry technique and told me how and when he collects the material, from the discarded thin olive branches to the magnificent, golden-yellow rushes (canna) found on the salty lakesides of San Vero Milis. Romeo’s baskets were sturdy, perfectly designed for carrying fruit and mushrooms, and keeping them fresh without the use of plastic. His wife brought different kinds of baskets, more decorative and precise in design than Romeo’s. She spoke at length about the craft in the town of Sinnai in the Cagliari area, in the south-eastern part of Sardinia. Their basketry was an art, producing high-value objects to be presented as gifts, used for special occasions, and to be hung decoratively on the wall. Sinnai came up in several conversations, and another of the interviewees showed me the pieces made by her mother, also from Sinnai.

Figure 3.2  A street in the old town of Sinnai, Sardinia. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.

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As the staccato of news about Covid-19 started to become more insistent, we decided to wear masks during meetings. We kept the windows open in the car and were invited only to half-open spaces – terraces, halls, garages or gardens. A week later, we were on our way to the last studio. On the cusp of what would later be called a lockdown, we were about to witness an unprecedented, complete closure of businesses and social life to tackle the pandemic. This last visit, to Gianni in San Vero Milis, was centred around his garage which doubled as both studio and storage space. All masked and standing a metre or so apart, we tried to concentrate on questions and answers about the craft, Gianni’s learning journey with Romeo, the role of weaving in his everyday life, and the materials. As Gianni was carefully stepping between the baskets scattered on the floor, showing me the different types of plants used – olivastro, olmo, canna – I saw his father. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted this man in his advanced old age walking down the steps into the garage. This filled me with panic. What if I had become a danger to people and was spreading the virus among field respondents? The next day, I cancelled all interviews planned for the village of Cabras. I decided to wait a few days to see how the situation developed. As I sat in front of my laptop in my lockdown room going through the interview recordings, I thought about Julius Konietzko. If this was a further knot of the story, this one seemed impossible to untie. Ironically, Konietzko and I were both held up in our journey through the province of Oristano. Yet his waiting seemed more clear-cut, pinned down to the inconveniences of the winter weather. For the collector, spring was just a question of time. In contrast, my delay was caused by an unravelling global pandemic, emptying places of shoppers, commuters, walkers and children. Moving through space meant raising the risk of infection and contagion. Sitting tight appeared the only solution. However, this waiting in a deserted social space had no distinct endpoint. This came with a frightening realization of the risks now associated with the use of the ethnographic method. We were all becoming bodies of stratified vulnerabilities. We could bring danger to those we might encounter. There was no field left. No sanctuary, no retreat, no splendid isolation. And perhaps no ethnography either.

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Thread Following a long tradition in anthropology, Paul Basu (2017) has recently argued that all things represent tangled trajectories across time and space, between dislocation and relocation. Despite the snagged fieldwork, my dislocation from the field in March 2020 provided an opportunity for pursuing another thread. Back in Berlin, I had returned to the comments of my respondents in Zeddiani and San Vero Milis, but the words of the weavers kept pulling me towards Sinnai. The baskets looked very different from those of the Oristano area. Konietzko’s collection included five examples, all made using the same distinct coiling technique. Some of them were exquisitely constructed – perfectly cylindrical, for example, and the baskets each had a fitting cover. They were made both of natural materials – interwoven wheat and spiny rush plants – and bits of decorative fabric; their surface still had a natural sheen. Online, I identified a maker who shared her work and technique via social media and asked her about a possible meeting. Then, a few months later, as the first wave of the pandemic was retreating, I returned to Sardinia to resume fieldwork in a world of hygiene measures, regular Covid-19 tests and carefully managed human encounters. Sandra invited me to her workshop and I made my way on the local Pullman bus from Cagliari to the historic town of Sinnai some 15 kilometres northeast, in the mountains of Serpeddì-Sette Fratelli. After a walk through the labyrinthine streets of the centre (Figure 3.2), and some confusion, I arrived at my destination among the newer, two-storey concrete houses on the outskirts of the town. Sandra, the weaver, and two barking dachshunds greeted me at the metal gate to her property, and we proceeded to her garage-studio. I had taken a rapid test that day to establish I was virus-free and we decided to converse outside, keeping our distance and sitting at the threshold of the studio. The multifunctional space served as a workshop, a store and a gallery to display finished pieces. One wall contained a set of shelves with completed baskets in different shapes – plates, bowls and clocks. On a chair at the back of the garage I spotted a box, of exactly the same style and design as the ones in the Konietzko collection. Sandra showed me where she kept the plant material and brought out a yellowing photo album with a record of her past work. Some

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of the images were of traditional pieces; showed Sandra at work or standing in front of an outdoor gallery in traditional costume. The event programme for this year had been cancelled. Due to Covid-19 she was unable to present and sell her work. The tourist industry had been wiped out by the lockdown and there would be no visitors to her studio for craft demonstrations this season. As we leafed through the album, Sandra also showed me other images on her iPad. In the lull, she explained, she was mostly doing other kinds of work. The majority of the commissions came through social media and involved repairs of old objects. We scrolled through the pictures and she showed me a number of examples of historical pieces – many of which had faded fabric, burnt wicker or a worn-out base. These were objects made by past generations of Sinnai craftswomen, still used in homes or placed on display. Walking through Sinnai, one can spot baskets adorning the walls of the inner courtyards or displayed in kitchens and living rooms. There are also pieces hidden away, ready to be brought out during visits and conversations about deceased family members. Across the town, there is a significant distributed collection of artefacts held within the community in the domestic sphere, demonstrating the continuing significance of these objects for both everyday use and family heritage.

Weaving on demand Over the past century, basket weaving in Sinnai has transformed from a domestic craft to a commercial activity (Perra 2005). Until the mid-nineteenth century, like many other forms of handiwork, basketry served the needs of the household. Its marginality can be illustrated by its absence from records such as Baldassare’s 1841 Cenni sulla Sardegna, an encyclopaedic volume on Sardinian life, which fails to mention the craft at all. This suggests that basketry was not then considered a significant part of the island’s economy. However, weaving with plants was of great importance within the household for the production of everyday utensils and parts of trousseaus (Atzori 1980: 9). As with other forms of weaving, basket-making was a spare-time activity, undertaken between the chores of child rearing, cooking and agricultural labour and, as women’s work, the craft attracted limited attention, though its significance within Sinnai is

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recorded in the local archives. Written just two years after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy as a nation state, an 1863 report on the industry and trade of the area noted Sinnai weaving as an ‘ancient and almost exclusive occupation of the population’ (Molteni and Medda 2021: 7). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as in the case of many other forms of so-called folk art, there was a significant rise in demand for the baskets. Basketry began to feature in exhibitions and world fairs. In 1884, the Sinnai district council requested products made with plant material and rush (giunco) for that year’s Italian General Exposition of Turin, one of the key spectacles of Italian nation-building (della Coletta 2016). In 1906, Sardinian baskets were displayed at Milan International as part of the Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise (Le Industrie Femminili Italiane, IFI; Cooperativa Nazionale 1906: 28). With roots in the 1891 presentation of Italian lace at the Chicago World’s Fair, the Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise was established by upper-class women as a way to promote women’s work and drive their entrepreneurial and artistic independence. As Countess Cora Slocomb di Brazza, the head of the enterprise, appealed to the Congress of Women during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893: The frail fingers of these women and children are competing with iron rods and steam power, and yet have courage; for the laces, the homespuns into which are entwined their dreams, their prayers, their songs and their tears, are unsurpassed. What I am striving for I can never accomplish. But you can do it if you only will. The storekeepers tell me if there was a demand for Italian goods they would place them in stock. They say to me: Create the demand, we will do the rest. I entreat you to ask in the shops for Italian laces, Italian silks, Italian homespuns. Fashion will obey your summons, such is your power. I can speak, but yours is the nobler part, you can act. Act, only act; the modest Italian women of the people in their far-off country homes will feel the benefit. (from her address, ‘Life of the Italian Woman in the Country’, 1893)

Buying the products of Italian women, as di Brazza’s impassioned speech urged, became not only a fashion trend but also a philanthropic duty of the well-heeled in America and Italy. Over time, the cooperative built a wide distribution network, predominantly focusing on sales across Europe and the United States. The network contributed to the revaluation of diverse forms of

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artisan labour across Italy, part of the wider fascination with pre-industrial craft among the upper echelons of society across Europe (Picciaia and Terzani 2019, Urdea 2018). The increase in demand for, and growing reputation of, Sinnai’s artisanship within Sardinia and Italy can be explored through the letters sent to the local authority in the following years. In its archive, we find a letter dated 21 July 1930 mentioning that Princess Giovanna Savoia had been given ‘Sardinian products’. There is Giovanni Cucca from Bottega D’Arte in the Sardinian town of Dorgali, specializing in leather goods and terra cotta products, asking about ‘the renowned baskets of Sinnai’. There is also a request from Paradiso delle Signore (Ladies’ Paradise) from the Nervi district of Genova with a wish to obtain baskets for the boutique. Many of these fragments of correspondence ask for ‘Sardinian products’, indicating that Sinnaiese workmanship was seen as representative of the island (Molteni and Medda 2021: 7). Associating a local craft with its region was a long-standing exhibition strategy both in Sardinia and Rome, as employed by the Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise (Le Industrie Femminili Italiane 1906). In 1930, the basketry of Sinnai was presented in the Sardinian Spring (Primavera Sarda) exhibition in Cagliari, part of wider interwar initiatives for boosting tourism and trade on the island (Ruju 2016: 31). The interwar period thus marks both the entry of the craft into the domain of commercial folk art production and a new association of Sinnai’s weaving with ideas of artistic value and antiquity (Atzori 1980: 54). This period of revaluation and national and international recognition forms the background to Konietzko’s acquisitions. The decision to collect is always linked to a value judgement. This assessment of aesthetic or ethnographic worth is part of a wider museological and commercial environment in which any professional collector operates. The local archive offers a glimpse both into the growing reputation of the craft and the economic role that it started to play in the interwar period. The growing demand also initiated the professionalization of craft-making within the family. The archive contains administrative records of commercial licences from the interwar period. These documents demonstrate the scale of craft involvement within the Sinnai population. After the introduction of the commercial licence requirement in December 1926, the local authorities

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received a large number of applications from individuals and couples wishing to sell basketry. Most mention the potential sales of ‘objects made of wheat’ in addition to agricultural produce. The documents show how Sinnai, predominantly living off farming and craft, was now full of so-called street tradespeople, door-to-door traders offering baskets, vegetables and fruit. But the renown of Sinnai basketry skills was not necessarily accompanied by good pay. Molteni and Medda (2021) demonstrate that many of these licences were issued without requiring the licensee to pay a fee, an indication of the poverty of craft families at the time. There are no archival traces of Konietzko and no indication that the collector ever visited Sinnai. Although the hilltop town is located in the vicinity of Cagliari, he does not mention any excursions there in his letters. None of the photographs indicates he had acquired objects directly from the makers. Looking at the photograph of the basket salesman in the harbour, the baskets shown have most likely come from one of the travelling traders. Atzori (1980) wrote about the hegemony of the middlemen who dictated the price of goods, often exploiting the immobility of the women who made the objects. We’ve already seen that, in Sinnai, traditionally, the artisanry of basket production is a gendered category, women’s domain, with craft activity dictated by the rhythms of household labour, child-rearing and meal preparation. The sale of the products, in contrast, was organized either by male family members or outsiders. Today the Sinnaiese remember how their mothers, grandmothers and aunts engaged in this precise craft. A local nurse has a large woven flat basket, or palinedda, that her grandma used in the kitchen. A B&B owner keeps a dedicated room for the pieces made by the grandmother, some used, others still pristine. The post–Second World War story of Sinnai basketry attests to the complexities of professionalizing and modernizing home-based production into a marketable economic activity, responsive to market demand. Initiated by the first post-war exhibition of Sardinian craft, Mostra dell’Artigianato Sardo, organized in 1950 in Sassari, the crafts of the island were to be transformed into decorative arts. The main driver of this renewal of traditional skills was the Sardinian Institute for the Organization of Craft Work (Istituto Sardo per l’Organizzazione del Lavoro Artigiano, ISOLA), set up in 1958. By the early 1960s, the rapidly growing ISOLA had already established a number

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of shops and showrooms within Sardinia and across Italy (Rossi 2011: 258). The products presented again excited interest among European and American customers. Thus, through ISOLA, the crafts of the island entered the scene of Italian post-war design. This is illustrated by the 1963 December issue of Domus, the prestigious design and architecture magazine, featuring a Sinnai piece alongside other Sardinian textiles and baskets. The composition was titled, ‘the forms and colours of Sardinia’. Woven craft objects were used to represent Sardinia, imagined by the design community as distinctive, high quality and uncontaminated by the market (Rossi 2011: 259).

Figure 3.3  A basket made according to the ISOLA design, now in a weaver’s house. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.

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Altea (2005) argued that ISOLA worked to preserve authentic workmanship while fostering innovation. Artisans were encouraged to renew themselves and leading Sardinian artists and designers, such as Eugenio Tavolara and Ubaldo Badas, directed this development in the 1960s (Altea 2005: 78). Tavolara, who is well remembered by the makers of Sinnai, set out on photographic documentation of the various forms of making on the island and made artistic interventions to change the patterns, object designs, colours and shapes for the design market (2005: 81). His work involved not only a reinterpretation of iconography and redefinition of design but also a rebuilding of knowledge transmission through ISOLA-led courses (Ceccarelli 2019: 936). This long-term vision for the craft involved the setting up of weaving schools and course programmes in basketry, run and supervised by the local maestre (experts, teachers). These courses consisted of 900 hours of tuition, including 300 hours of theory. Training was organized frequently, taking place regularly, sometimes every three months. The trained artisans were then all employed by ISOLA, working to order. With the specifications supplied by the designers, the makers were tasked to do piece work. Many of the products were designed to satisfy the demands of mid-century taste – new colours and minimalistic shapes to create modern designs aimed to update traditional craft (Figure 3.3). The products were presented in exhibitions across the country and sold in special ISOLA shops. Although the 900-hour educational programme was extensive, making objects on demand could be challenging. Many graduates struggled to meet the requirements in terms of the number of pieces as well as the particularities of the design. One of the older respondents bitterly recalled the pain of remaking pieces that were seen as falling below the quality standards required for ISOLA commissions. She told stories of Tavolara instructing the women of Sinnai to undo work which had taken many hours of back-breaking effort. Over time, ISOLA’s success started to fade and by the 1990s there was little left from the design boom of the Sinnai cooperative.

Valuing work During my first visits to Sandra’s studio, she showed me the repair jobs underway (Figure 3.4). One flat basket was already packed and you could see the contrast between the dark plant and the fresh fabric centre. The second basket

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Figure 3.4  A repair project of Sinnai basketry. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.

was still on Sandra’s to-do list. The large piece showed many signs of wear and tear – parts of the coiling were broken and the central fabric was crumbling down. Attached to the object was a note with a name and repair instruction: ‘Red cotton ribbon on top and bottom, Strong red fabric’. There was also the piece that closely resembled the wicker boxes collected by Konietzko. Sandra pointed to the fresh blue ribbon and the lining of the fabric, highlighting the challenges of careful engagement with the vulnerable material. Adding new decoration, and appending new textile on the dry structure, risks breaking the

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threads. The pandemic labour of repair and renovation was a balancing act of using fresh thread made with spiny rush to fill in the gaps without fracturing the old coiling. Caterina, a young weaver in her early thirties and another of my interviewees, explained that as courses were cancelled, restoration work also took priority for her: In terms of basket weaving or restoration, things are very good: people ask to restore the baskets passed down by their families, so they want to preserve them … you can replace the brocade, you can re-weave the last circles, you can put a ribbon at the end of the basket or recreate the base: these parts can be restored.

Restoration and care for older objects was part of the wider portfolio of work. Being trusted to restore a family piece was a sign of trust in a weaver’s expertise and a stamp of reputation. As Sandra was patiently instructing me how to make a neat girriedu, the knotted spiral forming the base of the basket, she talked about the various commissions and collaborations attesting to the value of her name as a Sinnai maker. She showed me a range of publications featuring her work. A booklet titled Mediterranean Archipelago: Sardinia included a photograph of her making a plate, and an exhibition catalogue showed one of her most challenging projects, a tall, finely woven, brimmed straw hat made with the same coiled technique as the Sinnai baskets. This project was a partnership with an archaeologist who wanted to reconstruct dress from the local ancient Nuragic civilization. It was one of the most thrilling weaving tasks, she explained, requiring much consideration of the three-dimensional structure of the object. Moving between the images in the album, the iPad and the WhatsApp galleries, she showed me the images of past work and design commissions. There was a photo of her first stall in a craft fair, dated 1996, with a certificate of excellence. ‘I received the 3rd Prize’ – she pointed to the description. The album was a portfolio of sorts, combined with more intimate images of work. As we turned its pages, Sandra showed me a variety of shapes, from the cofinu boxes and bowl-shaped crobi for bread to canisteddu traditionally used for drying pasta. She explained that the cylindrical MEK object was incorrectly named as crobedda. Instead, it was a cofinu used as a container, traditionally

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mostly used as a haberdashery box. She remarked on the different destinations of the piece she had made. There was an image of a project commissioned by a German-Finnish designer: Sandra made the intricate, woven top crowning the designer’s minimalistic stacked glass vessel. Another photo showed the quirky, bendy structure she made for a Seattle-based artist. Rummaging through the different products she had stored away, Sandra showed me a white, woven tote bag adorned with girriedu-like circles. These objects were aimed at the tourists who visited her garage studio to watch craft demonstrations. With pride, she talked about some of the international audiences that came by the house, interested in her work. Occasionally, she has undertaken different kinds of tourist commissions, such as a set of objects for an exhibition presented in one of the island’s most luxurious hotels, in Costa Smeralda. These shows gave her access to the jet-set end of Sardinian tourism, on the far north-eastern side of the island. The traditional shapes she was required to make gave her more flexibility, as she could also sell them both at craft fairs and from her home to local customers and tourists. The new traffic of holidaymakers, encouraged since the 1960s, has created a souvenir market that to this day constitutes a source of income for Sandra and other basket-makers. The artisans present their work during the craft fairs attended by visitors during the tourist season or make objects for the hospitality sector. As Sandra mentioned, the presence of tourists who come from Europe, China and Russia attests to the high value of her work. The design sector was another source of income, albeit very marginal in the makers’ portfolio. Although work for designers and archaeologists provided a rewarding technical challenge, Sandra explained that it required much time and effort with little financial reward. Aware of the prices fetched by the designer objects, she felt that her contribution has not been sufficiently recompensed. Over time, she has become quite careful in agreeing to such collaborations. Speaking with one of the designers who had worked with Sandra and other Sardinian basket-makers, we reflected on why their joint projects have never taken off into a fully fledged collaboration. ‘It just became really complicated, it was difficult to communicate, it was difficult to get things shipped’ – she explained during a Zoom call from her studio in rural northern Europe. She found the basket-makers limited in their outlook and people did not try to find creative ways of making things work. For her,

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working with craftspeople was often very challenging as makers struggle to step ‘out of the comfort zone, adapting and getting out of the shape, that’s already a big threshold’. She identified a further challenge related to the business side of the cooperation as many producers ‘don’t want to give you the cost’ until they know how many hours they have spent on an object. This inability to be transparent about the cost of the object made the designer reconsider the project.

Stubborn survival The challenge of collaboration between traditional practitioners and designers was a recurring theme in my interviews with basket-makers across south Sardinia. A Sardinian initiator of another failed design partnership with basket-makers in the southwest part of the island told me with frustration about the impossibility of getting them to undertake such commissions. What happens in Sardinia in most of the sites, they sell in the streets and during fairs, the price is really low, it doesn’t take into account all the … before you start to weave, you go to the field and take the rush, the vegetation you are using, let it dry, all the phases … it’s just a lot, lot [of] work. And obviously, when you sell for 50 euros, that’s nothing. It doesn’t take it into account, and explain how much work is behind [it]. Our idea was, let’s show those people that there are people who understand the value, let’s explain the value by telling the story of the basket and the product. … We have to raise the level, so it is not that you have to make a thousand baskets. Simply that it is – I don’t want to say luxury – but it is really amazing, so sophisticated, the technique is so good.

However, this idea of making the baskets into high-end products was met with much resistance on the part of the makers. It was impossible to request a series of objects for any significant sale, as my interviewee explained emphatically: I was contacted by a few big stores and they asked me – ‘I want [to help you]!’ but I said ‘there is nobody’ because when I ask these weavers to make me a hundred baskets, they were like: ‘Are you crazy? I will never do it because I have my things to do, I work one day and the day after I don’t work.’ It was difficult.

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The designer-collaborator talked at great length about the fact that the basketmakers seemed to be looking for excuses not to undertake the work: they didn’t have the materials, they didn’t have the time, or else they told her that it was too hot to work. She felt that they lacked personal investment in the project. ‘They don’t want to feel that they have to do it’ – she spoke with frustration. ‘The work capacity is really ridiculous’ – and so is ‘punctuality, attention, precision’, she sighed. ‘They don’t see a life project in this work’; they lack personal investment in the project. She explained how the project suggested another way of looking at the traditional baskets, updating the product to new lifestyles and uses, but ‘[i]t was a hard, hard task to make these people understand that things can change, that there can be some kind of cross-fertilization.’ The designer went on to describe how the woven objects that had been used in everyday life had now become purely ornamental. Her design concept involved reconnecting this material culture with the present: ‘modern times, modern design, modern use’. In a passionate narrative about the objects’ trajectory and their alleged devaluation, she complained that the makers ‘don’t go further, they get stuck in these things’. The portrait of the makers painted by this would-be collaborator was of a profession that cannot imagine its own future and fails to fully invest time in the activity. For the designer, the craftspeople do not respond to potential design input with much enthusiasm, they appear too conservative. They keep their distance from shops selling traditional Sardinian crafts, snub design showrooms and rarely participate in exhibitions on the mainland. They are difficult and stubborn project partners, remaining aloof from opportunities to modernize, helping them develop the craft. Quite often, the basket-makers like Sandra seem unable to move on. They appear blocked by their antiquated attitudes and inefficient ways of working. The designers worry, too, that the makers undervalue their own labour. For the design community, the work of the Sardinian basket-maker resembles a cultural survival, a soon-to-die-off craft fading into obscurity. How to explain the ‘self-inflicted’ marginality? An elderly craftswoman in a village in the plains of Campidano explained her unwillingness to work with shops. We sat in her kitchen, surrounded by old baskets covering the walls and surfaces. Carefully carrying two espressos towards the table, she explained that basket-makers are only ‘teased’ by the shops. She took a large spoon of sugar, stirred it in her coffee and continued: ‘one

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works for money, not for payments after seven months … and then if the shop closes and you do what, where do you find them to pay you?’ She unpacked a small gueffus, an almond-based sweet, and threw the turquoise wrapper onto her saucer. She took a bite, looked at the sweet and said with conviction: ‘They sell a lot – they buy a corbula [basket type] for 70 Euros and then you see it for 600 Euros, it drives you mad.’ Infuriated by the price difference, she felt that supplying her work to shops was completely unsustainable. Like Sandra, she was also hesitant to work with the design community. She felt that some of the more rustic-looking commissions were not of the quality she wanted to make. She explained this to the Milanese designer but the commissioning party insisted. ‘We who work know if it’s good or bad’ – she spoke about the impossible negotiation – ‘They suck, they’re not beautiful, one could see that clearly … Milan said it’s beautiful because they don’t understand.’ As a result, although she sold two pieces in Milan she did not feel she wanted to continue working with the designer. A director of a foundation that had attempted to work with this maker nostalgically mentioned ISOLA. This craftswoman, like some of the older basket-makers who had worked with Tavolara, might still produce the objects of his design. The designer sighed, ‘[N]ow, we try to do the same but there is not the same effect because people are older and stuck in their imagination.’ Age is probably a very important factor in the challenge of low productivity, patchy motivation and lack of commitment to novelty. However, the director hinted at other reasons that corresponded to the narratives of the furious craftswoman: [T]hey always, what happened since Tavolara, maybe even before … there are these people who usually buy all the baskets and they sell them somewhere with the price they wanted … They feel there is somebody always going there to take their knowledge and stuff, get rich with it and they don’t get the recognition of what they’ve done and what they are. They are always somehow afraid of sharing.

The director talked about the makers’ requests for not sharing the skills, not recording the technique, and explained the reasons for this refusal. The basketmakers kept asking her: ‘Are you going to sell them in China or show the Chinese makers how to do it?’ They were afraid of any potential risk and needed to have

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things explained to them over and over again. For the director, ‘this idea that people came from the outside, steal your knowledge’ sounded ridiculous. But what if these questions express legitimate concerns about further exclusion and impoverishment? Writing about artisans in Crete, Herzfeld (2004) demonstrated that the work of an artisan is an ambiguous interplay of prestige and marginality. Thinking about tradition and modernity together allows us to invert some of the underlying categories and their political work. The tandem of tradition and modernity is played out in the design community’s imaginaries about the basket-makers. The old makers and the folk costume-wearing apprentice basket-weavers appear both picturesque and tragic, quirky and backward. They need to be helped to move on and require a lifeline of design for survival, Just like Virchow, the designers feared the demise of the art of the countryside, and like Jahn, they were ready to take objects from the village onto the global stage. The renewal initiatives of craft development programmes and collecting campaigns of Jahn-Virchow share the sentiment of salvage paternalism. Through the knotted story of collectors like Konietzko, the aristocratic women starting entrepreneurial cooperatives, artists and designers modernizing craft, we can trace the persistent presence of nostalgic ideas of backward idylls and picturesque traditions indulged by those who can afford them (Herzfeld 2004: 31). This museumification of living people, a ‘longdiscredited anthropological doctrine of survivalism, reconfigured as popular discourse’ (Herzfeld 2004: 31), is embedded within the moral economy of the southern question, persistently playing out in the various modernizing initiatives and their failures. These actors co-produce the fate of the craft, both glorifying and marginalizing it as a form of livelihood. This way, tradition can turn out to be something else: [W]hen the pedestal of tradition is turned upside down, its platform becomes a fixed concrete base, and the pedestal as a whole is revealed instead as a tethering post. The lauding of skilled workers as traditional artisans similarly both glorifies their achievements and firmly embeds their bejewelled glories in the glittering crown of modernity, from which they cannot escape without catastrophic loss of status. The irony of tradition is precisely that it cannot exist except in relation to a self-serving concept of modernity. (Herzfeld 2004: 31)

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As tradition is a modern invention, the idea of traditional maker produces different forms of exclusion from modern livelihood. The Cretan case demonstrated how ideas, craftspeople and places become marginal elements of a certain grand design. Numerous cases in critical heritage studies show how this happens in UNESCO contexts where the residents of listed buildings struggle to make ends meet while dwelling in homes devoid of conveniences (Herzfeld 2009, Joy 2016). In this light, how do we approach the artefacts that were acquired as southern survivals from Rückzugsgebiete now found in museum stores and archives? How do we tend to their awkwardness without paternalism, to their aesthetics without asserting kitsch, or their story without evoking backwardness and southern local colour? For Nimführ and Meloni (2021), we need to critically examine the Eurocentric modes of thinking and colonial matrix of power that leads to the production of ‘islandness’. We need to develop new practices of knowledge production about islands beyond the imaginary of a bounded insularity (Nadarajah & Grydehøj 2016). Could we reimagine objects, like those of the Konietzko collection, through the political and epistemological challenge of such decolonial island studies (Nadarajah & Grydehøj 2016)? Could we apprehend objects acquired in Sardinia without reproducing the hegemonic view of ‘survivalism’, ‘insularity’ and backward material culture? Perhaps they could become a diagnostic tool for investigating marginality and the epistemic, social and political alternatives afforded by craft-making (Black and Burisch 2020). The study of apparently ‘surviving’ craft could become part of the decolonial option, the main task of which is ‘[a] critical analysis of modernity and its darker side – coloniality – tracing the genealogy of modernity’s violence in relation to its internal and external others’ (Tlostanova 2017: 17). Aarti Kawlra (2020) has recently explored craft in India as a site of decolonial thought and practice. Rather than ‘surviving’ or still-existing in archaic, insular forms, craft could be critically apprehended as everyday, embodied, careful seeds of a decolonial option. This requires us to follow craft beyond the prism of modernity, seeking new ways of apprehension through tactile and material knowledges (Astacio 2021, Tlostanova 2017). In the case of Sardinian basketry, this may require new sensitivity to the stubborn labours of care, embodied knowledge ecologies of weaving

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(Perez-Bustos 2018) and ways in which they resist the various modernizing projects. Among the basket-makers, such work is expressed in shirking responsibilities for collaborative projects, in taking one’s time to complete work, in acting irrationally, and in hesitating to determine a price per piece. The marginality is practised in semi-legal procurement of material and devising one’s own online business, run via WhatsApp and word-of-mouth recommendation for further commissions. It is expressed in the rejection of design aesthetics and the values promulgated in Milan which come with a different price tag. The added value, as the makers were subject to successive waves of innovations and modernization, never really trickled down to the Sardinian maker. The marginality is about sardonic comments on being included in exhibitions outside of Sardinia which might elevate the reputation of the island’s craft but do not bring any benefit to the makers. It is about sneering at high culture in acts of demonstrative ‘ignorance’ about museums and heritage that might contain their craftwork. It is articulated in everyday forms of non-conformity and dissent. This includes the rejection of the delayed payments and the gig economy of folklore shops and design commissions with their delayed payments. It is about developing one’s own forms of a portfolio of work, embedded in a precarious ecology of activities, networks and DIY practices that can survive the adverse effects of a global pandemic. The makers of these objects are sometimes visible at craft fairs but mostly tucked away, among the shattered futures of craft cooperatives set up by ISOLA or IFI, and remnants of the once ever-growing tourist industry and cheap flights. They negotiate the parameters of neoliberal modernity on their own terms, forging values among the complexities of the market-driven logic of intangible heritage. The MEK’s collection of Sardinian baskets is a material record of the aftermath of past modernization initiatives, the frayed end of unsuccessful innovations and the traces of cultural hegemony and distribution of power (Herzfeld 2004). Importantly, the collection points to precarious forms of unfitting, a strange tool against the rhetorics of loss and backwardness. Through the constellation of rejection and improvisatory practice, the makers refuse to be tethered to the post of modernity, although paradoxically, the traditional objects and their very story of collecting suggests otherwise. These

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practices of disobedience and marginal action might not just mark wilful defiance but also signal fragmentary practices of creating alternatives and hope. This is a unique skill of endurance, not just as ancient, still-surviving artisanship but also as an ever-adapting creative existence, gaining resilience both through and despite different modern experiments.

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4

Waistcoat: Colour and Cold War

Figure 4.1 A girl’s sheepskin waistcoat (Mädchenbrustpelz) from Bistrița County, northern Transylvania, collected for the Museum of German Folklore, West Berlin. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Christian Krug.

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‘I am going to be sick’, I thought to myself as we opened the sides of the waistcoat. The textile conservator and I had been trying to manipulate the garment for nearly a quarter of an hour now. The task was to place it onto a headless dummy, sliding it down the lifeless torso – but without shedding the long-haired lamb’s fleece interior. The garment’s odour was overwhelming a combination of the heavy musk of the leather and the hospital-like conservation chemicals. As a result of the preservation process, the material was also very stiff. It was a relief finally to be able to move the dummy to the studio for the waistcoat’s documentation photograph. But in the museum’s photographic studio, it appeared even more awkward (Figure 4.1). The stiffness of the material and its smell, combining animal and synthetic notes, gave it an uncanny feel. The awkwardly sticking-out sides cast a shadow on the rest of the piece. Creases at its base and worn-out edges in the underarm area evoked its wearer. The waistcoat’s leather had also bulged up and expanded in places, delineating the contours of the wearer’s body. Some parts were pulled and darkened from repeated use, while there were newer patches of leather on the sides. Perhaps the patches were needed after the wearer gained weight or when the waistcoat was passed on to different family members. Usually, an item of clothing within the collection is packed in a box and wrapped safely in acid-free paper, stowed out of sight in the textile stores in the outbuilding of the Prussian Privy Archives. This particular object – literally, a Mädchenbrustpelz or ‘girl’s breast fur’  – is made of long-haired lambskin leather and silk. The edges of the waistcoat are embellished with filigree, semicircles finished with metal rings. The lower edge of the front, where the fine embroidery finishes, has a line of stamped flower patterns, all showing the exquisite craft of the leather maker. The embroidered initials ‘M’ and ‘B’ and the year ‘19’ and ‘11’ on either side of the front give hints about its past owner and year of production. The letter ‘B’ and some of the flowers have lost their colour and one can observe that the object has many loose threads across its surface. But any such signs of past use are not reflected in the museum records. As with many post-Second World War objects in the collections, we know where it came from but no information was recorded about the maker or wearer.

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According to the documentation, the waistcoat came from the vicinity of the city of Bistrița, Transylvania in Romania, and was purchased by the museum in 1963 from a collector called Käthe Kaspar-Herberth (of whom more later). The documentation file assigns this particular object the reference D (28 D 2) 373/1963 as part of the ‘Women’s waistcoats’ object group. Again, the cataloguing system of Berlin’s Museum of European Culture provides a map of the fragmented past but also of its interrelated geographical and institutional divisions, its complicated genealogy. As a ‘D’ – Dahlem – object, the waistcoat was collected by the West German museum, one of the 363 objects collected in 1963 or, more precisely, one of the 60 items acquired from Kaspar-Herberth that year. These were mostly items previously belonging to Transylvanian Saxons living in Bistrița-Năsăud County, but also from across the region. Compared to the images of the waistcoat in the museum database, the formal documentation file and the lengthy grid of the Kaspar-Herberth acquisitions spreadsheet, the smell and colour of the object were over-powering. Due to a previous medical condition, I have a long-term disorder in sensory perception. The smell of certain foods or substances, even seemingly unobtrusive or bland ones like soap or peas, can feel unbearable. This sensitivity makes me notice hints of expiration – I am the first to sense mustiness, mould and mildew, the smell of stale clothes or rotting wood. The distressing smell of this waistcoat contrasted with its brightly coloured appearance. Its green, pink, yellow and blue pom-poms reminded me of a song about the region I first came to know in 2011 during my doctoral fieldwork in Sibiu, southern Transylvania. The nineteenth-century Transylvania Song (Siebenbürgenlied) is considered the regional anthem of the Transylvanian Saxons and I heard it on numerous occasions during folk performances in Sibiu’s town square or in one of the Saxon-themed restaurants. In the lyrics of the Siebenbürgenlied, Transylvania is represented as a ‘green cradle of a colourful flock of people’ (grüne Wiege einer bunten Völkerschar). This chapter follows the Romanian waistcoat to explore its colours and those of Transylvania through historical and ethnographic research in Berlin and Bistrița. In 2019, I traced the object in the institutional records of the post-war era collection and through recent curatorial work within the MEK. In January and February 2020, just as Covid-19 broke out in Europe, I undertook fieldwork

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in Romania to explore the object in its place of origin. This involved research in the Bistrița-Năsăud Museum Complex and the county archive, ethnographic interviews with the Saxon community in the area, and the Romanians who live in the former Saxon houses in the region today. Drawing on the initial ambiguous, sensory overload of the object, this chapter aims to capture the waistcoat in a textural manner. It highlights the complex histories and the ambivalent forms of representation in which this object and rural Transylvanian Saxon material culture are entangled.

Language island The MEK has acquired objects and images of Transylvania since its inception, as soon as Jahn and Virchow were building their initial collections. Already when Jahn introduced their museum to the public, he spoke about the Transylvanian Saxons as part of the the ‘tangible folklore’ of German peoples (Jahn 1889: 336). Jahn’s idea of Transylvania as an island of German language and culture was embedded in the tradition of language island research (Sprachinselforschung) (Ahonen 1998, O’Donnell et al. 2010, Swanson 2017). Originally developed in dialectology, Sprachinselforschung was focused on linguistic and cultural enclaves of Germanness. As German-speaking communities were present across Central and Eastern Europe through various processes of border changes, colonization, conquest and migration (Rock and Wolff 2002: 5), much of this study concerned the region. While others were collecting samples of oral culture, Jahn’s ‘tangible folklore’ collection required examples of material culture. The MEK collection photographs of the Transylvanian Saxon community were taken in the nineteenth century by members of another of Virchow’s scientific involvements  – the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (BGAEU). The museum still holds a collection of portraits taken by BGAEU member Fedor Jagor, including the photograph of a young Transylvanian Saxon woman in her Sunday outfit (Figure 4.2). The model poses against a bucolic, painted landscape background, sitting on a stool with an enigmatic half-smile. This choice of idyllic space and celebratory ‘Sunday’ material culture (Hildebrandt 1992) was indicative of the rural imaginaries

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Figure 4.2  Photograph of a young, well-off Saxon girl in her Sunday attire (before 1905). Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Andreas Fedor Jagor.

of the time. This image of Transylvania as a pastoral space is epitomized by Charles Boner’s 1865 book, Transylvania: Its Products and Its People, in which he shares his delight: How fresh those Saxon girls are, and how pretty and bright everything about them. The white petticoat, plaited in innumerable folds, an inch broad, reaches to the ankles, and looks like a snow-flake beneath the broad black merino apron. They have on the usual jacket of blue woollen cloth, open in front, from which depend behind the numberless ribbons, red, black, and blue. Round their head they wear a kerchief of finest gauze bound tightly over the forehead,

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but under this is a broad ribbon, red and gold, gleaming through it as though a haze. The ends, too, of this delicate head-gear are embroidered with small, red stripes. One was bargaining for a new leather jerkin, with flowers in gay colours worked over it in silk. (Boner 1865: 133)

The English traveller and teacher living in Germany seemed spellbound by the sensuality of the Saxon girls and their attire. ‘Colour, colour! Everywhere colour!’ the traveller exclaimed as he commented on what he saw as the vibrancy of Transylvanian life (Boner 1865: 134). Boner draws heavily on the nineteenth-century Romantic trope of the region as an assortment of a ‘colourful flock of people’. For Murawska-Muthesius (2021), Eastern Europe is often represented by a picturesque ethnic body, imagined as a female figure in traditional clothes. The gendered Eastern European body was seen as a canvas on which could be painted various claims about identity. The Saxon girl could be seen at different points in time as a primitive craftswoman, a sexualized peasant, a babushka, a tender object of desire, a colourful bird and a carrier of national or ethnic values. Regardless of these changing representations, the female body and the clothes remained a constant, recognizable signifier of Eastern Europe. The region had been home to the Saxon settler community since the twelfth century. As Boatcă and Parvulescu (2020) demonstrated, Transylvania can be seen as ‘an exemplary multi-ethnic, multilingual and multiconfessional region’ (2020: 11) shaped by the complex dynamics of inter-imperiality and coloniality. The Saxon ‘colonization’ was encouraged by King Geza II (1141–1162) who recruited the settlers to defend the south-eastern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary. The settlement area was declared as a Königsboden (fundus regius, i.e. Royal Land), which gave the Saxons a high level of autonomy. The so-called Andreanum of 1224 was one of the first written constitutions in Europe, which guaranteed Saxon privileges, setting them apart from other groups resident in the multi-ethnic region, German-, Hungarian-, Yiddish-, Romanian-, Romani- and Ukrainian-speaking communities. The history of Transylvania complicates the imaginary view of the region as a land of bucolic multiculturalism. The place lauded for its ‘colourful’ coexistence was in fact an unequal space of stratified communities and unequally distributed privileges. This status contributed to the rapid development of craft and trade in the Saxon-controlled cities or seats which

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gave Transylvania its German name, Siebenbürgen (seven citadels). Saxon privilege was reinforced in 1438 by Unio Trium Nationum (Union of the Three Nations), a pact of mutual aid between the Saxons, Hungarian nobility and the free military Székelys. This document, directed against the peasantry largely of Romanian origin, divided political power between the three dominant communities. These unique entitlements lasted until 1867 when Saxon Lands were integrated into the Hungarian county system. As a result, Saxon institutions lost political power and the community was subjected to aggressive policies of Magyarization, or assimilation to Hungarian language and culture. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled in 1918, this experience of loss of status paired with forced Magyarization resulted in the Saxons’ support for the newly expanded Kingdom of Romania. The events of the First World War and the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a profound impact on the community. Transylvanian Saxons increasingly became the target of Prussia’s imperial ambitions. Having “lost” its colonies at the end of World War I, the German Empire remapped the reach of its nation to include both the German-speaking populations in East Europe (“the German ethnic and cultural lands”) and those who had settled in the Americas (“the overseas Germans”), thereby providing a transcontinental and transatlantic arc for the imbrication of coloniality and inter-imperiality (Parvulescu & Boatcă 2022). As the borders were redrawn, the Saxon Assembly voted in favour of sanctioning Romanian unification with Transylvania. This was to guarantee state funding for the Lutheran Church and the autonomy of the Saxon education system and community institutions. The community was organized into fraternities and neighbourhood organizations (Bruderschaften, Schwesterschaften, Nachbarschaften) strictly regulating social interactions, and guilds structuring the professional life of many crafts. Cultural autonomy was linked to the idea of Romanian territory, German culture (rumänisches Territorium, deutsche Kultur) where Germanspeaking culture was frequently self-proclaimed as superior. Any policies focusing on the Romanian language or culture were rejected, and considered vulgar and crude. Such increasing Saxon nationalism became rooted in the local folk customs and an imaginary view of Saxonness as a eugenic fortress surrounded by ethnic wilderness (Davis 2016, Georgescu 2016). This opposition later facilitated the radicalization of the Saxons and Swabians (Koranyi 2008: 71). In the 1930s, as the situation in Europe

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worsened, the Saxon community became torn between mainstream politics and the rise of the right under King Carol II of Romania. As a result, previously marginal groups, such as the so-called Rejuvenation Movement (Erneuerungsbewegung), gained much popularity, leading to Saxon status as a Volksdeutsche Gruppe (ethnic German group) to be coordinated by Nazi Germany. As the community became instrumentalized and under the sway of Third Reich policies, over 55,000 ethnic Germans in Romania became part of the Waffen-SS and other Nazi military units (Traşcă 2006). At the end of the Second World War, the German army tried to evacuate the Saxons from some areas of Transylvania but many survivors were in prisoner-of-war camps. More than 100,000 Germans managed to leave Transylvania before the arrival of the Soviet Red Army, founding a large diaspora in Germany and Austria. Approximately 70,000 were arrested for Nazi collaboration, and deported to labour camps by the communist authorities. During post-war communist rule in Romania, the Saxon community’s social and economic standing decreased even further, leading to several waves of migration, predominantly to West Germany, Austria, Canada and the United States (Koranyi and Wittlinger 2011). These traumatic experiences of wartime deportation and post-war loss of status, along with narratives of their past role as the defendants of Christianity on the frontier, have contributed to Saxon discourses of particularism, victimhood and a sense of being under siege (Koranyi 2008: 20). Additionally, the Cold War constellation fostered a relationship between the Federal Republic and its diaspora in Romania which allowed Transylvanian Saxons to cultivate notions of an ‘external homeland’ that encouraged its diaspora to return ‘home’. (Koranyi and Wittlinger 2011: 96)

The emigration or homecoming trend continued in post-socialist Romania when many Saxons decided to join their family members in the diaspora. Although migration continued after 1989, there was also a visible rise in the community’s political participation, the recreation of institutions and the creation of multiple community initiatives and local and EU projects, such as the town of Sibiu’s nomination as the European Capital of Culture in 2007 or the recent election of a Saxon president in Romania, which involved both the diaspora and homeland communities. The political and cultural entrepreneurship of the Saxon community has thus contributed to the relative prestige of the Saxon

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minority and the rise of a Saxon myth with associated characteristics of morality and competence (Stroe 2011). These recent post-socialist ideas of Germanness in Romania paradoxically are reminiscent of Jahn’s ideas about German culture and its remnants across Eastern European lands, Germanic Sprachinseln (islands of German speakers), have clung tenaciously to the soil of their forebears even as the tides of German borders have ebbed and flowed around them. (O’Donnell et al. 2010: 1)

These ideas of German islands surrounded by a sea of others have informed collection activities, not only in the early stages of the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products but also in its post-Second World War successor institutions.

Go West The waistcoat was acquired in the 1960s for the Dahlem-based West Berlin German Folklore Museum (Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde) along with other textile objects from Transylvania. After the Second World War, this provisional museum operated from a military building in Lichterfelde at the edge of south Berlin’s Botanical Garden. In 1963, it became part of a new organization in West Germany  – the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz)  – with a mandate to bring together and preserve collections scattered around the Western occupation zones. The period between the catastrophe of the Second World War and the re-establishment of the museum and the creation of its early post-war exhibitions was marked by feverish attempts1 to restore the collections after the loss of almost 80 per cent of its stock (Pretzell 1962: 108). Reduced to a mere 40 boxes with only about 3,500 objects, the collection was returned to Berlin in 1959 from various wartime storage sites, bunkers and countryside hideouts. At the same time, the museum staff were acquiring new objects through an extensive network of institutional and private sources, from local museums, art and antique dealers to flea markets (Bauer et al. 1975: 9). The colossal task of ‘filling gaps’ caused by war losses and putting new acquisition priorities into use necessitated a network of collaborators.

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The newly acquired collections embedded in the complex network of private connections continued to focus, as they had in the pre-war period, on rural material culture, daily work, popular beliefs and customs and, geographically, predominantly on German-speaking areas (Pretzell 1962). In 1964, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Virchow’s Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products, the museum presented its first exhibition since 1945. Organized off-site, in the newly built, shiny post-war modern building of Urania House, the show focused on folk art and handicraft (title: Volkskunst und Volkshandwerk). The following Precious Folk Heritage (Kostbares Volksgut) exhibition in 1967 reflected a continued strategy of salvage collecting by displaying the new acquisitions and the high-value highlights of rescued collections. This exhibition placed emphasis on pieces of rural origin that the curator considered culturally arrested by their dependence on tradition, community and custom. The museum director Lothar Pretzell saw these objects as frozen in time and argued that in contrast to dynamic urban dress, ‘only gradually were changes based on taste, practical or hygienic aspects able to assert themselves, but were then again tenaciously adhered to’ (Pretzell 1967: 47). The thematic interest and mission to collect and preserve the typical folk culture of the last centuries also remained the same. Pretzell continued to place an emphasis on objects that would be considered examples of ‘folk art’, particularly creatively designed objects representing aesthetic value. Pretzell had introduced acquisitions documenting everyday livelihoods through objects such as tools, traditional work clothes and undecorated or only sparsely decorated furniture. Beyond objects of aesthetic interest, the collection was thus enriched with objects that were representative of quotidian lives in the countryside (Bauer et al. 1975: 10). For Pretzell, objects used in daily life could be seen as treasures in their potential to open up fundamental questions about what makes us human (Pretzell 1967: 2). Despite these changes, it appeared to a large extent that the West Berlin museum continued to collect objects from German-speaking regions. As the report on the West Berlin’s Museum for German Folklore acquisitions, the museum’s collecting activities continued to extend to the entire German-speaking area, even if the political situation only permitted purchases from the regions belonging to the Federal Republic. However, acquisition trips to Austria also proved fruitful, while German-speaking Switzerland, from which the museum possessed numerous

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objects before the war, remained somewhat out of the picture. Even objects from the areas of the GDR or from the former German eastern territories were acquired commercially and from private Berlin collections. (Bauer et al. 1975: 9)

This demonstrates that the West German museum continued the collecting traditions developed in the interwar period under Konrad Hahm (see Chapter 2). The museum continued to focus on the German-speaking areas of Europe, including German language islands such as Transylvania, Alsace or South Tyrol. In the period between 1959 and 1974 covered by the report, the museum, like its folklore (Volkskunde) discipline, considered neither a change of direction in the field nor its complex entanglement with some of the concepts that had been politically used under National Socialism (Brinkel and Bendix 2009: 148). The 1964 exhibition catalogue expresses this continuity of approach in its discussion of the Transylvanian collections: In Transylvanian costumes and textiles we find German uniqueness mixed with Balkan influences. As in all Volkstum islands, here too a lot of traditional things have been preserved. The rich embroideries are outstanding. While these are mostly monochrome (red, black, blue) on the textiles, coats are almost always colourfully embroidered and appliqued. (Pretzell 1964)

Textiles are thus conceptualized as a crucial part of Transylvania’s status as an island of Germanness, continuing discourses developed by Jahn and the early museum curators. Todorova’s (2009) analysis of the discourses around the idea of the Balkans demonstrates how the area constituted a spatial and temporal category similar to that of the Orient, offering an imaginary escape to the Middle Ages (2009: 14). This orientalist representation of the eastern parts of Europe was further perpetuated during the Cold War when the Iron Curtain set a clear-cut division into ‘us’ and ‘them’ which was reduced, in fact, to geography. The two systems’ border was inscribed in the mental map in which continuous space was transformed into discontinuous places inhabited by two distinctive tribes: the civilized ‘us’ and the exotic, often ‘uncivilized’ Others’. (Buchowski 2006: 465)

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As Romania found itself under the new socialist regime on the other side of the Iron Curtain and the country turned eastwards culturally and politically (Deletant 1999, Vasile 2011), the contrasts seemed starker than ever. This oriental image of the East and the Balkans as a timeless space was evident in Pretzell’s notion of the Transylvanian Saxons. For the museum curator, these rural communities seemed to have retained a material culture that had long vanished in other parts of Germany. In 1967 Pretzell stated that Transylvania was one of the few remaining places in which folk attire was still ‘alive’ (Pretzell 1967: 48). Although off-limits in the Cold War order, the region was seen as a repository of customs that could tell the museum about a lost German past. As the backward East could serve to recollect the past material culture of the West, the salvage task of the museum was to gather the evidence of expressions of German culture outside its borders. The West German museum’s acquisition of extensive textile collections from the German East, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland (NeulandKitzerow 2014) needs to be understood within the complexities of longstanding imaginary views of a rural past and, in particular, of West German Eastern Policy (Ostpolitik). In the post-Second World War order in West Germany, museums became spaces of knowledge production about this past and, in particular, storytelling about the former German presence in Eastern Europe. Perron (2016) considers developments in museum practice within the sensitive negotiation of a difficult past, a past that evoked a particularly traumatic ending: loss of territory, displacement, and flight. This narrative of expulsion played an especially significant role in political and academic circles, and the ‘Volkskunde of expellees’ was a key research domain until the late 1960s (Brinkel and Bendix 2009: 104). The museum’s heightened focus on expellee cultures and the region itself was linked to the cultural priorities associated with the §96 of the 1953 Federal Act on Expellees (Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge or Bundesvertriebenengesetz, hereafter BVFG). This memory law established the significance of expellee cultural heritage and assigned the duty of preserving and disseminating this legacy to both Federal and local governments (Länder). Following the post-war forced migration of Germans from the east, various political actors and expellee organizations aimed to create a narrative about a homogeneous homeland (Heimat) and expulsion. The 1950 Charter of German Expellees was a declaration of expellees’ victimhood  of

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‘flight and expulsion’ and the definition of their needs and political visions. The declaration positioned the expellees as contributors to a ‘free and unified Europe’ linked to anticommunist discourse and referred to the central political concept of the Adenauer era, Western and Christian occident (Abendland). The Charter highlighted two concepts that came to dominate the German discourse on forced migration for several years: the notion of ‘expellees’ and the ‘right to the homeland’ (Recht auf die Heimat, often Recht auf Heimat). The authors had thoughtfully chosen from a broad variety of available terms, such as ‘refugees’, ‘resettlers’, ‘immigrants’ or ‘new citizens’, and adopted ‘expellee’ as a self-identification. (Feindt 2017: 555)

On the one hand, the 1953 law was an expression of foreign policy as well as a tool of control over the politically sensitive expellee organizations (Perron 2016: 59). On the other, the 1950 Charter informed the framing of the 1953 law with its underpinning notions of ‘expellee from the homeland’ (Heimatvertriebener). For Feindt (2017), in the application of expellees’ ideas of the right to the homeland (Heimatrecht), the law overlooked the complexity of homelands such as Transylvania. Crucially, however, the 1953 law created funding streams from the Federal Ministry of the Interior for new museum acquisitions and regional heritage preservation. This policy imperative and collection funding became available for the newly established West German museums, such as the Prussian Heritage Foundation (Perron 2016: 61). Although there are no traces in the archive of specific budget lines, the colourful waistcoat described at the beginning of this chapter, sourced from the German language island in the East, needs to be understood within the collection development priorities of the §96 effect of the Federal Act on Expellees West German museum landscape.

Perforating the Iron Curtain? In the 1950s and 1960s, the Iron Curtain made regular exchanges between the East and West impossible. Despite the logistical impossibility of direct acquisitions from Eastern areas, in 1963 (the year of the West Berlin museum’s incorporation into the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation), the institution acquired a set of fourteen objects from Transylvania. The unlikely

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collection came from Käthe Kaspar-Herberth, a private collector based in a Transylvanian migrant settlement of Rosenau am Attersee in Upper Austria. The museum called meeting the collector in 1962 a ‘lucky coincidence’. Indeed it resulted in a significant relationship as between 1963 and 1976, Käthe Kaspar-Herberth sold over 500 objects to the museum, all from Transylvania. Käthe Kaspar-Herberth had been a student of a Transylvanian folklorist, Adolf Schullerus, in Hermannstadt (today’s Sibiu) before the Second World War and post-war became a quasi-consultant in the areas of folklore and customs for the West Berlin museum (Bauer et al. 1975: 105). Living in the diaspora, she worked as a nurse and kindergarten teacher, having access to many migrant families through her work, and so acquiring items of traditional Transylvanian Saxon attire. She was uniquely placed not only to knit together relationships between the museum and different members of the Saxon diaspora community, but also to select objects of outstanding precision and beauty that could be displayed as folk art. This material culture was a legacy of the past prosperity of the Saxon community as a privileged ethnic group. One such example of exquisite aesthetics and prosperity is a Kirchenpelz (literally, ‘church fur’), a leather coat with a long-haired sheep’s wool trim from the same area in North Transylvania as the waistcoat, also part of the KasparHerberth collection. Like the waistcoat, the coat is made from sheepskin leather and long-haired wool stitched together and embroidered with filigree floral patterns. The garment was worn to church by the members of Saxon Lutheran community and was particularly luxurious. When Lothar Pretzell curated the Precious Folk Heritage exhibition, he presented a wool-trimmed leather coat ‘from the village of Arcalia (Kallesdorf) in the vicinity of town of Bistrița, collected by Kaspar-Herberth’. In the introduction to the catalogue, Pretzell reflected on the social significance of colour in the understanding of dress. He noted that the design of the displayed pieces of rural attire was prescribed by the occasion of wearing and the age of the wearer (Pretzell 1967: 47). This idea of the intimate connection between colour in dress and cultural meaning was taken up by curators in the 1980s, in one of the most ambitious and thoroughly researched exhibitions of the West Berlin museum. This was also a watershed exhibition as it was the first Cold War show that featured objects from both West and East Berlin museums. The concept of the White

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Vests, Red Robes (Weiße Westen, Rote Roben) exhibition stemmed from a review of the museum’s textile collection that prompted the team to ask if it was possible to develop a thematic framework capable of encompassing the entire collection. During the review, colour emerged as a key category through which connections between objects could be made. This led to a theme of the ‘colour cosmos’ interlinking symbolic, psychological, aesthetic, ethnic and economic aspects of dress (Nixdorff and Müller 1983: 5). The exhibition, as the subtitle suggests, aspired to tell the story of colour in dress  – From the colour orders of the Middle Ages to individual colour tastes2  – and present ‘European folk costumes in the overall context of costume history against the thematic background of colour development and meaning’ (Nixdorff and Müller 1983: 17). This included displays on types of dyes and colouring processes, individual tones and colour schemes, and the relationships between colours and people over time. The show presented traditional Transylvanian outfits, including waistcoats, alongside other colourful examples of rural attire. White mannequins wearing highly decorative outfits composed of linen blouses, embroidered vests and aprons were positioned in the middle of the gallery, enclosed in individual glass boxes with pyramidal covers (Figure 4.3). The variety of colour in the rural fashion of the nineteenth-century countryside was an expression of the availability of new dyes. As the catalogue description suggested: the rural population took full advantage of the rich palette of the dye market that was just made available to them. On the one hand, they became grateful buyers of dyeing products still made with natural dyes such as madder and indigo, which have long since ceased to be in demand in fashion. On the other hand, it is toying – as once in the Middle Ages with the bright colours of the higher classes – with the still unaffordable new, bright aniline colours. Little by little these colours are incorporated into the festive costume. In addition to black and white, there are now, for example, bright orange, red-violet and green. The garish pink becomes a special favourite colour and runs like a ‘red thread’ through the folk costumes since the end of the nineteenth century. But the longing for colour harmony remains alive among the rural population. For them, this means to combine as many available basic colours as possible into one artistic whole. (Nixdorff and Müller 1983: 68)

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Figure 4.3 Sheepskin waistcoat from Bistrița County displayed in the ‘Colourful’ (Bunt) section of the White Vests, Red Robes (1983/84) exhibition, a name which seems perfect for Cold War–era Berlin. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Ute Franz, Gisela Oestreich.

For the curators, the use of colour by the rural population was indicative of opulent peasant aesthetics related to community prosperity, and visible in the trickle-down of urban trends and the affordability of new, industrially produced dyes. Twenty-five years later, in the exhibition Discover Europe! (Europa Entdecken!) displayed at the MEK from 13 April to 31 August 2008, the

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museum once again aimed to show the link between Saxon dress, identity and prosperity. One of the thirteen objects presented in the show was a lavishly decorated Kirchenpelz, the same one that was used in Pretzell’s exhibition. As the MEK curator Beate Wild suggested, the pre-war cost of such a coat ‘made to order’ could be the equivalent of a maid’s annual wage. Wild interviewed the surviving leather workers, mainly from the Hungarian part of the local community, who had made such coats and waistcoats for the Saxon neighbours. Their narratives suggested that the garments were ordered as a gift to mark particular rites of passage – in particular, confirmation ceremonies and weddings. Each was not only part of the local dress code but also a marker of age, gender, marital status and confessional identity (Wild 2008: 31). For Wild, the leather coats and waistcoats constituted a material expression of difference within the community that ‘reflected the social structures of Saxon village communities in a manner that was also clearly visible to outsiders’ (Wild 2008: 32). These differences, Wild argued, were also represented by the order of seating in the church, and the performance of spatial segmentation. The Sunday Kirchenpelz was a marker of belonging to the Saxon community and the Lutheran church, as well as a symbol of prestige and social status. This textile expression of affluence was brought to a dramatic end by the Second World War, which radically changed the fate of the community. As mentioned earlier, many Saxons served in the German military forces including Waffen-SS, and the community suffered the consequences in post-war Romania, with many deported to the Soviet Union, their property expropriated and their citizenship revoked. A particularly traumatic memory for the North Transylvanian Saxon population was the event of an evacuation, organized by the retreating German army in September 1944. One of my respondents told a story of his parents leaving their house and crops behind and taking with them a cart containing only their most basic belongings. The convoy of carts, guarded by the retreating soldiers, travelled for weeks through Hungary and Austria. There were stories of squalor and death during the journey, but some evacuees managed to escape to Austria or Germany. However, those unable to keep pace with the first group were caught by the Soviet army and ordered to return to Romania. The family of my respondent was one of those who went back to find their home occupied by other refugees living off the food supplies they had left behind. The family was unable to get their house

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back, had lost access to their land, and was now split between different villages. Some 55,000 Saxons fled in the autumn weeks of 1944, of whom about 20,000 eventually settled in Austria, founding Transylvanian enclaves. As the West Berlin museum staff reflected in the 1970s: Most of our objects now come directly from this area. I would like to point out that the majority of our traditional costumes from Transylvania are parts of the festive costume, which is not surprising, since the former refugees, most of whom came from rural communities where the costume was worn by everyone until the war, understandably packed the most beautiful and valuable garment into their flight baggage first. (Bauer et al. 1975: 105)

In the years that followed, the Saxon population in North Transylvania continued to shrink. In the 1950s, many migrated to join their family members already living in the West. In this migratory period, the museum started to receive acquisitions directly from Transylvania (Bauer et al. 1975: 105). In an agreement between the Romanian government and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, West Germany repatriated members of the Saxon population in exchange for a payment. Then, after the Ceausescu dictatorship was overthrown in 1989, emigration started again, from crisis-stricken postsocialist Romania. In the early twenty-first century, roughly 20,000 Saxons remain there, constituting less than 1 per cent of the Transylvanian population. In the Bistrița region, it is estimated that only about five hundred people self-identify as Saxons. The dramatic rupture into two fragmented groups on either side of the Iron Curtain between 1944 and the end of communism had a profound effect on the community and continues to inform dominant discourses, such as ideas of wartime victimhood, until today. The rupture has also been the key determinant in the subsequent construction of the community’s history and material culture.

Vestige Contemporary Bistrița carries many traces of its Saxon heritage. The architecture of the city and the dominance of the evangelical church spire over the central square is a material sign of its past as one of the Transylvanian Saxon Seven Cities.

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Currently, the Saxon presence is overtly indicated on tourist information notices and two buildings – the Evangelical Parish and the German Democratic Forum situated on the main boulevard at the edge of the old town. During the Covid-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020, the Forum seemed sleepy with its closed heavy metal gate and a noticeboard with just one poster, advertising the previous year’s Saxon Meeting (Figure 4.4). Inside, in the corridors on the way to the Forum’s office, there were photographs of various community events, dance group performances, brass band concerts, community feasts and religious celebrations. The Forum offers a range of cultural and community activities as well as social support. Membership is not restricted to Saxons but includes local residents of Saxon, Romanian and Hungarian origins with a connection to Saxon culture. Given that many of the Saxon families in the area are now mixed, the event programme has, as the Forum staff member put it, an ‘inter-ethnic’ character. This way, he remarked, the organization still keeps the flag flying for an increasingly diverse community.

Figure 4.4  Entrance hall to the German Democratic Forum in Bistrița. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.

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This dynamic was exemplified on a February evening when the Forum supporters gathered in a hotel to celebrate Fasching, a Saxon carnival party. Over two hundred participants with Saxon and Romanian heritage were distributed around a large hall, and sat at tables around a dance floor dotted with dark gold columns. At one end was a stage with a live band, the Trio Saxones, made up of three Lutheran priests, a keyboard player, a guitarist and a singer. Their vibrant repertoire ranged from traditional Saxon folk music to pop and party covers. Although nobody wore traditional Saxon dress, the adult guests dressed for the occasion, wearing elegant gowns, suits and even occasional carnival outfits such as kimonos. All the children were in colourful fancy dress and they were running and playing between the tables and the dancing couples. There were group dances, singing of Saxon songs as well as an award ceremony for the best children’s costume. This multigenerational event was a sign of the community’s vibrancy. Discussing the vitality of Saxon life in the area, I learnt that the children were part of the local school with a German programme. The Forum member explained that only a small number of the pupils are from Saxon families, and many local non-Saxon parents decided to educate their children in the bilingual school. The school has an excellent reputation and language skills are highly valued by employers in the area. Mihaela too had placed her children in the bilingual school. The school, she remembered, taught both language and customs of the Saxon community such as traditional music and dance. This generous and extrovert Romanian public administrator felt that this had proved an excellent choice as her son is now working as a graphic designer in Austria. She was one of many supporters of the Bistrița Saxon community, collecting Saxon material culture and attending events. She saw herself as a ‘friend’ of the Saxon community in appreciation of its legacy within the region. As one of the city’s Saxon association members reflected, many Romanians currently take up and continue the Saxon traditions in the area. From my observations in Bistrița, neither Sunday church visits nor carnival celebrations were seen as opportunities to wear an outfit like the MEK’s waistcoat. The Saxon costume, collected extensively as a symbol of Transylvanian Saxons, is rarely used in present-day Romania. The brass band and dance group performances are perhaps the only spaces where traditional dress is worn. Among the carnival-party goers, I noticed Maria, one of my respondents wearing a suit jacket for the occasion. I spoke with her in the German centre. She herself,

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now in her seventies, came to Bistrița from southern Transylvania, where she had grown up in a Saxon family. She spent her working life as a German teacher but spoke Romanian at home to communicate with her Hungarian husband. All their children knew three languages and some now live and work in Austria. Similarly, one of the key organizers of the Forum was married to a Romanian woman and spoke both German and Romanian. In many ways, these linguistic, familial and communal entanglements evoked the song’s image of Transylvania as a ‘cradle of a colourful flock of people’. These interconnections can also have their disadvantages, as one respondent reflected: ‘I’m here and there, and they [Saxons abroad] stay in their line and continue, they are within their boundary.’ Her friend also reflected that mixed households were often pushed/pulled in different directions politically by divergent, sometimes highly charged, messages from the German or Hungarian media, for example. This complexity characterized Saxon kinship, everyday language, school attendance and participation in Saxon cultural activities. The local brass band that played an exclusively Saxon repertoire, for example, had no Saxon members at all as none happened to be good musicians. In these circumstances, it is amateur Hungarian, Romanian and Roma trumpet, clarinet and saxophone players who continue to play and disseminate Saxon songs. The older Romanian respondents remembered how important traditional dress was. Every village had a slightly different style and the outfits were symbols of status and social standing. These disparities played a significant role and could be read from the costume’s design, artistry, and ornamental details. Sunday church services in the village, as Mrs Agne remembered, were a performance of difference within the small community between the well-off and the plebeians, in the ways they dressed and which seats they took during the service. This performance of visible markers of community and status was no longer possible in socialist Romania and the depleted Saxon community gave up its symbolic dress and left the visible markers of Saxonness behind. I discussed the relatively low level of importance attributed to traditional textiles with members of the Saxon handicraft circle that meets regularly in Bistrița Lutheran church. On a crisp February afternoon, we were drinking coffee in the church offices. The centre is located in the historical heart of the town in the backyard of a sixteenth-century building entered from the portico surrounding the church and the market square. Upstairs, there are three

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rooms used as meeting spaces. Walking up the austere white-painted, arched stairway to the meeting room, I noticed a glass case with headless dummies wearing Saxon outfits. The male mannequin wears a leather coat with a floral decoration similar to the waistcoat in the museum. The piece is quite old – the embroidery dates to 1924 – but well preserved. The thick, old walls seem to provide a stable, cool environment for the fragile material. I walked into the meeting room, and one of the elderly women immediately closed the door to prevent cold air from entering the room. I had arranged to meet the members of the Saxon craft group to discuss photographs of the MEK’s objects. The group brings together women from the Saxon community to meet regularly for conversation and textile craft. Most work involves personal projects, such as table cloths for home or family. The group occasionally makes small objects that can be sold during Christmas or summer fairs, sometimes undertaking commissions for community members in Romania and abroad. The women use heritage pattern books such as Charted Peasant Designs from Saxon Transylvania, a catalogue of cross-stitch designs collected by a nineteenth-century local amateur folklorist, Emil Sigerus. Like many collectors of that time, Sigerus divided the patterns into distinct ethnographic zones with particular geographical boundaries connoting distinct entities of people and material cultures. Every zone had a set of specific dress conventions, categories of objects, materials, tools and ways of making. In the absence of people who might be able to transmit textile knowledge directly, or provide direct accounts of past ways of making, the women of the craft group resort to the authority of Sigerus for their own projects. Mrs Schmidt, a slender woman in her 70s, brought two family photographs representing traditional attire, similar to that of the MEK collection. One blackand-white photograph, carefully posed in a studio, was of her grandmother’s cousin and her spouse, both wearing elaborate Saxon leather coats. The couple stand next to each other, holding hands yet keeping some distance – perhaps due to the thickness of their coats that might feel as stiff as corsets or to look more formal and appropriate. The coats’ designs vary in the level of detail and the wife’s coat is more intricately decorated, with elaborate floral ornaments. The wife is also wearing the traditional headgear (Borten) received by girls at confirmation. It is a solid cardboard tube covered with black velvet with long, hand-embroidered silk ribbons that fall down the wearer’s back.

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In contrast to the serious pose of her relatives, Mrs Schmidt shows a photograph of herself in traditional Saxon dress (Figure 4.5). She sits on a wooden chair in the middle of a blooming garden, looking directly into the camera and smiling shyly. She is almost drowning in the slightly oversized garments, the skirt coming down to the lawn and the long sleeves of her blouse gathering much fabric at her wrists. Her skirt is partly covered by a white embroidered apron and she wears a waistcoat on top of the blouse. Too young to wear a headdress, her dark hair is covered with a white headband, embellished with beads, similar to those around her neck. On the side, one can spot some floral detail of decorated ribbons falling down her back. Her position looks uncomfortable, as if she was instructed to present the wide sleeve of her blouse or highlight the filigree embroidery work for the photographer. To help her balance, she grips the back of the chair with both hands. Rather than a regular Sunday outfit, Mrs Schmidt told me, this attire was linked to a particular moment in her life. She wore this traditional outfit only once. Her oversized floral outfit, so perfectly fitting the verdant abundance

Figure 4.5 Discussion about traditional Saxon attire in Bistrița. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.

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of the summer garden, was destined for another girl, her cousin living in West Germany. The clothes were made at her grandmother’s behest and had a bittersweet connotation: following Mrs Schmidt’s father’s death, her grandmother was moving abroad to join another branch of the family in the West. Mrs Schmidt was to stay in Romania with her mother and the outfit went to the new homeland as a present for another granddaughter. The image of her brief appearance in traditional Saxon dress encapsulates key aspects of her life history – its ruptures and dislocations as well as the rigidity of Cold War boundaries between members of the family going West and those staying ‘behind’ in Transylvania. Tarlo’s (2007a) research on dress argues for navigating away from potentially stereotypical concepts of typical attire and instead, paying attention to sartorial biographies. A biographical perspective can provide insight into personal experiences of clothes and the complex relationships between people and their outfits (Tarlo 2007a: 145). The post-war photograph of the Saxon girl from North Transylvania has to be understood within Mrs Schmidt’s sartorial biography and her lack of engagement with traditional Saxon clothes. Rather than representing the sartorial culture of Saxon communities in Romania, the photograph tells the story of a one-off event and a fragmented Cold War community. As the example of Mrs Schmidt shows, community members had different experiences of and attitudes to traditional textiles and their Saxon identity. In Romania, the impoverished post-war generation of Saxons was leaving their traditional outfits behind, but they were still in demand among the diaspora. The craft group in Bistrița community centre thus found themselves embroidering aprons to be worn at community events or by traditional performance groups in Austria or Germany. As the Saxon identity in Transylvania itself became less associated with rich textiles and the lavish material culture sought by museum collectors, it was the German and Austrian migrant communities that became the key audiences for the production and export of new outfits. So these textiles made their way to expellees and Saxon migrants but could also be picked up by diaspora collectors. The Transylvanian waistcoat pictured at the beginning of this chapter, although collected and recorded as a traditional outfit, opens up questions about trespass and crossing boundaries. One set of boundary problems is linked to the post–Second World War formations of Saxonness, the

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community dispersal, migration, and translocal histories and livelihoods. For example, today’s Germany- and Austria-based Saxons appear to be willing to engage with the traditional sartorial culture in a more committed manner than their Romanian counterparts. For Romanian Saxons, their migrant peers might sometimes resemble mannequins in glass cases, a very static idea of Saxon identity. Migrant Saxonness appears as more contained than the dynamism, colour and complexity of identity in Transylvania. In Bistrița, the visible signs of everyday Saxonness are long gone, except outfits for the traditional dance groups. Meanwhile, the numerous diaspora organizations, such as the Windau Hometown Association (Windau Heimatortsgemeinschaft) or the Association of Transylvanian Saxons in Germany (Verband der Siebenbürger Sachsen), continue to create opportunities for celebrating identity and making and wearing traditional attire. Through a programme of community events, archiving preservation practices and cultural activities, all enabled by the legacy of §96 of the Federal Act on Expellees, they continue to create stages for performing Saxonness. At the same time, just as in Romania, migrant Saxons can have a troubled relationship with their traditional sartorial past. Wild’s research among the Saxon diaspora in Germany demonstrated that ceremonial clothes, such as sheepskin leather garments, have lost their social roles. For example, a Sunday church coat is now worn almost exclusively in costume processions or Munich Oktoberfest parades. Beate Wild’s conversations with Saxon diaspora showed that those who moved to Germany often tried to give up signs of their Transylvanian identity: [M]any people gave up everything almost without thinking. Some then said, okay, we’ll leave everything now. That is to say, as if they had been waiting for this moment for 40 or 50 years, they at least gave their traditional costumes to the local parish

The MEK curator was recalling her dilemmas expressed during her interviews with the Saxon communities at the point of radical change: Especially those who resettled a little later than those who resettled immediately in 1989/90 and said, ‘I think it’s exactly these signs of identity that we can no longer use in Germany, because first of all, we don’t fit in there anymore. These are the traditional sheepskin leather garments of our forebears, when can we wear them? And, in the worst case, the moths will eat the garment and then

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it’s over. Besides, what happens to us when we leave the region in which our culture has developed over almost 900 years, does it all dissolve now that we are leaving? Will it continue to exist? What will remain there, materially and immaterially?’ … Many people were simply not sure how they should behave. The fact that you were given German citizenship right away made many people think that they had to adapt. Many of them took language lessons, and because of their rolling Rs, they had to train themselves to get rid of that. They would want to become 150 per cent German.

Wild suggested that shedding the Saxon material culture, traditions or even identifiable sounds were key to these dilemmas and attempts to fit in. As the curator learnt in her interviews and later explored in the MEK Discover Europe! exhibition in 2008, many Saxons decided to leave their coats behind as they were heading West: They would instead inter [abandon] them in their native country: in a grave, a river, or a fire. This unusual method of destruction or burial may appear disconcerting to outsiders. But for the Saxons about to emigrate it was a symbolic act of bidding the traditional forms of their specific local identities farewell. (Wild 2008: 34)

Before moving to their new homeland, the migrants opted to destroy prescribed sartorial tradition. Through drowning, digging and immolation, they liberated themselves from the burden and the stiffness of the objects. This complex story of identity, migration and social change in the Romanian Saxon community as well as the diaspora poses questions about the underlying reasons for the leather waistcoat’s presence in the museum. Käthe Kaspar-Herberth never appended personal histories to her sales. Despite my numerous attempts to contact the Saxon community in Kaspar-Herberth’s diaspora hometown, nobody was able to provide any information about the collector. In the waistcoat documentation, we do not find any indication of its past use or communal value at the time of acquisition. It could have been an object that lost value in the new homeland and was no longer seen as a meaningful part of family possessions. In this context, the items within the museum’s collections could perhaps also be understood within the rituals and practices of riddance. If the members

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of the Saxon community moving West during and after the Cold War were cutting ties by burying, drowning or simply abandoning their material culture, the museum holdings emerge as a further disposal technique. The anthropologist Susanne Küchler, analysing the practices of sacrificial exchange in New Ireland, wrote about the ceremonial uses and ritual destruction of malanggan sculptures. Over time, selling the objects to foreigners became an alternative to actual destruction (Küchler 2002). The act of exchange as a means of rendering objects absent could also apply to the Saxon collections at the MEK. The museum could be seen as a mausoleum or a pyre of Saxon things. Rather than simply representing Saxon material culture, it also enables the negotiation and shedding of identities through riddance and exchange.

Conclusion Joanne Entwistle reminds us that dress is an expression of boundaries, not only as an envelope of the self, marking the boundary with society, but also articulating the concerns of particular groups (Entwistle 2000: 328). Clothing is not only a bodily surface but a boundary zone between the individual and society (Roach-Higgins and Eicher 1992, Turner 2012, Wilson 1987). The collection and exhibition practices of museums often overemphasize the boundedness of dress – what gets to become part of museum holdings is seen as representative of practices and spaces in which traditions are followed and boundaries are uncontested. Imagining the countryside as harmonious and unchanging was central to presenting the West Berlin textile collections in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in contrast to curatorial ideas of bucolic Transylvania and its dress (Pretzell 1967), the post-war rural landscape and communities were ripped apart by the legacies of the Cold War. In examining the West Berlin acquisition practice, I have shown how the museum tried to mend broken collection threads and patch holes that resulted from the war losses. The Cold War order has in significant ways affected the work of the museum, dividing its collections and restricting access to new acquisitions. What initially drew me to the waistcoat were the olfactory overload and an affective reaction to the object, pointing to a space of ambiguity. The exploration of this object emerged from the sensory reaction. It pointed me to a

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textural approach to the object within and beyond the museum. Such a textural perspective, attuned to the ambiguity, might offer an alternative apprehension, beyond that of the museum, to classify the piece as a rescued remnant of a fading German language island. The case of the waistcoat tells a complex story of a fractured Europe and Iron Curtain–era limitations that radically changed the lives of communities. It points to the unsettling intersections of politics and affect, safekeeping and destruction, and remembering and forgetting. The object bears silent witness to the difficult history that led to the relational history and the dispersal of the Transylvanian Saxon population. Rather than patrolling the boundaries of Saxonness, it becomes an embodiment of mobility and changing values. The story of this object also reveals a more complex image of Transylvania itself, one that might not be a green pasture, a bucolic cradle of nations or a dazzling spectacle of local colour. The waistcoat’s bright, unapologetically intense tone and vibrant contrast point to Transylvania as a place of cross-fertilization, blurred boundaries and communities animated by the complexities of coexistence over time, through painful histories of unequal encounters. The region’s multi-ethnic, multiconfessional and multilingual nature is underpinned by a complex history of shifting dynamics of interimperiality, coloniality and Cold War geopolitics (Parvulescu and Boatcă 2022). All these intertwined histories came to shape Transylvania and Saxon relations with families, neighbours and communities within and outside of the region (Boatcă and Parvulescu 2020, Koranyi and Wittlinger 2011). These relations, their sociomaterial dimensions and their transformation are inscribed in Saxon material culture in today’s museums. Colours might not just symbolize a picturesque rural idyll, but tell much more nuanced narratives, including those of coexistence and difference, devaluation and destruction as well as mobility and change.

5

Cook’s uniform: Refashioning the social fabric

Figure 5.1  Staff member in a cook’s outfit during the Metropolitan Proletariat exhibition (1985) in Museum of Folklore, East Berlin. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Wolfgang Schmelzer.

This photograph of two museum staff members wearing cook’s outfits was taken in the space of an exhibition entitled Metropolitan Proletariat: On the way of life of a class (Großstadtproletariat: Zur Lebensweise einer Klasse). The exhibition was on display between 1980 and 1987 and presented the collection of the East Berlin’s Folklore Museum (Museum für Volkskunde), located on the ground floor of the renowned Pergamon Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island. The two women are standing in front of a display presenting a turnof-the-twentieth-century working-class apartment. The shorter woman on the right of the picture, smiling for the camera, is a museum intern wearing a cook’s uniform, a piece from the collection, acquired in the 1980s. The

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Figure 5.2  Cook’s outfit from Plauen (before 1900). Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Christian Krug.

uniform is made of beige cotton, decorated with brown stripes and buttons on the front. The object file states that the cook’s dress (Köchinnenkleid) was part of a bequest made by the Hammer family and that the dress was used before 1900 in the town of Plauen. The museum intern wears the outfit with much ease, looking very relaxed as she rests her hand on the rolling pin. For a curator today, the sight of a staff member wearing a museum artefact in excess of eighty years old might come as a surprise. Contemporary conservation practice rarely allows for an embodied use of collections unless they are specifically marked as objects for handling. Museum objects should be preserved as pristine – disembodied, devoid of bodily smells and carefully pressed to be presentable on display. Museums detach material culture from the realm of use and produce ‘ethnographic objects’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) that are then used to represent social worlds.

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This chapter shows how objects such as the cook’s uniform enacted social worlds in the East and West Berlin museums of the 1980s. In what follows, I trace how the collections were reshaped in East Berlin’s Museum of Folklore during the Cold War division of the institutions which succeeded the pre–Second World War Museum of German Folklore (Staatliches Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde). In the previous chapter, I demonstrated that the West Berlin museum aimed to rebuild the collections lost in the war, highlighting how the ideas of German language islands and the migration of post-war repatriates affected the museum’s acquisition policy. Here, I mostly follow its counterpart in the German Democratic Republic (hereafter, the GDR) to examine how its acquisitions and exhibition policy and practice came to reflect the new state’s project of social transformation. Under socialism, the collection was integral to reimagining the social fabric in the museum by focusing on working-class heritage. At the same time, this story reveals that the ways of collecting and displaying objects like the cook’s uniform on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain can be seen both as entirely distinct and also as convergent, mirror images of each other. These differences and similarities between the East and the West can be traced in material culture, the folds and creases of the fabric, and how the objects were inhabited or disembodied in the museum.

Renewal After the Second World War, the eastern districts of Berlin became part of the Soviet Occupation Zone and then in 1949 these Soviet-controlled territories were incorporated into the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The historical centre of Berlin became the capital of the new state. During the first post-war years, the re-establishment of the folklore museum was not a priority for a city devastated by war. The buildings of the former Museum of German Folklore could no longer be used for museum purposes and, as in the West German case, its collections were scattered in hiding places across the country, with many objects taken by the Red Army on its return to the Soviet Union. Initially, the museum’s remaining holdings were still kept in the wartime buildings and then moved to the Berlin Palace on Museum Island.

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When the Palace was demolished in 1950, the collections were relocated again, further endangering their survival. The first signs of a potential vision for museum renewal in East Berlin appeared in the early 1950s, in particular during the German Festival of Folk Art (Deutsche Festspiele der Volkskunst), which was first held in 1952. The festival aimed to represent the achievements of the new state. For Kühn (2015), the festival was embedded in the 1950s GDR programme of cultural renewal through folk art (Volkskunst) and folklore (Volkskunde). The programme envisioned East Germany as a cultural nation (Kulturnation), an authentic guardian of German traditions against the perceived threat of Western cosmopolitanism. The festival was designed against a background of the ‘mouldering planks of American cultural barbarism’ widely discussed at that time in the GDR media (Palmowski 2004: 382). The newly established state was haunted by the spectre of American imperialism and the cultural decay seen as emanating from neighbouring West Berlin. The problem of American-induced corruption of German values had become a focus of high-priority policy debates as early as 1950 and during the Third Party Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in July of that year, the party membership proposed a policy framework to tackle it. It was decided that an antidote to encroaching Western ‘nonculture’ (2004: 383) should be the cultivation of Heimat (homeland). This new socialist Heimat was no longer owned by the capitalist bourgeoisie, but by the workers and peasants, who had the full power to transform it according to their wishes and needs. As a result, Heimat was more emotionally charged in the GDR, where the love for it could be expressed in its active transformation. (Palmowski 2004: 375)

The care for the Heimat was not just a matter of preservation but also renewal. Socialism could bring to fruition a new idea of Heimat based on the principle of class equality rather than capitalist exploitation. This transformed collective homeland was envisioned in direct contrast to the past. It was no longer the individualistic, ‘bourgeois’ sentiment of Jahn and Virchow’s nineteenthcentury Romanticism. Nor was it the ethno-nationalist, exclusive notion of Heimat as developed during the Nazi era. However, like its predecessors, this new Heimat required folklore to sustain it  – this time, against US-driven cultural decay. For this mobilization of socialist folklore, the new state deployed

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many institutions and resources to support and establish groups involved in folk art (Volkskunstgruppen) and traditional skills from folk dance to artisanal crafts. In this way, folkloric production and reimagined tradition became a top state priority and a focal point of cultural Cold War. The 1952 Festival of Folk Art was a display of the new homeland and GDR values  – democracy, peace and progress. These principles were showcased through diverse folkloric performances and displays of working-class talent. The workers and peasants of the GDR became actors, poets, singers, conductors and choreographers (Kühn 2015: 7). In this way, the festival reimagined the cultural sector and aimed to showcase the socialist-era social fabric. Its accompanying exhibition was a key part of this sociopolitical vision. German Folk Art (Deutsche Volkskunst) was held on Museum Island in the heart of East Berlin, in the former Kaiser Friedrich Museum (Emperor Frederick Museum), renamed as the Kupfergraben Museum (Museum am Kupfergraben; today, Bode-Museum). This renaming aimed to shed the institution’s imperial past and include new objects into the canon. Previously, the museum presented its collections of European art from the classical, Renaissance and Baroque periods. The introduction of folk art as the art of the people, the workers and non-professional cultural producers, marked a new direction. Hosting the exhibition in the Kupfergraben Museum – thereby including folk art in the art historical pantheon  – was a symbolic gesture. As Erika Karasek – who started to work in the East Berlin’s Folklore Museum (Museum für Volkskunde) in 1962 and retired as director of the reunited museum in 1999  – has observed, it was ironic that folk art objects managed to sneak into the space formerly conceptualized and curated by Wilhelm von Bode,1 the same person who at the turn of the century opposed the entry of folklore collections and the Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products into the State Museums (Karasek 2001: 36). In contrast, in the 1950s, folk art was given a prominent space in the heart of Berlin. The large-scale 1952 exhibition was divided into twenty thematic sections. The rooms explored the relationship between folk art and nation, connections between folklore and architecture, folklore and literature, as well as shedding light on techniques used in folklore production. The section on contemporary folk art included displays about the post-war folk renewal in festivals, markets, music groups and the work of the students in the Central House of Folk Art in Leipzig. One room was dedicated to the rebuilding of Berlin, with a large

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model of the planned city. Just as across the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s, folk art was mobilized in the GDR’s Berlin to display tradition and modernity, and to represent the ever-changing socialist state (Buchczyk 2018). Although the 1952 exhibition was very well attended, it also attracted criticism. For example, Paul Nedo from Leipzig’s Central House for Lay Art felt that the festival exhibition could have done more to present the new conceptual framework of GDR folklore studies (Volkskunde): the exhibition obviously lacked a clear ideological concept, which should have found its expression in the selection of the material and a critical evaluation of the exhibits, which the theorists were obviously not able to do, because they had not sufficiently dealt with the theoretical foundations. On the other hand, it is precisely the example of this exhibition that makes it clear how important it is for the strengthening of national consciousness and the development of militant patriotism, given the popularity of the topic and the high number of visitors. (Cited in Karasek 1989: 15)

For Erika Karasek, it was Paul Nedo and Wolfgang Steinitz, the director of the Folklore Institute at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, who became the driving forces behind the post-war re-establishment of the pre-war Museum for German Folklore in East Berlin. Both Nedo and Steinitz were dedicated to creating a new discipline of folklore (Volkskunde) that would be part of a socialist renewal. They aimed to overcome the legacy of bourgeois folklore that was seen as linked to nationalist psychologism, based as it was on the premise of the German ‘people’ (Volk) as a spiritual community regardless of their class or status. Nedo and Steinitz saw such folklore as linked to nationalism and obscuring social differences (Jacobeit 1980b: 602). Steinitz’s background was in musical folklore and, in order to re-evaluate these social differences, studied folk songs as expressions of Germany’s working-class history. Nedo investigated working-class ways of life as well as the oral history of the Sorbian ethnic minority of East Germany. Aware of the dangerous legacy of Nazi instrumentalization of folklore, Nedo and Steinitz sought to rethink the discipline around a more differentiated notion of society. Rather than a nation-oriented idea, they opted for a Marxist reimagining: ‘Folk’ is thus made up of the peasant strata, artisans, land-poor or landless plebeian groupings, proletarian strata, workers, and petit bourgeois, among others. By ‘complementary relationship’ is understood a processually

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determined, many-sided network of connections between those in power and specific lower strata, but also among the latter. That network of connections is very much like a net that not only proves effectual as a common field for carrying out class struggles, but is also characterized by all kinds of innovations and their acceptance, implementation, or rejection. Their resiliency, i.e., ability to continue, to function or to adapt intellectually to changes in traditions, in the areas of material, spiritual, and social culture, etc., helps constitute an everyday life that is ever changing. (Jacobeit 1991: 68)

Thus conceptualized, the study of folklore would include research on these connections, differentiations and conflicts. In contrast to the mythology of a national body of people, research was to reveal social stratification. The aim was to highlight diverse aspects of everyday life, as well as historical and class-specific transformations. Rather than describing cultural landscapes or unchanging people, students of folklore would examine the manifold relations of proletarian culture with dynamic cultural and social processes (Kramer 1977: 101). By capturing such social dynamism, Steinitz and Nedo argued, the discipline and its objects could play a central role in the fundamental task of building socialism, and developing a new culture (Brinkel and Bendix 2009: 104). Folklore could gain a role in society, integrating research and teaching in museums, universities, worker cooperatives and factories. This new appreciation of folklore within GDR cultural policy reignited the need for a museum, an institution to carry on the festival’s legacy. This sparked the idea of re-establishing the pre-war Museum for German Folklore. Soon, a debate ensued over whether such a museum should become part of the German Historical Museum, the Academy of Sciences or the Leipzig-based Central House of Lay Art (Karasek 2010: 40). On the one side, the Academy of Sciences with Steinitz held debates and conferences about the future of the museum and argued that the museum needed to be embedded in the developments of folklore. An academy-drafted statute for the new institution proposed that its focus should be folklore rather than folk art alone, encompassing all working-class ways of life (Lebensformen) (Karasek 1989: 16). On the other side, the National Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) acted as one organization bringing together all artrelated heritage institutions. There was a danger that the future everyday life or non-art museum would be separated from the space and funding opportunities afforded by membership of the National Museums’ network.

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After much discussion, the folklore museum was formally re-established in 1953 as the Museum of German Folk Art (Museum für Deutsche Volkskunst) within the structures of the National Museums (Karasek 1989: 27). The opportunity to secure a space for the new institution came with the return of the objects taken during the war to the Soviet Union and the completion of building restoration works within the Pergamon Museum on Museum Island. In 1957, the museum dropped both ‘Art’ and ‘German’ from its name, presenting its first post-war public exhibition as the Folklore Museum (Museum für Volkskunde). The question of the ‘Germanness’ of the collection had been a bone of contention from its first re-opening; the collections since Virchow’s era had been wider in scope and the East German museum had a number of objects from Norway, Switzerland and Greece. The first permanent gallery of the renamed museum opened a year later and was entitled Textile Art in Traditional Culture (Textilkunst in der überlieferten Volkskultur). Given the acquisition history of the museum, the focus on textiles is perhaps not surprising. The exhibition’s broad remit allowed for the presentation of different types of textile handed over from the Soviet Union. The show was designed as a homage to Adolf Reichwein as in 1958 he would have celebrated his sixtieth birthday. The exhibition took its inspiration from Reichwein’s Weaving and Acting (Weben und Wirken) exhibition of 1941 which explored the materials, practices, tools and outputs of textile craft (Karasek 1989: 19). The 1958 show, embedded in Reichwein’s principles of museum pedagogy, also focused predominantly on techniques. This allowed the newly (re)established institution to avoid ideological pressures and navigate the state politics of folklore at the time (Karasek 2010: 42). Like its West Berlin-based counterpart, the museum also engaged in acquisition activity to replace its war losses. In the 1960s, collecting priorities were linked to the research conducted in the Academy of Sciences and focused on material culture related to rural work, ranging from objects representing agrarian livelihoods to fisheries and crafts. This acquisition campaign took place in the context of a state policy of rural modernization. Collective land ownership and mechanized agriculture were vital in creating a new socialist society (Bauerkämper 2002, Last 2009). As the state was

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radically reconfiguring rural livelihoods, the museum acquired artefacts from among what were seen as the redundant tools of a fading agrarian society (Karasek 1989: 19). In this way, the early 1960s acquisition strategy needs to be understood – as in other socialist contexts at that time – within the dynamics of the transformation of the countryside (Buchczyk 2018). This radical change was documented in a public exhibition in 1964 on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of Virchow’s Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products and the 150th anniversary of the National Museums. Three years after the building of the Berlin Wall, the museums in East and West Berlin organized separate anniversary displays. While the West Berlin museum focused on folk art and handicraft highlighting continuity, the East Berlin institution emphasized change. The latter’s exhibition, entitled Agriculture Yesterday and Today (Landwirtschaft gestern und heute), opened on 6 October 1964 in the large exhibition hall of the East Asian collection in the Pergamon Museum’s North Wing. The exhibition displayed traditional agricultural production tools, showcased the rural economy’s mechanization, and presented the development of a new, socialist type of village (Steinmann 1967a: 153). As in other exhibition contexts across the Eastern Bloc, traditional objects were placed at the centre of socialist society and displays presented folklore and everyday material culture within historical materialist narratives of progress (Nicolescu 2014). Things from the past were juxtaposed with the progressive present, part of reimagining the social fabric and building a socialist future in the countryside.

Reorientation The GDR Museum of Folklore worked extensively with the Academy of Sciences and the scholarly community in Berlin. In the 1960s, the museum developed a particularly strong cooperation with the Humboldt University of Berlin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). This included collaborative internship opportunities for students, staff sharing, and exchanges between academic debates and curatorial practice (Karasek 2010: 43). In an interview

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on 16 December 2019, Karasek reminisces about her time working in the museum as curator and director: We had a very good relationship with the academy and have often worked together. All these collection tours that we did were often done by the academy’s academic staff … they really did more field research, we still had the current museum operation. They gave us the relevant information when we could acquire this and that for the museum.

In the same conversation, Karasek explained that the continued collaboration could at times lead to pressure on the museum team: There were also tendencies where people were shutting themselves off. Not completely incomprehensible were the words of Steinmann [the Museum of Folk Art and then Folklore Museum director between 1955 and 1971] who said – ‘The academy again – that always causes so much work’. Of course, he had seen his rooms and they were limited as the academy continuously came up with new ideas.

In 1972 a former member of the Academy of Sciences, Wolfgang Jacobeit, became the director of the museum, further developing a vision of the museum as providing interconnected academic capacity in cooperation with folklore institutes and academia. Jacobeit had worked as a scholar and was very active internationally. As one of the former GDR curators reminisced: Jacobeit always had ties with the international trends – he was with ICOM [International Council of Museums] and so on. He also brought a lot of stimulating things back to the GDR from the trips he made. And so he had access to literature because he was in touch with the academics.

The curator recognized Jacobeit’s profound contribution to the museum in the areas of theoretical museology and new directions in ethnography and folklore studies. Under Jacobeit’s leadership, the museum began to ask new questions. The wider scholarly shift in folklore towards Marxist museology and the study of everyday life aimed to include ‘all of the people’, particularly the working classes, as part of its investigations (Jacobeit 1991: 67). In particular, a working group on folkloric research and its resulting publication in 1967 on the Problems and methods of contemporary folkloric

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research (Probleme und Methoden volkskundlicher Gegenwartsforschung), co-written by Jacobeit and Nedo, highlighted the need to explore different social strata through ethnography and the museum’s acquisitions (Jacobeit 1991: 89). In the same year, the Museum of Folklore’s large-scale collections of farming equipment from Agriculture Yesterday and Today were relocated to a barn in suburban Wandlitz. This space became first a branch of the Museum of Folklore and later a separate local Homeland Museum (Heimatmuseum). Through this offloading, the Museum of Folklore gained space in its Berlin base for new acquisitions. There, the curators were able to put into practice their vision of folklore as documenting the everyday material culture of social strata and working-class populations with a greater emphasis on urban life. This move away from rural collections was much discussed in academic and museum circles. In 1976, during the annual conference of GDR museum directors, Hans-Joachim Hoffmann, the Minister of Culture argued that [e]thnographic museums are concentrating one-sidedly on rural cultural development in their collections and thus in their profile. The culture of the [urban] working class is currently being neglected. We must therefore strive to complement the picture. (cited in Jacobeit 1980b: 601)

In his speech, Hoffmann raised questions of museum value, the breadth of collection policy and the representation of the urban working class in museum displays. However, the minister wanted the cultural sector not only to keep abreast of scholarly developments but also to cut ties with museological traditions that emerged in the pre-war ‘bourgeois’ context. Instead, the new GDR-wide museum policy stipulated that the museums should above all represent the culture and way of life of the working classes and strata. A central task is the research and representation of the culture and way of life of the industrial proletariat in the past and the working class and the cooperative farmers in the present. (Hauptaufgaben 1978: 7)

The policy document prescribes the new task for the museums to collect working-class material culture in a targeted manner. To develop a new profile in line with the recommendation, the Folklore Museum engaged in extensive acquisition activity.

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Increasingly, collecting refocused on Berlin, both in its pre-GDR era (primarily between 1870 and 1945) and post-war period (Jacobeit 1980: 665; Karasek 1989: 21). The team started to collect as many as two hundred ‘proletarian’ and ‘petit bourgeois’ objects a year. Some objects came from elderly people’s homes or networks of private collectors.2 Others were acquired through collection campaigns with the help of university students. There were also collections created with the help of curatorial teams from the Berlin City Museum (Märkisches Museum) and the Academy of Sciences. These research projects included interviews with the residents of Berlin’s industrial districts built at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Siemensstadt. The studies aimed to document heavy industry as a city-making influence. They explored industrialization as a force that redrew the map of the city and transformed Berlin’s social fabric, at the same time documenting how individual biographies were affected by these developments. The focus on intersections between the individual story and industrial history led to the acquisition of personal objects, many of which were massproduced garments. As Jacobeit, the director of the time, reported about the 1970s collections, the key acquisitions were textiles of all kinds from the late 19th and 20th century; exhibits of the culture and way of life of the proletariat and other social classes. (Jacobeit 1979: 215)

Despite the entirely new collection paradigm and a shift in social and spatial focus, textiles continued to be a key acquisition domain. The museum started to develop new textile subsections, for example fabrics which had furnished urban flats or outfits made from recycled pieces of fabric in the era of postwar shortages. As Dagmar Neuland-Kitzerow, one of the East Berlin curators, reflected, The objects are an expression of industrial development in the production, acquisition and handling of textile products, redefining the relationship between producer and user and influencing the collection of such objects at museums. … These textiles represent industrial developments, which are just as evident in materials, sewing and processing techniques as in the uses of fabric and clothing. (Neuland-Kitzerow 2014: 12)

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Within the re-orientated museum, textiles told new stories of mass-produced everyday material culture. The biographies of objects and materials, the dynamic histories of their use, documented the changes in urban life. The domain of collections thus expanded to new objects such as work uniforms or household textiles with political or moral slogans. This also involved a new type of documentation that included not only information about provenance but also notes about the production, use and appreciation of such textiles. In this way, the curatorial record was able to capture the social, historical and psychological contexts in which they were located. Within the Marxist paradigm, this allowed an exploration of how clothing behaviour and use shape lifestyle and express conflicts, dynamic change and social differences within societies (Neuland-Kitzerow 2005: 163). The museum’s acquisition of textiles in the 1970s demonstrated continuity in its long-standing curatorial interest in textiles. At the same time, with the more detailed collection record and the new focus on urban, working-class clothing, the museum’s practice represented a shift in the GDR-era representation of the social fabric as stratified, class-based and embedded in multiple relations of conflict, social change and interaction (Mohrmann 1986).

Blue-collar museum The Metropolitan Proletariat exhibition, as shown in the images of the two staff members (Figure 5.1), was the culmination of the 1970s’ museological turn to presenting the everyday lives of urban populations. There were exhibitions tackling the topic of everyday working-class culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain.3 Within these broader trends, the exhibition in the GDR’s Museum of Folklore was the first attempt in a folklore museum to shed light on the essential cultural and livelihood aspects of early twentieth-century proletarian life: While in the past the folklore museums were limited exclusively to the presentation of rural, peasant and urban artisan ways of life and cultural expressions, with this exhibition project the Berlin Museum of Folklore followed the realization that folklore as a historical science deals with the culture and the way of life of all working classes and strata from feudalism to the present. (Karasek 1989: 2)

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In the words of the exhibition’s curator and then just-appointed museum director, taking working-class life as the sole subject matter of a folkloric exhibition and using Berlin as an example, the exhibition attempted to reflect on the living and working conditions of the urban working class from the turn of the century to 1914 (Karasek 1983: 172). The show aimed to highlight the interconnected spheres of proletarian production and social reproduction, work and family life. The exhibition and the museum’s overall shift of focus towards urban everyday life were enabled by the debates in the Academy of Science and the Marxist interest in workingclass culture in the GDR. Scholarship about everyday life in West Germany was made available to the East Berlin museum team through Jacobeit’s connections and also contributed to this focus shift. As Neuland-Kitzerow reflected in an interview with me, research from the West was opening a new perspective: There were multiple debates in the academic centres of West Germany … people who were interested in collecting and publishing workers’ biographies. This worker biography research opened the view into other social groups and this was a very important prerequisite for this [show].

The exhibition included such biographies and aspects of working life and the everyday city. It presented reconstructions of spaces of everyday life in displays of a living room and a bedroom as well as a worker’s kitchen, seen as the central living and economic domain of the working-class family. There was also a street section with shop fronts and workshop spaces, as well as a typical Berlin corner bar with its associated club room, all of which were intended to give the visitor an insight into the ways of life and spare-time activities of the proletarian classes. The curators aimed to avoid generalizations about typical ways of life, instead presenting multiple accounts to demonstrate that the working classes were not a uniform or undifferentiated mass (Karasek 1983: 172). Objects, photographs and autobiographical accounts were used to showcase the various hobbies and forms of organization, the internal hierarchies, changing consumer relations, fashions and buying habits that emerged in the industrial metropolis of the early twentieth century. The final display was dedicated to family and children as well as the triple burden on women as workers, housewives and mothers.

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This latter theme was seen as a sphere of social reproduction that was interconnected with production, especially for women who worked in domestic spaces as outworkers or domestic servants. As Karasek reflected in the exhibition catalogue: the young girls from the countryside did not come under parental care, but [lived] all alone in the unfamiliar surroundings of the big city. For various reasons, they preferred to be employed as servants, nannies or housemaids. First of all, unlike the factory workers, such an employment contract guaranteed them ‘board and lodging’. If the food was occasionally as limited as the sleeping accommodation, which was sometimes in unheated attics (in the kitchen or in the bathroom), they did not have to worry about it every day. Secondly, this occupation gave them the opportunity to practise all aspects of housework, which they could use for their later life. Finally, the young country girls in employment did not feel as exposed to the dangers of big city life as they were in the large factory halls. (Karasek 1983: 11)

For some women, employment in domestic service seemed to offer more benefits than factory work. The cook’s uniform worn by the intern (Figure 5.1) reflected the curatorial view of the capacity of textile objects to tell the story of these interconnected spheres. Another of the exhibition curators argued that through the cook’s dress, I can tell you something about the paradigm change in the discipline and about social structures. This includes questions of why one needs a special dress, who wore it, why was it worn, when did the wearer wear it, and what social position was involved. So, I look at a social structure, I also look at the object and ask who makes it and why it looks exactly the way it does, who came up with the idea that it looks like that. Through the dress, people knew about a person right away when she was seen shopping in a cook’s dress at the market. It becomes a symbol of what job I have but it also shows that I am taking up the position and if I have a different dress, I can take up another position. There are also stories about the dresses of the cooks, which were given to the staff by the employers as a Christmas present, according to the motto ‘a new dress for Christmas’. The present was not a nice garment but a new one for work. You can also tie social relationships to it … look at the textile industry and its development. You can notice that a dress is a certain size and the owner knows that the cook has a certain size and buys an outfit that fits.

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During museum events, the museum staff presented the uniform and performed one of the workers’ biographies. These performances were used, as the then museum staff later reflected, to enliven the gallery space and the empty rooms of the workers’ house on display. The use of a living interpreter in a period dress occupying the space of the gallery aimed to invigorate the gallery. The cook’s dress, already a museum object, played a further role in the display. It was used to enact the working-class experience at the turn of the twentieth century in front of a contemporary 1980s working-class audience. Through movement, performed activity and storytelling, the displayed Berlin street or the worker’s kitchens were to appear more lifelike. In this way, the display focused on the change in living conditions between contemporary workers of the 1980s and pre-war Berliners. The inhabited object was to shed light on everyday life in the dynamic turn-of-the-century city. The cook’s dress gave legitimacy to the worker’s story and highlighted the intimate relationship between representation and embodiment of worker identity in the GDR-era

Figure 5.3  The display of Servile Ghosts (1981) exhibition in West Berlin with a cook’s outfit, a reproduction of a historic outfit made by a Berlin art school (Hochschule der Künste, Berlin). Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Unknown photographer.

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Museum of Folklore. Through performance in the exhibition, the dress gathered traces of use, folds and creases. The object adapted to the staged worker’s biography and the performer’s body. As the socialist state reimagined ‘the people’ (Volk) as a dynamic, conflicted, class-differentiated social fabric, the museum textile object was used to not only show but also enact this new social representation. In the process, through repeated use, the object itself changed as well.

House ghosts A year after the opening of the Metropolitan Proletariat exhibition, the museum in Dahlem, West Berlin, presented its own display on the lives of the working classes in the city. Servile Ghosts: Life and Work of Urban Servants (Dienstbare Geister. Leben und Arbeitswelt städtischer Dienstboten), curated by Heidi Müller, was on show in West Berlin between 18 January and 18 July 1981, later moving to two open-air museums (Museumsdorf Cloppenburg and Rheinisches Freilichtmuseum Kommern). It was the first exhibition in West Berlin’s Museum of German Folklore which highlighted the lives of the urban working class, filling a perceived gap in institutional practice. Prior to the Servile Ghosts exhibition, although the museum claimed that it was concerned with the ‘life of the middle and lower social classes, the “ordinary” people [der kleinen Leute], the builders, craftsmen, workers, today and in the past 400 years’ (Lauterbach 1985: 264), this focus was not presented on display. Instead, as the ethnologist Burkhart Lauterbach observed, if you go through the permanent collection of exhibits, you will quickly notice that the peasants enjoy preferential treatment, the craftsmen are too few and the workers do not appear. (1985: 264)

Criticism came not only from Western academics as the comment above but also from East Germany. The focus on the aesthetics of folk art in the West German museum was criticized by the director of its East Berlin counterpart who saw the focus on the harmonious beauty of folk art as turning a blind eye to the manifold contradictory processes of social life in the countryside.

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Museum acquisitions, as Wolfgang Jacobeit argued, do not represent valuefree folk culture or exclusively positive witnesses of the past. For him, this Romantic perspective deliberately omitted the pressing questions of status and the analysis of the actual conditions of rural life (Jacobeit 1980b: 243). Folk art objects exhibited in isolation, he argued, were removed from their connections with religion, everyday practice, or their historical and social contexts (Jacobeit 1980b: 244). This notion of a more contextualized everyday life was not only being propagated in Marxist folklore studies in the GDR but also explored in 1970s’ West German cultural studies (Schöne 1996). In academic centres such as Tübingen, Marburg and Frankfurt, research had begun to explore questions of everyday life that encompassed working lives, the material conditions of everyday livelihoods and the cultural forms arising from these conditions (Dehne and Leben 1985). The exhibition Servile Ghosts in West Berlin was thus a response to developments in scholarship on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It drew on the work of Oscar Stillich, a social scientist and economist who in 1899 made a largescale study of Berlin domestic servants (Stillich 1902). His questionnaire, with responses from more than four hundred servants, explored the nature of their employment, their wages, working hours, and living conditions such as food, housing, personal relationships, free time and mobility (Wierling 1982: 55). The inquiry was widely debated in the national press at the time and was seen by many of the employers of these women as a breach of privacy, and a threat to the existing order (Kosta 1992: 47). The 1981 exhibition included not just sections on the local and social background of the servants, their qualifications, health and safety regulations, wages, employment, working hours and the scope of their jobs but also the servants’ clothing, spare-time activities, the organizations they belonged to, as well as individual biographies of women. In order to present this topic, the Museum of German Folklore reviewed its collections and found rich graphic material such as service books, photographs and certificates. However, as the curator Heidi Müller reflected, there was a lack of clothing, which had a decisive influence on the appearance of the city’s personnel in the past and to which chapters in the exhibition are dedicated. I was therefore very surprised when I read in the 1901 Notifications of the Museum of German National Costume and Domestic Products [Mittheilungen aus dem Museum für Deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse

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des Hausgewerbes] that the Berlin Folklore Museum owned the skirt and bonnet of a Lübeck maid … destroyed together with the largest part of the old costume collection during the war, so that they are no longer available for the exhibition. After the first inventory in the museum, I felt compelled to begin the preparations for the exhibition with a collection campaign. (Müller 1981: 9)

This acquisition campaign, widely promoted in local and national media, resulted in a large collection of photographs, letters and family testimonies. This was disappointing for the curator: Our hope to get mainly servants’ clothes for the exhibition through the surveys was unfortunately not fulfilled to the extent we had hoped. Except for a large number of aprons, which we have given away as gifts over the past few years, such items as everyday clothing, had been thrown away when they were no longer needed. (Müller 1981: 9)

As a result of this absence, the museum had to resort to loans from public and private collections. In the case of the maid figurine in the photograph (Figure 5.3) and on display in other reconstructed rooms, the museum decided to have the outfits made anew according to old photographs and patterns from the turn of the century. For the curator Heidi Müller, highlighting clothing in the context of an exhibition about domestic labour was of particular importance. Firstly, the outfits were important indicators of social difference. The objects’ materials – such as, in the case of the household owners, precious fabrics, furs and lace and, for the servants, mass-produced linen, wool and cotton fabrics – told the story of contrasting status. The employment documentation also indicated particular prohibitions of luxury for servants: fabrics containing silk, gold thread or appearing as fashionable were not allowed among the staff. In this way, clothing provided a clear sign of identification and evidence of the socially stratified material culture of the household (Müller 1981: 111). The West Berlin exhibition was visited by the East Berlin curator, Erika Karasek, who had been authorized to make an official ‘incognito’ visit to the show without getting in touch with any of the West Berlin staff. In what Karasek has subsequently called a ‘schizophrenic’ work culture of separated

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museums, she was never able to officially discuss the matters of parallel practices and divided collections with her Western counterparts although it was the East Berlin museum that held the full catalogue for the pre-war collections now held across both institutions. The ethnologist Burkhart Lauterbach, who saw the shows in both Berlins, felt that, in the West German context, the Servile Ghosts show definitely represented some progress. However, although the exhibition was varied and offered an extensive presentation of the situation of the metropolitan servants, it also contained that already familiar danger: in order to achieve a high degree of vividness, the museum displayed three period rooms with a cook in a kitchen, a parlour maid in a salon and a maid rolling the laundry in the back room of a soap shop. (Lauterbach 1985: 265)

The danger of period rooms, Lauterbach noted, lay their artificial cleanliness and immaculate presentation. Paradoxically, although the show aimed to highlight the squalor and difficult living conditions of the domestic workers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Berlin, the house it displayed was pristine, and spotless. The specially made servant outfits must have played a role in this sparkling presentation. These perfectly fitting, ultra-clean garments stood in stark contrast to the facts about low wages or unequal power relations within the household presented on the panels accompanying the display. The new outfits, made to replace the missing historical textiles, contradicted the aim of the exhibition. As they had never been worn, they were not able to embody the difficult conditions of the domestic servants they set out to represent. Like the museum’s earlier exhibition during the 1960s of folk art and highly decorated peasant outfits, the 1981 depiction of urban living conditions projected a sense of conflict-free comfort and stability. As the garments of former servants were considered valueless and had been thrown away by their owners, the museum had limited opportunity to represent the everyday lives of domestic servants to the extent they had hoped. In contrast, the curators of the Metropolitan Proletariat exhibition in East Berlin decided to embody the garment and enact the working-class livelihood in the exhibition space. Rather than opting for an impersonal display with spotless objects, the museum used the servant’s outfit as part of a performance. In this way, the outfit was inhabited, gaining new traces of use.

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Anthropologists have long explored cloth as a boundary between the self and the society enacted through everyday life. As Turner ([1980] 2012) has demonstrated, wearing things and adorning the body is a matter of relations and social identity: Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge. This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature  – that the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. (Turner [1980] 2012: 486)

The bodily surface is continuously modified and fashioned by putting together outfits and performing certain garments in specific social contexts, such as the workspace or a religious ceremony or building. Ethnographies of cloth and dress have explored these dimensions of performance, adaptation and wear to shed light on how people explore produce textile culture in social action. Different ways of displaying, wearing, assembling and destroying textiles in everyday life highlight complex relationships from self-fashioning status to kinship relations to social norms and expectations about appearance and bodily performance. As clothes are inhabited, wearing textiles is a matter of affective and sensory relations, such as the feel of the garment and the memories it may evoke. At the same time, clothing may become an extension of our body, reshaping and orienting it in different directions. Ways of wearing clothes and accessories can be seen as body techniques, conduits for creating and transforming a sense of self and relationships with others. Bide (2017) explored how garments worn over a more extended period indicate lingering experiences and the messy realities of austerity or histories of living through the war in a city. Items of clothing that were rubbed thin at the hips or were stretched under the armpit with visible loose stitching at seams might tell the social history of a place through the biography of the garment. The practice of wearing, as the ethnographic research of clothing has demonstrated, allows for the investigation of the ways of being in particular environments, such as living in a city (Tarlo 2007b). In

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this way, worn clothes are the end results of particular ways of being in the world and carry complex imprints of social skin and everyday life. As Ellen Sampson (2020) has suggested, signs of wear and tear are traces of our entanglement with the world. Sampson argued for the study of the textural quality of garments and the materiality of their wornness (2020: 1). This includes exploring the different ways in which bodies inhabit garments and the bodily traces on a piece of clothing. The marks left on items of clothing contain the records of the major events through which one might narrate a life (rites of passage, journeys or achievements), but also the habitual minutiae, the multiple repeated acts, of our everyday lives. A crease may start with a single gesture but is deepened by its repetition over time. Creases frequently relate our habitual gestures; at times one may even recognize a wearer through the creasing of their clothing … Just as tacit knowledge is inscribed on the body through repetition, deep creases are incised into material, learning and responding to the practices of the body. A crease is a material memory, an archive of an act repeated over time. (Sampson 2020: 153)

Exploring material memory includes focusing on the imprints of repeated use and the human body, its movements, gestures and performances. Overlapping marks and folds act as records of everyday experience through the traces of their use. As Sampson argues, this notion of inhabiting textiles is key to garments’ capacity to act as records of everyday life. The folds and creases constitute the textile archive. Although the archival qualities of wornness are often omitted from museum records, they can be made visible or obscured on display. The use of the cook’s dress in both East and West Berlin museums demonstrates how traces of use and wear and tear are used in exhibitions. The examples of the West and East Berlin exhibitions show how both museums set out to overcome long-standing ‘folk art’ orthodoxy, the predominantly rural narrative of Volkskunde and related disciplinary notions of everyday life. In different ways, the institutions utilized or overlooked the archival potential of materiality and the textural qualities of the collection. These contrasting ways of opening up to include urban working-class material culture have resulted in divergent exhibition practices with different effects.

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Costume/fashion In 1989, East Berlin’s Folklore Museum organized an exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Virchow’s original Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products. For this exhibition, entitled Dress between Costume and Fashion (Kleidung zwischen Tracht und Mode), the curatorial team chose clothes to represent the history of the museum. To tell the complex story of the institution, the curators, led by Dagmar Neuland-Kitzerow, decided to follow its garments. For the curator, the museum was established with clothing in mind. She identified textiles as central to the 100-year history. Textiles had appeared as a crucial aspect of museum activity throughout that time, connecting different generations of curators. Within a limited exhibition space, clothing could provide an opening into all the twists and turns the museum had taken, with its historical shifts and paradigm changes. The exhibition showcased the historically contingent ways in which the museum reimagined textile artefacts. There was a section on traditional costumes that included an outfit from Rügen. The costume was presented as revealing rural social structures as well as developments in fashion and taste. As Neuland-Kitzerow argues: Traditional costume was once idealized as a static object, an essence. But it wasn’t like that, it has always changed, was immensely influenced by fashion and was much more alive than we find in the early publications.

This critical view of the museum’s collections of the traditional dress was demonstrated through a number of the exhibition’s themes. A section focusing on production and labour traced ready-to-wear clothing to its military origins in tailoring standardized uniforms. It also presented stories of dressmaker family business and portraits of Berlin seamstresses. Another section on clothing and care presented context-specific ways of storing and caring for garments. A wardrobe was displayed to represent one family’s sartorial archive. The wardrobe embodied socially specific ideas of self-fashioning, appropriateness and the everyday order of things. The display presented how the notion of clean, carefully looked-after clothes was pivotal to ideas of propriety and standards of a good family. The exhibition showed how

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the ‘poor but clean’ (arm aber sauber) principle, embedded in rural life, was negotiated in the squalor of overpopulated flats and the cluttered communal washrooms of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Berlin. A further section focused on the lives of clothes – their status as Sunday or workday clothing and their movement across categories and people in families as they became worn out or too small. Other display cases focused on clothes and identity by looking at uniforms, through which different forms of identity are made visible  – for example, the cook’s dress (Figure 5.2) has also been placed on display as an example of everyday, workplace clothing. The exhibition explored how different identities are forged through dress with examples such as alternative and subculture lifestyles as well as GDR DIY clothing culture. The museum wanted to show that, next to official identities, clothes were a form of expression and rebellion. In this room, the exhibition presented a Westpaket, a care package sent from West Germany with food and fashion items. Due to the political sensitivity of this object, one curator reminisces, it was displayed with a very small label and was not included in the catalogue. There was also a section on clothes and children as well as a display about National Socialism with its rejection of foreign fashion, its return to traditional, rural outfits, and its use of textiles to mark out and exclude those it wished to marginalize and persecute, such as the Jewish population. The exhibition opened on 27 October 1989 with a symposium on the question of everyday culture in ethnographic museums planned for 13 November 1989. But on Thursday 9 November 1989, Cold War Berlin was transformed in a watershed moment when, following a series of protests and political negotiations, the Berlin Wall guards were instructed to open the checkpoints between East and West. The evening of 9 November 1989 is known as ‘the fall of the Wall’ as for the first time since it was put up, people were allowed to pass through freely with little or no identity checks. The anniversary symposium nonetheless took place the following Monday morning amid the historical transition. Due to the seismic shift, curators from museums in West Berlin and wider West Germany could attend alongside their GDR counterparts. This event thus became one of the first fora of post–Cold War scholarly debate, exchanging knowledge about different museological practices and notions of everyday life in West and East German scholarship. The questions of urban material culture, explored separately by the curatorial teams of the two institutions, could now be researched in tandem.

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Conclusion Despite Wolfgang Jacobeit’s argument about the fundamental differences between the East and West Berlin folklore museums (Jacobeit 1980b), from the 1970s onwards both institutions worked to develop a practice that reflected a wider paradigm change on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Both East and West Berlin museums aimed to represent more fully urban material culture, everyday life and social history. Given their shared past, both institutions took up the challenge to develop their collections by acquiring less aesthetic but more socially representative artefacts. A current curator who used to work in the GDR museum observes that when she started working with the collections in the reunified Berlin, the holdings of the two museums were not radically different: [T]his topic of the large city and the proletarian culture in the GDR collection was surely strongly set at the time and objects were bought to supplement this. But that would basically mean, for example, that you acquired a maid’s clothing, or a garment of a worker’s wife, or an apron from a working class child, but this category of children’s clothing already existed [in Dahlem, West Berlin]. And now you would have to look at how it is with the individual themes. So here [in Dahlem], for example, this theme would be workers or service personnel because there was a special exhibition on it. But to what extent different collections were made, I believe that this was actually rather less the case. I don’t think the collections are [that different]. I didn’t come here and think ‘Wow, the collection looks completely different here’, no, because it simply wasn’t like that. And I think that is, as I said, because we also worked with the same catalogues, on the same type of classification. (Interview, November 2019)

The curator suggests that in spite of the geopolitical divisions and institutional differences, the museum collections mirrored each other. She attributes their similarity to contemporary exhibition practice as seen in Servile Ghosts and Metropolitan Proletariat but also to the pre-existing museum infrastructure. The categories of types of acquisitions had been set in the pre-war museum and these to large extent drove new acquisitions. The chapter explored how a shift in the acquisition practice in the two successor institutions of the pre–Second World War Museum for German Folklore (Staatliches Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde) was put into practice

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across the Cold War divide. The inclusion of a cook’s dress in the exhibitions Metropolitan Proletariat and Dress between Costume and Fashion in East Berlin and Servile Ghosts in West Berlin demonstrates that dress in different ways articulated the attempts to challenge the rural focus and to effect a curatorial shift on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Both museums undertook the task of acquiring examples of urban material culture and presenting the themes of stratification and social class in their displays. As this chapter demonstrated, this new area of museum practice in German Volkskunde was driven by a range of research-related and politically motivated agendas and produced different museological effects in East and West Berlin. At the same time, in both East and West Berlin institutions, the curatorial shift was effected using textile culture. In Dahlem and on the Museum Island, textiles served as a key site for reimagining the construction of society and ‘the people’, beyond the long-standing ‘folk art’ tropes. This included a range of curatorial decisions in the exhibition space to make visible new themes of urban life and working-class experience. These initiatives produced varying effects, depending on the broader political or scholarly context and how the objects were displayed. Bethan Bide (2017) argued that the potential of objects to challenge narrative orthodoxies is also linked to the materiality of the object on display, the way the object connects with or alienates the visitor through its own worn and used nature, the biography of the material, and the stories and affects this can evoke. The disruptive quality is not only located in curatorial decisions about acquisitions and forms of display presenting rural or urban material culture. This disruptive potential also lies in their textural characteristics, such as the creases, stains and folds on the cook’s outfit.

Conclusion: From unification to prefiguration

Figure 6.1  Setting up the new Museum of European Cultures after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Installation of the new signage in 1999. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Uwe Classen.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ever-changing fate of the museum seemed finally to have been positively decided: in 1992, the former East and West Berlin folklore museums were reunited. In what appeared to be an uplifting ‘end of history’, the fragmented, divided collections were brought together within one institution. Finally, the documentation could be consulted without the major logistical challenge of an incognito visit across the Iron Curtain. The museums’ reintegration came at a time of heated debates about folklore and the discipline

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of Volkskunde. The institution’s post–Cold War reformation took place in the context of a disciplinary urge to reinvent the German museums concerned with the topic of folklore (Kaiser, Krankenhagen and Poelhs 2014: 30). In the 1990s, following debates on the legacy of Volkskunde within the German-speaking research community, several folklore institutes and heritage organizations began a process of renaming. In 1994, the reunited museum led a debate on the Paths to Europe1 about the changing approaches to and questions of Europe in museums. As a result of debates within the sector in Germany, and in the context of wider European cultural policy,2 many of the former folklore and folk art collections, potentially a problematic legacy, were reimagined as examples of European everyday culture. In 1999, the newly merged institution was renamed as the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) (Figure 6.1). With a ‘European’ brief, the divided East and West collections were not only integrated but also joined up with the former European Department (Abteilung) of the Ethnological Museum3 (EM). Based in Dahlem, in former West Berlin, the EM collection imagined Europe as composed of distinct entities. Collections focused on ethnic, national and regional groups such as the Sàmi, Italians or Scots. The combined collection became part of the new, linked structures of the united National Museums in Berlin (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz). The merger heritage organization (SMB-SPK) brought together museums and heritage institutions from former East and west Berlin. With a new composition of the collection within the structures of the SMB-SPK, the MEK set out to tell stories about the diverse European material cultures. The museum’s vision was to represent ‘Europe’s shape’ as ‘the result of different cultural contacts’ (Karasek and Tietmeyer 1999: 19). The journalists reporting on the first days of the MEK used textile metaphors, arguing that Europe has been crocheted and stitched together in the new museum according to EU norms (Tietmeyer 2020: 10). In the newly created MEK, the Europe of cultural contacts was considered a point of convergence, intermingling and interaction across a variety of areas of social live and culture. Europe resembled a knot, imagined as a tangle of cultures, trade and travel routes. Within the European concept of the MEK, objects which had been used as tools for displaying ‘ethnicity’ or distinct ‘culture’, were reframed as the local

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expressions of a continent-wide ‘cultural area’. The former artefacts of folklore or ethnography were reinterpreted as an ‘object cosmos’ (Tietmeyer and Ziehe 2008: 9) marking the richness of stories and everyday material cultures. Each thread of the collection could be explored as capable of revealing historical and social narratives about an interconnected Europe. As Rosenberg (2018) pointed out, the MEK opted for a ‘quantitative’ integration, presenting Europe as a cultural area considered as a neutral platform for cultural contact. However, the curatorial team of the new museum realized the limitations of this undertaking: The name of the new museum may suggest that it will exhibit all of Europe’s national cultures or even show all of Europe in its facets. Apart from the presumptuousness of such a claim, it is downright impossible to address all European cultural forms in their temporal, spatial and social dimensions. Rather, the commonalities, but also the differences in the diversity of European cultures should be explored comparatively. (Karasek and Tietmeyer 1999: 19)

This quote demonstrates that the museum team reflected on how best to display Europe at the very outset of the MEK’s existence. As representing the whole of Europe was an impossible task, the curatorial team decided to display cross-sections and samples. Yet, as Chiara de Cesari observes, the strategic European refashioning did not fully purge the collection of its built-in biases  – in particular, the enduring legacy of nineteenth century academic and museum practices … as well as … the distinct cultural-geographic understanding of ‘Europe’ embedded in the collection itself. (de Cesari 2017: 28)

De Cesari points to the abiding legacy of the collection’s past and the underlying knowledge taxonomies. Despite the Europe-oriented framework, as Cris Shore (2000: 64) points out, projects of defining Europe ‘from a cultural perspective’ still risk perpetuating elitist or ethnocentric ideas of Europe’s heritage. The MEK’s strategic shift to Europe was also a time of selecting ‘European’ objects from the ethnological collection. This reframing created new boundaries between the ‘European’ and the ‘non-European’ objects. As

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Stuart  Hall argued about the wider developments of European integration taking place in the post-1989 era the same contradictory process of marking symbolic boundaries and constructing symbolic frontiers between inside and outside, interior and exterior, belonging and otherness, is providing a silent accompaniment to the march to 1992. (Hall 1991: 18)

The contradictory processes of reconnecting and marking new boundaries were clearly at play at the very foundational moment of the MEK. The unintended consequence of stitching together ‘the European’ out of a combination of ‘the folkloric’ and ‘the ethnographic’ of the EM’s collection was a construction of an image of Europe as a self-contained entity. For Hall [t]he story of European identity is often told as if it had no exterior. But this tells us more about how cultural identities are constructed  – as ‘imagined communities’, through the marking of difference with others  – than it does about the actual relations of unequal exchange and uneven development through which a common European identity was forged. (Hall 1991: 18)

These divisions and the new practices of marking difference have recently been further institutionalized within the structures of SMB-SPK as the ‘nonEuropean’ collections were transferred to the Humboldt Forum in the rebuilt Berlin Palace at the heart of Berlin. Macdonald (2016) demonstrates that the city’s new museum constellation has further perpetuated the binary between the ‘European’ and the ‘non-European’. The resulting development places ‘exoticism’ at the centre, while orphaning the MEK. For the decision-makers at SMB-SPK, as the journalist Karlheinz Schmid observed, looted art was chosen for display in preference to traditional costume. If the Humboldt Forum controversy became the impetus for a renewed examination of Germany’s colonial past and debates about the repatriation of artefacts, Europe remained an unmarked category, relegated to the suburbs. In an interview with one of the curators, we discussed the fact that MEK was left behind in Dahlem, excluded from the Humboldt Forum: I never understood that but politics is made by other people. I still find it incomprehensible, but it is the way it is. And I say to myself, okay Europe

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doesn’t stop for me or for us here at the Urals or at the Atlantic in France. Europe is much further. I don’t want to judge that, but Europe is everywhere. We know the historical reasons for this and of course the roots of globalization. This means that the MEK must continue to develop into a global Europe.

For one curator at least, this reflection illustrates that MEK is committed to telling an externalist story of Europe (Hall 1991). However, the curatorial team knows that the museum might not have the right tools for the job. The epistemic legacies of its ethnological and folkloric collection pull the MEK in an internalist direction, where Europe is imagined as a bounded entity made up of distinct cultural or ethnic parts. As curator Judith Schühle (2020) candidly admitted, a walk through the MEK’s galleries might evoke a sense of the absence of ‘globally European objects’ (2020: 36). This challenge was debated during the 2019 ‘What’s Missing?’ conference held at the MEK to mark its twentieth anniversary. The conference probed the MEK collection’s relevance, its storytelling capacity and ways in which it could influence the methods and structures of the MEK (2020: 15). The presentations explored the problem of the collection’s legacy and suggested ways of challenging the internalist representation of Europe and the underlying museological Eurocentrism. Reimagining folkloric objects as European or everyday collections needed to be supplemented by new acquisitions directly speaking to the contemporary challenges: Turning folklore (Volkskunde) collections into collections of everyday culture has to be framed – and even more so in the MEK’s specific case – within a European context. Processes of Europeanization and the engagement with trans-European themes in and outside museums have to be put centre-stage – especially against the backdrop of current debates around highly contested European identity and identities. (Edenheiser 2020: 15–16)

Edenheiser, then MEK’s deputy director, reflected that the collection was both the filament of the museum’s existence and the barrier to its development. The anniversary event addressed the ‘blank spots’ within the museum: objects, narratives, methods and actors have not received any (or enough) attention, and are missing from our museum practices and reflections on contemporary daily lives and societies in Europe. (2020: 15–16)

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Exploring these gaps, the conference focused on museums which, just like the MEK, have reimagined the folklore collections as European. The discussions suggested that due to such glaring omissions, the museums might have limited capacity to tell relevant stories about an ever-changing Europe. For Edenheiser, the blank spots do not just constitute gaps in the unfinished project of a representative European collection. Instead, she proposes posing Europe as a problem at the heart of the collections. Schühle’s (2020) comment on ‘global Europe’ in the same volume provides a problem-based perspective on the continent’s global ‘externalities’: Europe cannot be conceptualized without the atrocities committed under colonialism, without the structural, racist violence that continues to feed imbalances of power and unequal rights of movement and without an understanding that this background also shaped and shapes everyday life in Europe. (2020: 37)

For Schühle, the notion of global Europe is not an aspirational slogan or a marker of recent globalization (Hall 1991: 18), but an indicator of a long-term relationality at the heart of Europe. Acknowledging this relationality includes an understanding of Europe’s construction as a racial formation based on an unequal distribution of rights and resources, steeped in the legacies of colonialism and the Holocaust. In Schühle’s view, a museum of the European everyday cannot be uncoupled from working through the continent’s problematic past, and its tangible, present-day consequences. Using the Rubik’s cube as a metaphor for world-making, Schühle calls for museums to show Europe ‘as the hands that twist its individual squares’. How could the historical collections address this challenge? Given that Europe is not a neutral formation or a ‘moral success story’ (Wolf 1982: 5) but the outcome of a complex global history, could the folkloric collection contribute to creating an externalist representation? How does a museum like the MEK, with its particular collection history, reconcile the vision of displaying ‘Europe’s shape’ as ‘the result of different cultural contacts’ with aspects of Europe’s distasteful past? As Brian Graham noted, the unacceptable is at the heart of Europeanness: Srebrenica and Auschwitz as well as High Gothic cathedrals, romantic castles, utopian Renaissance town planning and symphonic music. The memorable history of Europeans embraces pogrom, persecution and prejudice, near-continuous internecine war, oppression and genocide. The twentieth

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century has seen mass death, carpet-bombing of cities and, above all, the Jewish Holocaust of 1933–45. This remains archetypically ‘European’ heritage, and arguably the most serious challenge facing contemporary European society in creating a sense of common identity. European Jews – ironically the principal European people not nationally defined  – were deported and murdered by Europeans in Europe in pursuit of a European ideology. (Graham 1998: 44)

Returning to Schühle’s Rubik’s cube metaphor, the ‘not quite’ European (Dzenovska and de Genova 2018) places and people are critical sites of the twisting and turning of Europe. As the previous chapters demonstrated, areas such as Masuria, Sardinia or Transylvania are seemingly at the margins of Europe. Yet they periodically emerge at the very centre, whether through vanguard modernization projects or in pursuit of nationalist dreams. Despite imaginaries of stagnation and traditionalism, these spaces and peoples sit at the intersection of imperial histories and bear their legacies. They are loci of radical change, from depopulation and resettlement, and laboratories for experimental shock therapies of the post-1989 or post-2007 eras. Most recently, the apparently marginal spaces of southern or eastern Europe, as interstices of migration routes and nationalist politics, have been put in the spotlight of the boundary-making of Europe and Europeanness. They bear the traces of the movements within the Rubik’s cube, actively partaking in core processes. Posing Europe as a problem, we have to include the ‘not quite’ European material culture to explore the underlying social, political, economic and discursive formations. Investigating the ‘not quite’ European collections, we can trace ‘the genealogy of modernity’s violence in relation to its internal and external others’ (Tlostanova 2017: 17). That means that the traditional costumes and carts that did not make it to the Humboldt Forum might paradoxically show that Europe ‘shares much in common with other broad geopolitical categories like “the developing world”, “the West” or “the Orient”’ (Shore 2017). We need to stop overlooking these collections and reassess the ‘not quite’ European material cultures, places and people as enmeshed with coloniality, racialisation (Boatcă and Parvulescu 2022, Georgescu 2016, Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021, Turda 2010, 2022, Zimmerer 2005), uneven modernity (Adam et al. 2019), as well as hegemonic projections and histories of violence (Bernhard 2016, Harlin 2020, Proglio 2017).

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At the same time, attention to the ‘not quite’ European objects should not result in an ‘internalist’ debate on Europe. As El-Tayeb (2020) warns us: The refusal to engage with this [colonial] past as internal to Europe’s history also shaped the continent’s vision of its future, manifest in a steadily growing postcolonial population that remains ‘un-European’ and in futile attempts to once and for all define and fortify Europe’s physical, political, and identitarian borders. Borders, which are imagined to be self-evident, stable, and natural but which are … malleable, shifting, and largely imaginary, though very real nonetheless. (2020: 76)

At a time when European researchers predominantly engage in provenance research and decolonial museology based on the ‘non-European’, there is a risk of Europe becoming an unmarked category. Posing Europe as a problem in museums requires shifting boundaries, thinking collections beyond the binary of the ‘European’ and ‘non-European’, and connecting the critical debates from multiple standpoints with different object constellations. We need to urgently engage in new forms of knowledge production and critical apprehension of epistemic categories which frame such imaginaries and engage in new theorizing of and from ‘not quite’ European spaces and their objects. Rather than removing the rural, ‘folkloric’ artefacts from display, they should be reincorporated into the critical debate and be part of new scholarly agendas and curatorial toolkits. Boatcă and Parvulescu (2020) outline the benefits of understanding Europe from its margins. The position of rurality, they argue, allows us to question the dominant perspective on global processes of urbanization or capitalism, and to challenge assumptions about the linear development of Europe. By shedding light on these marginal perspectives and the manifold global entanglements which contribute to the hegemonic, ‘internalist’ definition of Europe, the museum could show the very processes and forces which render objects and peoples as ‘non-European’ or ‘not quite European’ in the first place (Santos and Boatcă 2022).

Collection reimagined In what ways can a museum like the MEK address the implicit boundaries of ‘European’ and ‘non-European’? Since 1999, as the museum set out to display European cultures, the curatorial team has established a range of collecting

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practices to capture the complexity of Europeanness. The European reframing of collections has led to new ways of working in the museum, driving new acquisitions. The renewed practice has been theorized, summarized and further developed in the MEK’s acquisitions policy working document, known to staff as the collection concept. The process of writing the collection concept became part of a more comprehensive institutional reflection on the composition of the collection, and its perceived gaps and biases. In practice, as one curator argued, the collection concept acts as a resource for the current team and its successors, helping them in the head-scratching task of understanding the nuance of museological craft in the MEK context. The current team often needs more clarity about the rationale for past acquisitions. Why would a curator in the 1970s buy so many Slovakian embroideries? What was the perceived value of the individual pieces within the vast set? As one of the curators explained, with the Collection Concept, future staff would not need to speculate about the intentions of their forerunners but could look at what the Collection Concept was and say, ‘Aha, that’s why we do not have these things because we have such a form, or we have a concept, and we know why these things were collected.

The collection concept aims to make curatorial choices visible and to articulate the museum’s underlying acquisition values and intentions. This way, it works to ensure transparency and provide future curators with information about past decision-making processes and mechanisms that have shaped the collection. The Concept develops a set of key themes – ‘red threads’ – in the collection. One of these red threads is ‘Europe within a global context’ focusing on collecting the ‘external view’ of Europe through the inclusion of objects that represent a European culture outside Europe, but also examining and re-evaluating existing objects and collection areas from non-European perspectives.

As the Concept suggests, global Europe needs to be tackled from multiple perspectives. On the one hand, global interconnectedness and migration processes lead to forms of creolization and heterogeneity. On the other hand, they cause objects, materials and techniques to be seen as ‘European’. The concept establishes a new practice of crafting the collection in which

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any proposed new object will be collectively cross-checked. Before admitting an object into the collection, the concept requires the team to ask itself if the potential acquisition fills ‘a gap’ or constitutes a significant ‘leap’ within the collection. These considerations are ways of dealing with a confusion and profusion of objects (Macdonald and Morgan 2018), designed to put a brake on unmanageable collecting and to prevent further overgrowth. During my attendance at the MEK’s curatorial meetings, I observed how the principles of the collection concept are put into practice. In the course of one of the discussions, the team decided upon the purchase of a dress. The object under debate was absent from the meeting but well-known to the participants. The proposed garment (Figure 6.3) was on display at the MEK during the ‘Wedding Dreams’ exhibition between September 2018 and July 2019. The frilly ivory-white, silk wedding dress with its oversized bow on the chest and long train became one of the central attractions of the show. The piece was bought by a French woman living in London and engaged to a British man, intended for their wedding in Las Vegas. The garment was the product of a celebrated 2006 design cooperation between the fast-fashion retailer, H&M, and an Amsterdam fashion house, Viktor & Rolf. The fabric was manufactured in Bangladesh for a Dutch designer and Swedish clothing brand, demonstrating the connectedness of European fashion with global supply chains. It expressed new bridal styles, the emergence of high-street/designer collaborations, and limited-edition products in the fast-fashion context. The bridal outfit and the Las Vegas trip also embodied a particular wedding dream; the bride was reported as saying in a 2006 Daily Mail article: ‘a little bit romantic and a little bit rock and roll’. For the MEK curator who proposed the dress for the museum collection, the object stood out not only for its fashion value and its ‘European union’ story (the British/French couple) but also documented how wedding rituals intersect with popular culture. The material culture of wedding dresses reflects the changing social ideas of a ‘dream wedding’, and their link to fashion and the market economy. Situated at the intersection of design and high street, the frilly dress under discussion pointed to wedding dreams as

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representing status aspirations, ideas of gender normativity, and the rise of nonreligious ceremonies. In this light, the object gained additional value as a key ‘leap’ within the MEK’s collection of wedding textile culture. The object also met the key criteria of the concept: its provenance was documented; it came with a complete object biography and was in good material condition. In addition, the couple’s geographical mobility indicated a very contemporary, cosmopolitan notion of Europeanness, and the dress highlighted key MEK themes: global Europe, (lack of) sustainability, and identity formation. Following a discussion about the collection candidate, the curators agreed that the dress met the requirements for acquisition and raised their hands in its favour. Let us imagine, or perhaps, weave together the wedding outfit with the case of another MEK object – a long, frilly tulle dress (Figure 6.2). In her short essay ‘Weaving as method in feminist science studies: The subjective collective’, Susan Leigh Star reflects on Mary Daly’s idea of methodological ‘spooking, sparking and spinning’. Spooking involves identifying things and silences that haunt knowledge, such as the MEK collection categories and the in-built binaries of the ‘European’ and ‘non-European’. Sparking is a creative process of restoring meaning and using the tools of irony and collaborative thinking to make the blank spots and silences collide. In this case, I mobilize the ironic nature of the ‘not quite’ European to indicate what is technically European but failing in relation to the normative trope of Europe. Through the idea of ‘not quite’, I hope to spark new questions about the nature of European material culture in museums. Spinning involves stretching our imagination and weaving new knowledge about the collection (Bauchspies and de La Bellacasa 2009: 335). But before we start spinning into the future, let us go to the past and the historical garment acquired by the MEK in 2010. The dress, made in the style of long-sleeved 1900s Edwardian fashion, was offered to the MEK by the granddaughter of its wearer. It is a well-preserved and strikingly delicate piece, made from an embroidered cream fabric decorated with frills and rows of stitched satin flowers. The outfit came with documentation, including a photograph of two white women, the wearer and her daughter. They stand in front of a neoclassical building, the daughter

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wearing a long, high-necked white dress in a similar style, and holding a bunch of flowers. The photograph is framed by the leaves of a lush palm tree. The acquisition is known by the curatorial team as the ‘Namibian dress’ as the wearer’s family lived in the former German East Africa and German Southwest Africa. Since its acquisition, the dress has been loaned for two exhibitions: German Colonialism at the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 2016–2017,

Figure 6.2  Tulle dress, probably from German South-West Africa (today Namibia), worn around 1905. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Unknown photographer.

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Figure 6.3 H&M dress on display at the MEK in 2019. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.

and Racism: The Invention of Human Races at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, 2018–2019. In both displays, the dress was used to tell the story of German colonial settlers and their attempts to differentiate themselves from the indigenous residents. As the historian Dörte Lerp highlights in the catalogue for German Colonialism: Europeans distinguished themselves from the indigenous population in the colonies through their clothing. They went to great lengths to keep their dresses and suits white and spotless. (Lerp 2016)

Exploring the historical accounts of German lives in the territories of today’s Namibia, Lerp suggests the dress was part of the colonial gender order. Settler women were portrayed as engaged in a continuous battle with dirt and dust. They came to symbolize a gendered idea of protectors of whiteness and German and European values on the frontier (see O’Donnell et al. 2010, Reagin 2006). Everyday material culture partook in projections of European superiority and constructions of bourgeois and national identity. The presentation of the

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tulle dress in the context of the exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden highlighted the symbolic nature of settler clothing as a claim to white superiority, an expression of domination and a status symbol. What kind of reimagining of the MEK’s collection would the two outfits, the H&M wedding dress and the Namibian dress, allow? Bringing together the two cases enables us to explore the different ways in which the MEK uses textile culture to change the focus of its collections to ‘Europe within a global context’. The case of the Namibian dress demonstrates that textiles can reveal of the day-to-day practices of Europeanness and the policing of perceived European values outside Europe. As the Dresden and Berlin exhibitions of the dress demonstrated, this textile can highlight the exclusionary practices of Europeanness and segregation in the colonial space. The delicate, frilly garment can reveal the entangled histories of gender and coloniality and the ‘unsettling truths about settling’ (Waters 2019). Displaying the dress signifies the MEK’s shift to an externalist perspective on Europe and the museum’s acknowledgement that collecting European objects must include acquiring the everyday textile culture of settler colonialism and oppressive Europeanness. This way, the object can provide insight into some of the domestic, embodied and intimate facets of Europe as a racial and social formation. The H&M/Victor & Rolf wedding dress embodies the MEK’s stated goal to document how global interconnectedness and the experience of migration influence people’s daily lives. Here, the couple’s wedding dreams are closely entwined with migrant lives, the mass-media imaginaries of a Las Vegas wedding, and the global fashion industry. At the same time, such global entanglements are part of the object itself. Its production story offers an insight into the global environmental impact of textile culture and the sweatshop-dependent supply chains of the European fashion industry. Considering the multiple potential narratives about the two dresses, we can see that in these textile acquisitions, the European and non-European become intertwined in various ways. At the same time, the dresses reveal both the aspirations (such as status or value preservation) and the oppression (including exploitative global markets or racist politics) that underpin constructions of Europe. The two dresses both offer a new nonbinary representation of Europe that signals new directions in crafting the MEK collection’s future.

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Other futures If we stretch this further, could the two dresses help us craft the collection differently and perhaps even push it into an alternative future? During one of the interviews, a member of the MEK’s curatorial team told me that the collection is a future-making device: we make cultural history for the future. What do you call that … Anticipatory collecting? We have to be clear about that. Of course, we will address questions of the present in the exhibitions. Sure, but the collection is for the future.

Discussing prospective institutional development triggered a range of hopes and fears about potential transformations. One curator aspired to removing Europe from the museum’s name and refocusing on global social entanglements within the collection. She felt that the distinction between European and non-European cultures was artificial and dispensable. Another curator asserted that, given a history of museum changes, renaming and institutional reshuffling, the future collection might end up serving an entirely different museum. For example, the curator reflected, the MEK could become a women’s museum because of its predominantly female-oriented historical material culture and the profile of the curatorial team and core public. Rather than thinking about challenging the current implicit gender bias, this curator proposed that the future museum could realistically accept and decide to build on its existing core collection and visitor profile. During the interviews, another team member started to present a potential worst-case scenario, speculating about the development towards a museum for German folklore, which is then politically instrumentalized, because there are nationalist aspirations all over Europe and the basic idea of the museum is a very nationalist one.

The curator indicated profound anxiety about unsettling contemporary developments. Some objects seem to linger, haunting the stores with the potential to re-emerge in undesired circumstances. They could become the seeds of a future that could be a spectral return of the past. The curator said that she did not want to contemplate this nightmare scenario. Instead, she wanted to think of the museum as a caterpillar, a young creature capable of further transformation

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and then, a thing of beauty, flying free. This metaphor is endearing, but a glance at the museum store with its stacks of ambiguous objects provokes concern for the future. It weaves itself into the surprise at the sight of a promising collection candidate or the puzzlement of discovering an object file without any provenance information. Acquisition choices are seeds of possibilities. During informal conversations, the curators indicated that undesired futures are an inevitable part of collection taxonomies, potentially performing objectionable worlds into being. Collection development can work to reorient the museum’s future through corrective, preventive and anticipatory means. This reorientation practice may focus on what is missing from the existing collection that might be needed for posterity. In this context, acquisitions aspire to be corrective tools, attempts to fix past mistakes. This is expressed in adding objects representing marginalized groups who were denied a place within the past museum narratives (Edenheiser 2020). New acquisitions can also prevent exclusion and epistemic violence directed toward people and cultural phenomena previously omitted from collections. The principle of anticipatory collecting might address the challenge of capturing contemporary social phenomena and so lead to establishing additional collections. For example, the MEK curators have identified themes of sustainability and global Europe and are collecting objects that capture these perceived current topics. The curators anticipate that these themes will play a more significant role in the future, and the new acquisitions are designed to follow these shifts. However, as the MEK’s past illustrates, the future might outlast and outwit the museum, exceeding the wildest expectations. Reshaping collections tainted by a complex past and unpredictable future might require action beyond preventive, corrective or even anticipatory tools. To make history for the future, collection development might instead require the explicit pulling of desirable futures into the present.

Prefigurative collection Let us imagine what kind of museum could be crafted if we pull the future into the present. Let us think of a museum as a device of textural knowledge (de la Fuente 2019), one that engages in the weaving of desirable worlds

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through collecting, assembling, caring for and interpreting objects. Weaving has been explored as a relational performance, the practice of intentional entanglement, and a means of crafting the future. Multiple studies have demonstrated that weaving has foreshadowed other forms of knowledge like mathematics or coding (see McLean, Harlizius-Klück and Jefferies 2017). Perhaps we could learn a new craft of weaving a museum into the future. Rather than responding to and anticipating things to come, such museumweaving would be a prefigurative practice, actively shaping future outcomes (Holtorf 2020: 3). If collections are made for posterity, a prefigurative approach to collecting focuses on planting the seeds of the future into the collections of today. Outcome-oriented, prefigurative collection development could move curatorial work away from some of the dilemmas concerning missing or lost objects or a profusion of a particular type of material culture. Instead, a prefigurative ethos could help imagine collection development as an area of experimentation and creation of alternatives, mobilizing everyday practice for future relevance (Yates 2015). Prefigurative collection development could untie the collection from existing knowledge threads, collection histories and their epistemic or taxonomic burden. Instead of identifying the gaps, it could imagine the material beyond existing knowledge categories, such as ethnicity. For example, collection development could suspend or abandon the reliance on dominant groups within the collection to enable an embrace of its social justice potential to create a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable future (Jeffrey and Dyson 2021). Moving beyond established knowledge formats could drive acquisitions against and beyond some of the worrying nationalist legacies in the historical collections. This would involve working actively with the objects to prevent the unsettling scenarios latent within the pre-existing collection (i.e., the material culture that might lend itself to be exploited for nationalist or racist political ends). Countering residual museum taxonomies could involve developing new routines of disposal and de-growth (Förster 2008; Morgan and Macdonald 2020), improvising with a range of acquisition formats and opening the collection to become an experimental resource for social action. Rather than identifying future themes, curators could focus on embodying values and enacting institutional practices to ensure their future relevance. Settler material culture is a largely ignored theme of everyday European

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material culture. Prefigurative collecting would rethink the parameters of Europeanness from culturalist frameworks to perspectives that highlight the hitherto exclusionary practices of the European presence in the world. New forms of collecting would embrace interventions into the taxonomies within the material collected. For example, objects of folklore, as demonstrated in the cases of the waistcoat and the basket (Chapters 3 and 4) could become traces of migration or indicators of the spatial distribution of value in Europe. Prefigurative collection development would take the notion of repair seriously. In this context, Romani material culture and archives could serve to retell the role of Roma in Europe and build new alliances between Roma and others struggling for social justice. Attending to these gaps can help to build up areas of counterpower and capability to enact social change (Chui Fan and Ting 2019: 201). Considering the various social and economic effects of repair, prefigurative collection practice would work through areas of marginalization and exclusion within collections. This would open collection development to the ethos of repair as care, improvisation, and co-production of knowledge (Morse 2020). For Graeber (2009: 235), prefigurative action involves creating and elaborating new kinds of institutions and interactions. Prefigurative collection development would question existing institutional arrangements. It would critically address the effects of decision-making within the institution to help develop new forms of learning and practice (Lobo 2019). This entails confronting the binary of ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ collections, the historical legacies of this dichotomy and the potential consequences of the current institutional separation between MEK in Dahlem and the museums in the Humboldt Forum. Through prefigurative collecting, the MEK could acquire objects ‘as if ’ the binary did not exist and in so doing overcome the separation. This way, the museum would not add to those elements of the collection that signal a worrying future return to the past but actively transform the institution. By developing new avenues of prefigurative collection development for institutional renewal – beyond the corrective, preventive or anticipatory – the collection could be capable of, in the words of the curator, actively making history for the future. In a time of multiple curatorial dilemmas, prefigurative institutions would seek to ‘invent a new future for themselves and their

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communities, or at least help create an image of a desirable future’ (Janes and Sandell 2019: 17). Rather than sleepwalking into the future, museums could reorient themselves, nurture experimentation and even, perhaps, effect desired outcomes.

Conclusion The MEK’s coming of age has prompted significant reflection. This involved taking steps to develop the collection through the articulation of the collection concept and new acquisition practice. This also included asking broader questions about things and people ‘missing’ from the collection and connecting the museum’s past with the contemporary moment. Recent scholarship on curatorial practice illustrates that many museums face similar challenges regarding their collections’ role in society. These challenges encompass complex questions of value and representation or ways of adequately addressing the challenge of profusion, extinction, and loss. Amidst uncertain futures and difficult decisions, museums once again face the choice of continuing on an established path or leaving behind the familiar collecting practices that simply turn them into ‘unmanageable time capsules’ (Were and King 2012: 4). Reflecting on the MEK’s changing acquisition practices, I hope to have demonstrated that grasping how the future orients the present involves more than acknowledging the potential value or prospective uses of objects. All acquisitions are bound up in temporal threads, connecting the collection’s past, present, and future. The practice of bringing new objects into collections sits at the intersection of pre-existing categories and powerful future orientations, ranging from hopes and fears to anticipation and expectation. The craft of collection development, as the MEK curatorial narratives show, marks the ways in which the museum’s future awakens the present. The curators routinely anticipate different potential uses of the collection, fear the return of a nationalist agenda and speculate about forthcoming institutional changes. They also acknowledge the unknown yet possible shapes of the future museum – could it be gender-oriented or more global in scope? Beyond individual curatorial dilemmas, this calls for an explicit acknowledgement of the future-oriented capabilities of collections. These  considerations need

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to move beyond questioning persistent accumulation or considering how to mitigate gaps or prevent loss. Thinking about sustainable heritage and the social role of museums necessitates productive engagement with different institutional modes of relating to the future. At a critical juncture of reevaluating their social role as collecting institutions, prefiguration can help post-folkloric museums unsettle their taken-for-granted institutional knowledge, welcoming new improvisatory practices in what institutions might be and what they could do (Cooper 2020). Prefigurative collection development could be part of a new set of transformative actions to pull desirable futures into the present and to craft a different museum. As Janes and Sandell (2019) reminded us, posterity has arrived and more unanticipated futures might be yet to come. Museums must learn new ways of actively shaping and inhabiting the future rather than passively falling into it. All museums craft their collections and participate in weaving stories about the world. As Olga Tokarczuk reminds us, “when this story changes, so does the world.” Museums like the MEK have the potential to deploy their past and future collections to slowly and carefully reweave the dominant stories about the world, perhaps making it a slightly better place.

Notes Introduction 1 Salvage anthropology was the practice of collecting materials that were perceived as being under the threat of loss or extinction. Those who were acquiring ‘salvaged’ objects saw themselves as preserving them, although these practices were embedded in wider contexts of dispossession, deprivation and colonial loot. 2 In 2019, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) announced the following new museum definition: Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing. The definition proved very controversial, leading to the resignation of nine members of ICOM’s leadership, including ICOM president Suay Aksoy who was the keynote speaker for the MEK’s ‘What’s Missing?’ conference.

Chapter 1 1 As Bendix (1997: 235) suggested, the term ‘Binnen’ refers to ‘not overseas’ or ‘inland’ which implies that the exotic can also be within reach. 2 I translate Volkskunde as ‘folklore studies’ as suggested by Gingrich (2005: 62). 3 The full list of initial members included Adolf Bastian, ethnologist; Max Bartels, medical doctor; Louis Castan, co-owner of Panoptikum; Jean Keller, wine

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merchant; Frank Goerke, director of the Urania Society; Max Hollmann, district court judge; Hugo Lemcke, historian; Alexander Meyer-Cohn, patron and banker; Georg Minden, officer of a Berlin mortgage bank; William Schoenlank, consul and merchant; Wilhelm Schwartz, philologist; Albert Voss, director of the prehistorical section of the Ethnological Museum; Karl Weinhold, professor of German language and literature; Hermann Weiss, costume specialist at the Academy of Arts (Imeri 2019: 79).

Chapter 2 1 The archival research included material from museums, local archives, libraries and family records collected in Berlin (MEK) and in north-eastern Poland, including Olsztyn (East Prussian Allenstein), Ełk (Lyck), Mikołajki (Nikolaiken), Barczewo (Wartenburg), Olsztynek (Hohenstein) and Węgorzewo (Angerburg). 2 East Prussia is the name of a historical province along the south-eastern Baltic Coast, currently divided between Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast and northeast Poland. The region was part of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773 to 1829 as well as from 1878 until 1945. In 1871, the region as well as the Kingdom of Prussia became incorporated into the German Empire and then in 1918 became part of the Weimar Republic’s Free State of Prussia. The regional capital was the city of Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad). 3 Since 1994, Schloss Bellevue has been the official residence of the President of Germany. 4 The Völkisch Movement was an ethno nationalist and white supremacist ideology found in Germany from the late nineteenth century and throughout the Nazi era. The aim of the Völkisch Movement was to build German solidarity through a racial blood bond and a sense of ethnic community. This was underpinned by anti-Semitism in particular and a general rejection of everything considered foreign. The movement aspired to restore handicrafts as part of a return to a nationalist pre-capitalist economy. 5 Dywany mazurskie o swoistych wzorach były wykonywane w dawnych czasach przez tutejszą ludność pochodzenia polskiego. Świadczy o tym ich wyraźne pokrewieństwo w rysunku z wzorami polskimi. Tkano je z przeznaczeniem na uroczystości rodzinne. Warto jeszcze przy tej sposobności zanotować, że etnograf niemiecki Konrad Hahm w swej źródłowej pracy poświęconej dziejom dywaniarstwa ludowego na Mazurach stwierdza wyraźnie, że nawiązuje ono do współczesnej mu produkcji polskiej (source: ‘Pierwszy po 200’ 1955: 4).

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6 Kresy refers to lands belonging to Polish Second Republic (1918–1939), now part of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. 7 Philippians (ru. Филипповцы) is a subsection of Old Believers, following religious practice preceding the seventeenth-century reforms of the Christian Orthodox Church. As a result of religious prosecutions, many Philippians emigrated from the Russian territories, some taking refuge in the former East Prussia.

Chapter 3 1 Currently a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Museum Island (Museuminsel) is a complex of prestigious neoclassical buildings built between 1824 and 1930. Situated in the heart of the former Prussian empire, the museum use of the space was a product of Enlightenment ideas of public education. Following similar trends in London and Paris, the 1810 order of King Frederick William III envisioned an establishment of a public art collection. The development plan of the island holding collections in the centre of Berlin followed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the creation of the first building in 1830, now called the Old Museum (Altes Museum), followed by the construction of the Royal Prussian Museum in 1859, today’s New Museum (Neues Museum). Between 1876 and 1930, new buildings of the National Gallery (today’s Old National Gallery, Alte Nationalgalerie), the Emperor Frederick Museum (today: Bode-Museum) and the Pergamon Museum which became the site of the re-established Museum of German Folklore.

Chapter 4 1 Between 1959 and 1974, the collection grew exponentially to 20,000 objects. 2 The exhibition’s full title: Weiße Westen, Rote Roben. Von den Farbordnungen des Mittelalters zum individuellen Farbgeschmack.

Chapter 5 1 Wilhelm von Bode, also known as the ‘Bismarck of the Museums’, was the first Director General of the Königliche Museen zu Berlin (Royal Museums in Berlin), now Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

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2 One of the most renowned acquisition partners for the museum was Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde) who procured objects from buildings that were about to be demolished. 3 These include the 1974 Schloßberg-Museum exhibition about child labour, Arbeiterkinder – Gestern und Heute; the 1976 exhibition about seventeenthcentury everyday life in the Historical Museum of Frankfurt, Frankfurt um 1600: Alltagsleben in der Stadt; or the City Museum of Brandenburg 1977 show, Der Brennaborprolet – Arbeiteralltag in Brandenburg (Havel) 1918–1933, that represented the working, cultural, social and political lives of twenty-five worker families in the city.

Conclusion 1 The Working Group meeting in question was the Wege nach Europa: Ansätze und Problemfelder in den Museen: 11. Tagung der Arbeitsgruppe Kulturhistorische Museen in der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde vom 4.-8. Oktober 1994. 2 The symbolic denationalization and reframing of the collections through a European lens were part of the post-1989 German European policy in the Helmut Kohl era (Früh 2014: 228). The formative period of the museum was also the time of the Maastricht Treaty (1992), setting out a new political and cultural image of Europe as an ever-closer Union. Article 128 of the Treaty included ‘Culture’ provisions, highlighting regional and national diversity within a common heritage of European peoples (Shore 2000: 53). 3 This is a renamed institution of the former Museum of Ethnology (Völkerkundemuseum).

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Index acquisition 1–4, 7–8, 11, 14, 18, 20, 22, 29, 40–1, 45, 50, 74, 76, 78–80, 90, 107, 113–14, 116–17, 122, 130–1, 135, 140–1, 143–5, 150–1, 157–8, 167–70, 172, 174–7 Agriculture Yesterday and Today (Landwirtschaft gestern und heute) 141 Ahmed, S. 14, 21 Albers, A. 17 Allenstein. See Olsztyn Altea, G. 93 Andrzej 58, 61 Angerburg. See Węgorzewo (Angerburg) The Arcades Project (Benjamin) 32 archive 8, 11, 28, 35–9, 42, 44, 53, 60–1, 66, 83–4, 89–90, 101, 106, 108, 117, 154–5, 176 Association of Transylvanian Saxons in Germany (Verband der Siebenbürger Sachsen in Deutschland) 129 Astacio, P. A. 13, 101 Atzori, M. 88, 90, 91 Auslandsdeutsche 50, 53 Badas, U. 93 Baldassare, L. 88 Basia 56–7 Bastian, A. 31 Basu, P. 13, 14, 19, 87 Bendix, R. 5, 115, 116, 139, 179 n.1 Benjamin, W. 32, 39 Bennett, T. 7, 12, 39 Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory) (BGAEU) 27–31, 41, 76, 108 Berlin Wall 2, 141, 156, 159 Bide, B. 153, 158

Binnenexotik 27 Bismarck of the Museums 181 n.1 Bistrița 105, 107–8, 118–19, 122–9 blue-collar museum 145–9 Boatcă, M. 13, 82, 110, 111, 132, 165, 166 Boehm, M. H. 48 Boner, C. 109–10 Boym, S. 26, 28 Brahms, J. 26 Bryant, R. 21 Byhan, A. 78, 80, 83 Cagliari 83–5, 87, 90–1 Campidano di Oristano 85 Carol II, King 112 Castan, L. 31, 32, 179 cat’s cradle 16–17, 71–2 Centrala Przemysłu Ludowego i Artystycznego (CPLiA) (Central Union of Folk and Artistic Handicraft Cooperatives) 67–8 Charted Peasant Designs from Saxon Transylvania (Sigerus) 126 Chernyakhovsky, I. 55 Churchill, W. 55 cofinu 95 Cold War 1–2, 7, 19, 22, 24, 112, 115–16, 118–19, 128, 131–2, 135, 137, 156, 158, 160 Collection Concept 3, 167–8, 177 collection development 20, 117, 174–8 cook’s dress 24, 133–5, 147–8, 154, 156, 158 Cooperativa Nazionale ‘Industrie Femminile Italiane’ (Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise) (IFI) 89, 102 costume/fashion 155–6 Covid-19 43, 70, 86–8, 107, 123 crafting collections 16, 20–2 crobedda 74, 95 cultural survivors 75, 77–83

206 Dahlem (Berlin) 1, 8, 24, 107, 113, 149, 157, 158, 160, 162, 176 de Cesari, C. 161 de Genova, N. 6, 7, 165 de la Fuente, E. 13, 42, 174 Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic) (GDR) 135–9, 141–6, 148, 150, 156–7 Die Große Heimkehr (‘The Great Homecoming’) 50 Discover Europe! (Europa Entdecken!) 11, 120–1, 130 Domingo 84–5 dream wedding. See wedding dreams Dresden 44, 171–2 Dress between Costume and Fashion 155, 158 Dzenovska, D. 6, 7, 165 East Prussia 23, 43–8, 52, 54–60, 63, 67, 72, 75, 165, 180 n.2 East Prussian Peasant Carpets (Hahm) 44, 58, 61 Edenheiser, I. 2, 8–9, 36, 163–4, 174 Ełk (Lyck) 48, 57, 63, 67, 72, 180 El-Tayeb, F. 8, 166 Entwistle, J. 131 ethnography/ethnographic 6, 10, 15, 18, 142–3, 161 fieldwork 11, 19, 43 objects 5, 75–6, 78, 134 textural 12–19 zones 7, 15 Ethnological Museum (Völkerkundemuseum) 2, 8, 10, 30–1, 45, 50, 74, 76–8, 160, 163 exhibitionary complex (Bennett) 39 exotica 32, 75–7 Feindt, G. 117 fieldwork 8–12, 18–19, 43, 70–1, 87, 107 First World War 65, 75, 82, 111 Flitch, E. C. 84 fold 13, 24, 135, 149, 154, 158 folk art 4, 6, 40, 44–5, 53, 62–3, 69–70, 89–90, 114, 118, 136–42, 149–50, 152, 154, 158, 160

Index folklore 4–6, 139 GDR cultural policy 139 material 42 museums 28, 113, 133, 135, 137, 140, 142–3, 145, 151, 155, 157, 159, 163 nationalist 48–51 tangible 35, 108 Folklore Museum, East Berlin (Museum für Volkskunde, Ost-Berlin) 133, 135, 137, 140–51, 154–9 Friedrich, C. D. 25–6, 28 Fuller, M. 81 German Colonialism 170–1 German Democratic Forum 123–5 German Festival of Folk Art (Deutsche Festspiele der Volkskunst) 136 German Folk Art (Deutsche Volkskunst) 137 German Folklore Museum, West Berlin (Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde, West-Berlin) 105, 113–19, 149–52, 154, 156–9 German National Museum for Antiquities and Folklore (Deutsches Nationalmuseum für Altertümer und Volkskunde) 41 German Peasant Art (Deutsche Bauernkunst) 45–6 German Village 40 Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge or Bundesvertriebenengesetz (Federal Act on Expellees) (BVFG) 116 Geza II, King 110 Gianni 86 Gładkowska, E. 57, 62–3 Graeber, D. 176 Graham, B. 164–5 Gramsci, A. 80, 82 Hahm, K. 23, 38, 43–52, 54–5, 58–63, 65–6, 68, 70–2, 75, 115 Hall, S. 162–4 Hamburg 23, 75–80 Haraway, D. 14, 16–8, 71–2 Hartung, O. 30, 38 Heimat (homeland) 116–7, 136 Herder, J. G. v. 28

Index heritage 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 14, 20–2, 27, 35, 43, 48, 57, 62–3, 70, 88, 101–2, 116–17, 122, 124, 126, 135, 139, 160–1, 178 Herzfeld, M. 5–7, 81, 100–2 Hitler, A. 48–9 Hoffmann, H. -J. 143 Hoppe, C. 75–6 house ghosts 149–54 Hulanicka, B. 58, 60–1, 68, 70 Humboldt Forum 8, 162, 165, 176 Ingold, T. 13–4, 16 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 9, 142, 179 n.2 Iron Curtain 24, 115–22, 132, 135, 145, 150, 157–9 Istituto Sardo per l’Organizzazione del Lavoro Artigiano (Sardinian Institute for the Organization of Craft Work) (ISOLA) 91–3, 99, 102 Italian Africa 80 Jacobeit, W. 28–9, 138, 142–4, 146, 150, 157 Jagor, F. 108–9 Jahn, U. 28–32, 34–6, 38, 40–2, 76, 100, 108, 112, 115, 136 Janes, R. 20, 177, 178 Jefferies, J. 22, 71, 175 Karasek, E. 137–8, 142, 147, 151–2 Kaspar-Herberth, K. 107, 118, 130 Kawlra, A. 101 Kegel, L. 76–9 Kirchenpelz (church fur) 118, 121 Knight, D. 21 knot 13, 16–19, 23, 43, 45–6, 48, 50, 52, 54, 58, 60–2, 71, 74–6, 83, 86, 95, 100, 160 Koch, E. 54–5 Köchinnenkleid. See cook’s dress Koch, R. 32 Konietzko, J. 73–9, 82–4, 86–7, 90–1, 94, 100–1 Konietzko, P. 83 Königsboden (fundus regius, Royal Lands) 110 Kosegarten, L. G. 26 Kraus, K. 32 Kresy 64, 66, 181 n.6

207

Küchler, S. 5, 131 Kühn, C. 136–37 Kulturlandschaften 38 Kupfergraben Museum (Museum am Kupfergraben, Bode-Museum) 137 language island 108–13, 115, 117, 132, 135 Lauterbach, B. 149, 152 Lawrence, D. H. 80, 84 Lerp, D. 171 ‘Letters of a shipwrecked man’ (Kosegarten) 26–7 Lyck. See Ełk (Lyck) Macdonald, S. 4, 7–9, 14, 20, 162, 168, 175 Mädchenbrustpelz (girl’s breast fur) 105–6 Masuria 23, 43, 50, 52, 55–8, 60–2, 65–8, 70–2 material culture 4–7, 10–12, 15, 27, 30, 35–9, 42, 48, 50, 62–3, 75, 78–9, 82–3, 98, 101, 108, 114, 116, 118, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130–2, 134–5, 140–1, 143, 145, 151, 154, 156–8, 160–1, 165, 168–9, 171, 173, 175–6 Medda, N. 89–91 Meloni, G. N. 101 metaphors 12–14, 17, 71, 160, 164–5, 174 Metropolitan Proletariat: On the way of life of a class (Großstadtproletariat: Zur Lebensweise einer Klasse) 133, 145, 149, 152, 157 Meyer-Cohn, Alexander 31, 180 n.3 Mikołajki 53, 57–8, 60, 64–5, 67 Molteni, A. 89–91 Müller, H. 149–51 Murawska-Muthesius, K. 5, 110 Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (Museum at the Rothenbaum – Cultures and Arts of the World) (MARKK) 76, 79 museum ethnography 6, 15. See also ethnography/ethnographic Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Museum of European Cultures – National Museums in Berlin) (MEK) 1–4, 7–12, 14, 22–4, 27–8,

208

Index

36, 43–4, 71, 74, 77, 95, 102, 107–8, 120–1, 126, 129–31, 160–4, 166–9, 171–4, 176–8 Museum for German Traditional Costumes and Domestic Products (Museum für deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse des Hausgewerbes) 27, 33, 150 Museum of German Folk Art (Museum für Deutsche Volkskunst) 140 Museumsdorf Cloppenburg 149 Mussolini 81–2 National Museum of German Folklore (Staatliches Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde) 43, 45, 49–51, 54, 135, 150, 157–8 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) 48, 51 Naturvölker (natural people) 31 Nedo, P. 138–9, 143 Neuland-Kitzerow, D. 144, 146, 155 Nikolaiken. See Mikołajki Nimführ, S. 101 Nordic Museum (Nordiska Museet) 28 ‘not quite’ European 6–7, 165–6, 169 Olsztyn 11, 60–2, 65, 180 n.1 Oristano 77, 81–2, 84–7 Palais Kreutz 32–4, 45 Panoptikum (Berlin) 31–2, 41 Parvulescu, A. 110–11, 132, 165–6 Perron, C. 116–17 Plutyńska, Eleonora 58–61, 68–70, 72 post-war reconstruction 57–60 Precious Folk Heritage (Kostbares Volksgut) 114 prefiguration 22, 159–78 prefigurative collection development 175–8 Pretzell, L. 45, 50, 54, 113–6, 118, 121, 131 Probesammlung, see sample collection 29 Problems and methods of contemporary folkloric research (Probleme und Methoden volkskundlicher Gegenwartsforschung) 142–3 Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) 113

Racism: The Invention of Human Races 171 red things 15 Regained Territories 54–7, 60, 64–7 Reichwein, A. 51–4, 58, 72, 140 Rejuvenation Movement (Erneuerungsbewegung) 112 renewal 135–41, 176 reorientation 141–5, 174 Rheinisches Freilichtmuseum Kommern 149 Roosevelt, F. 55 Rosenberg, A. 161 Rubik’s cube 164–5 Rügen 25–9, 36–7, 155 salvage anthropology 2, 179 n.1 sample collection (Probesammlung) 22–3, 29–30, 41–2, 82, 108 Sampson, E. 154 Sandell, R. 20, 177–8 Sandra 87–8, 93–6, 98–9 San Vero Milis 85–7 Sardinia 5, 11, 19, 74–85, 87–93, 95–8, 101–2 Sardinian basketry 74–5, 83, 89, 96, 98, 101–2 Savoia, G. 90 Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection (Skandinavisk-etnografiska samlingen) 28 schizophrenic work culture 151–2 Schloss Bellevue 45, 49, 51, 180 n.3 Schmid, K. 8, 162 Schmidt, H. 122 school bilingual 124 Lyck Weaving 67, 72 and museum 51–4 Schühle, J. 163–4 Schulz-Berlekamp, G. 27 scraps 63–8 Second World War 10, 22–3, 42, 63, 91, 106, 112–13, 116, 118, 121, 128, 135, 157 Servile Ghosts 148–50, 152, 157–8 Shore, C. 161, 165, 182 Siebenbürgen. See Transylvania Sigerus, E. 126 Sinnai 11, 73–4, 85, 87–95 Slocomb Di Brazza, C. A. 89

Index source community 15–16, 18 Southern question 80, 82, 100 Soviet Union 23, 54–6, 65, 121, 135, 140 Sprachinselforschung 108, 113 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation – National Museums in Berlin) (SMB-SPK) 160, 162 Stalin, J. 55–7, 59, 62 Star, S. L. 17, 169 Steinitz, W. 138–9 Stief, W. 47, 49–50, 54 Stillich, O. 150 Stoff 36 Survivors (POW) 112 Syttkus, B. 52–3, 58 Tarlo, E. 13, 36, 128, 153 Tavolara, E. 93, 99 Textile Art in Traditional Culture (Textilkunst in der überlieferten Volkskultur) 140 textiles archives 36–9, 42, 60, 154 folkloric 4–7 textural ethnography 12–19 textural knowledge 42, 108, 132, 154, 158, 174 Thilenius, G. 77–8 Third Reich 51, 53–5, 112 Tietmeyer, E. 21, 36, 45, 50, 77–8, 160–1 Todorova, M. 115 Tokarczuk, O. 1, 178 Transylvania 5, 37, 105, 107–13, 115–18, 120–32 Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (Boner) 109–10 Transylvanian Saxons 107–13, 116, 118, 121–4, 129, 132 Transylvania Song (Siebenbürgenlied) 107 tulle dress 169–72 Turner, T. S. 5, 131, 153 Twain, M. 38–9 Tylor, E. B. 79

209

Ukraine 7, 55, 58, 65, 181 UNESCO World Heritage Site 181 n.1 Unio Trium Nationum (Union of the Three Nations) 111 USSR. See Soviet Union 55–6 Vestige 122–31 Viktor & Rolf by H&M wedding dress 168–72 Virchow, R. 23, 27–32, 34–42, 44, 51, 76, 100, 108, 114, 136, 140–1, 155 Völkerschauen 31 Völkisch movement 48, 51, 53–4, 180 n.4 Volksdeutsche 53, 112 Volkshochschulen 52 Volkskunde (folklore studies) 2, 28, 115, 136, 138, 154, 158, 160, 179 n.2 Volkstumarbeit 53 von Bode, W. 137, 181 n.1 von Luschan, F. 76 von Mahlsdorf, C. 182 n.2 Voss, A. 31, 180 weave/weaving 1, 11, 13–19, 22–4, 29, 37, 39, 42–62, 65–75, 82–93, 95–7, 100–2, 169, 174–5, 178 Weaving and Acting (Weben und Wirken) exhibition 52, 140 wedding dreams 168–9, 172 Węgorzewo (Angerburg) 68, 180 n.1 Weinhold, K. 31, 180 West Germany 23, 54, 107, 113–17, 122, 128, 146, 156 Westpaket 156 White Vests, Red Robes (Weiße Westen, Rote Roben) 118–20 Wild, B. 11, 121, 129–30 Windau Hometown Association (Windau Heimatortsgemeinschaft) 129 working group 142–3, 182 n.1 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) 39, 41, 89 world stage 39–41 Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 35

210

211

212