Department

Art History

Date

12-2016

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Art History (M.A.)

Type of Paper/Work

Qualifying paper

Advisors

Dr. Jayme Yahr, Ph.D., Chair Dr. Victoria Young, Ph.D. Dr. Michelle Nordtorp-­‐Madson, Ph.D.

Abstract

The collecting history of the Brandenburg-­‐Prussian Kunstkammer began in the late
seventeenth century after the original sixteenth-­‐century collection was destroyed during the Thirty Years War. The ethnographic objects that were collected over five hundred years by the rulers of Brandenburg and Prussia with a Western purview were originally housed within the Berliner Schloss as a part of the Brandenburg-­‐Prussian Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. Torn down in 1950 by the East German government, the Berliner Schloss is being rebuilt, with a projected opening date of 2019. The new Berliner Schloss will contain the Humboldt Forum, a global, cultural museum that will house the non-­‐Western ethnographic collections that were part of the original Brandenburg-­‐Prussian Kunstkammer. The collections that will be housed in the new Berliner Schloss will be encoded with cultural value and will position Germany within a global context, rather than retain the country’s historic identity as a harbinger of empire.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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