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
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Goldstein, Rachel Florence, "Das Berliner Schloss and Humboldt Forum: A Contemporary Repository of Cultural Identity" (2016). Art History Master's Qualifying Papers. 15.
https://ir.stthomas.edu/cas_arthistory_mat/15