Sammlerin, Ethnographin, Kolonialaktivistin

Neue Erkenntnisse zur Mikronesien-Sammlung von Antonie Brandeis

Abstract

Several museums in Germany and the US hold the ethnographic collections of Antonie Thawka Brandeis (1868–1945), the daughter of the famous ‘Arabian princess’, Emily Salme Ruete. Between 1898 and 1904, Brandeis spent six years on Jaluit as the wife of the German imperial governor of the Marshall Islands, where she became an avid collector, photographer, and ethnographic observer. As an aspiring autodidact, she was eager to adhere to academic standards of collecting and even studied anthropology with the German museum anthropologist Felix von Luschan. After her return to Germany, she became a committed representative of the German colonial women’s movement, produced a sizeable body of ethnographic and procolonial writing and contributed to a number of colonial exhibitions. Based on ongoing research into the provenance of her collection at the Museum Natur und Mensch in Freiburg, this article presents new insights into her collecting activities in the Marshall Islands and Nauru, drawing especially on a recently discovered unpublished written memoir owned by her family.