Museums - Museum für Völkerkunde

The history of the Museum für Völkerkunde traces back to the year 1560 and the kunstkammer of Kurfürst August von Sachsen, which contained some of the earliest documented objects to ultimately become part of the museum's present collection. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries von Sachsen's collection was enlarged, and was eventually organized and described in an Inventarien. This group of objects was assimilated into the holdings of the anthropological institutions burgeoning in Dresden during the nineteenth century, most notably the Königliches Zoologisches und Anthropologisch-Ethnographisches Museum, where it was greatly enlarged. The greatest contribution during this period came from Arthur Baessler, who donated 5,000 objects collected during his travels across the Pacific and in Africa, including important artifacts from the kingdom of Benin. After being partially destroyed during Allied bombings of Dresden in WWII, the museum's collection was brought under the protection of the newly independent Museum für Völkerkunde, which was installed in the city's Japanische Palais in 1954. The collection efforts of the museum were later widened to a global scope, and a modern storage facility was constructed in 1999.
Today, the collections comprise some 90,000 ethnographic objects from all over the world. Archival holdings number approximately 70,000 images related to anthropology and ethnology.