The history of the Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig stretches back more than 130 years. Founded in 1870 by a group of prominent Leipzig citizens headed by Hermann Obst, the museum was established upon the purchase of the collection of Gustav Friedrich Klemm, a Royal Saxon Advisor who had amassed one of the most important private collections of ethnographic material at that time. The museum moved out of its original home at the chemical laboratory in Liebigstrasse in 1873, and was housed in four different locations before finally coming to rest at the new Grassimuseum at Johannisplatz in 1927. The museum's collections were enlarged during that period by large and important acquisitions and donations from the German Society for Natual History and Ethnology of Eastern Asia in 1878; Adrian and Phillipp Jacobsen and Hamburg's Godeffroy Museum in 1885; Saxon geologists Alphons Stübel and Wilhem Reiss in 1887; Baron Speck von Sternburg; and collections gathered during nineteenth-century expeditions by Hans and Hermann Meyer, Leo Frobenius, Fritz Krause, and Karl Weule.
In December 1943, soon after the reopening of the museum, large parts of the building, as well as a fifth of the collection, were tragically destroyed by Allied bombing. Reconstruction and revitalization of the museum gained momentum in the 1950s, and the museum staff began to fill the gaps in the collections and commence research projects in many part of the world, some of which are ongoing today. Further increases to the collections were made through the purchase of private collections and by the assimilation of collections of other museums under state supervision.
Today, with approximately 220,000 objects from all over the world and some 100,000 photos and documents, the Museum für Völkerkunde is one of the foremost ethnological museums in Europe. The museum contains large collections of material from all the regions of Asia; the Near and Middle East; North, South, and East Africa; North and South America; and Australia and Oceania. Highlights of the museum's collections include an exceptional group of Ainu objects, one of the world's oldest collections of Fiji material, and a fine assemblage of East African Makonde masks.