Category Archives: News

News, Object of the Month

Object of the month: An Indian Tablā (dāyāṃ) in the Berlin Lautarchiv

Object of the Month 04/2023 

In addition to its core holdings of audio recordings of prisoners of war from the First World War and the collection of German dialects from the 1920s and 1930s, the Lautarchiv (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) also preserves other interesting sub-collections that have so far remained rather in the background and initially seem to have no obvious connection to the collection. Take, for example, three Indian drums.

No historical written documentation exists for these instruments. There is no entry in any inventory book that would indicate how, why and from where they came into the collection of the Lautarchiv. In terms of organology, the three drums do not form a coherent ensemble. One of these drums—an Indian tablā (dāyāṃ)—will be the focus of attention here.

Tabla
An Indian tablā (dāyāṃ) in the Berlin Lautarchiv; height 29cm.
Tabla Top View
The tablā (⌀ 20cm) viewed from the top with the characteristic black tuning paste (shāī) in the middle. Note the white areas (stains from an improper application of stickers).

About the instrument

Tablā is the name for a pair of drums played with the hands, consisting of two small kettle drums. The smaller of the two drums played with the right hand is also called dāyāṃ (literally: right), which is referred to as the “real” tablā in some publications. The larger drum played with the left hand is called bāyāṃ (literally: left). There is only a dāyāṃ in the Lautarchiv; the pair of drums is incomplete. The tablā is more than a mere “object”; it demands the respect of musicians to be treated as individuals: instrument and musician become one. The drums are placed on the floor and played cross-legged. However, it is not allowed to simply step over a tablā standing on the floor; this is considered disrespectful.

Provenance: a few tentative & speculative thoughts

Some speculative lines of thought on the provenance are outlined here due to the lack of documentation:

  • Non-returned loan?
    First of all, the speculative thought suggests itself whether it could possibly be a historical loan from the Museum of Musical Instruments SIMPK or the Ethnological Museum. This can be ruled out for the MIM due to a missing catalogue number on the instrument. The same applies to the Ethnological Museum.
  • Guest gift?
    According to Dieter Mehnert, who was responsible for the collection in the 1990s, the drums had been “brought” from India before the 1960s. Further circumstances were not known. So whether it was a guest gift to the university deposited in the Lautarchiv must remain open.
  • Age of the instrument?
    Even though the instrument probably came to the Lautarchiv before 1960, this does not allow us to draw any conclusions about the age of the instrument. It could be considerably older. The age could only be reliably determined by a dendrochronological examination (a dating by means of a tree ring examination of the wood used), not by mere visual inspection.

Within the non-material context of the collection

Although no direct connection of the tablā to the other holdings of the Lautarchiv can be reconstructed, the tablā in the Lautarchiv by no means stands in a culturally isolated space. Interesting cross-references exist within the collection that lend a non-material context to the fact that there is a tablā in the Lautarchiv. Consider that the Nobel laureate Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur (রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর,1861–1941) gave a speech and sang a song at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität in June 1921. This audio recording is now in the collection of the Lautarchiv (shelf mark AUT 48). Whether it might even have been a gift from Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur cannot yet be determined on the basis of current knowledge. A song sung in the Tamiḻ language (தமிழ்) by Rājamāṇikkam (born around 1902) on 28 September 1926, accompanied by tablā (shelf mark LA 733), is unfortunately among the losses of the Lautarchiv.

Symbolic power of a Tablā in the Berlin Lautarchiv

Last but not least, the tablā also stands symbolically “in the midst” of the POW recordings of Indian colonial soldiers sent by the United Kingdom against Germany in the First World War. One of the most famous cyclically repeated rhythmic structures in North Indian classical music is the so-called Teental (तीन ताल). Its rhythmically balanced structure in 16 drum syllables (bol), which in turn are subdivided into 4×4 syllables, was considered a symbolic force for peace by none other than Ravi Shankar (1920–2012). It is up to everyone to decide whether the existence of a tablā in the collection of the Lautarchiv, “in the midst” of the audio recordings of prisoners of the First World War, can also assume and unfold such a symbolic power of peace today.

Text and photos: Christopher Li, Head of Collection of Sound Archive
News, Object of the Month

Object of the month: Historical drawing of a new horse stable building

Object of the Month 03/2023 

House 9 on the North Campus once served as the equine clinic of the former Prussian Royal Veterinary School, which was one of the leading training and research centres for veterinary medicine in the young German Empire. The northern part of the building was built in 1836 by Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse, the southern part in 1874 by Julius Emmerich as an extension. A drawing from the plan archive of the Technical Department provides information on the construction of the extension.
HU, Campus North, House 9
Campus North, House 9, Photo: Kerstin Hinrichs, 14 March 2023
The drawing by the architect Julius Emmerich shows the front of an elongated single-storey stable building with a high roof, framed by stair towers and transoms on a scale of 1:100. The centre is emphasised by a risalit with a wood-decorated roof gable, and three window axes each on the left and right. On the ground floor, double-wing windows form a line with the skylights and thus vertically divide the cube. In the gable of the risalite, at the level of the attic, a double-leaf slatted door through which straw and hay could be stored in the attic. The towers served as access to the work and living rooms of the animal keepers in the transverse bays. The shape of the roof, the profiled beam heads and brackets, the accentuation of the cornices by moulded stones as well as the alternating coloured brick bands are depicted in great detail in the drawing. Emmerich’s design borrows from Schinkel’s designs for Prussian country house buildings. Trees and bushes frame the planned building and refer to the park character of the site.
project new horse stable
"Project for the construction of a new horse stable on the site of the Thierarzneischule", 59.8 cm x 45.4 cm, drawing, ink, wash on cardboard

The plan served as an appendix to the cost estimate for the building of 17 August 1873 and was submitted by Emmerich and countersigned by master builder F. Schulze on 12 September of the same year.
At that time, Emmerich was in the Prussian civil service and was in charge of the planning. On the basis of the other autographs, the remarks on the plan and the accompanying signatures, it is possible to trace the usual approval procedure for new buildings that was customary for the city of Berlin in the young Empire. Government building officer Ludwig Giersberg, an employee of the Ministry of Construction, Military, Trade and Finance, Department of Construction, confirmed the accuracy of the plan document. From 1866 onwards, Giersberg was entrusted in the Ministry with the preparation of expert opinions and the examination of building projects of outstanding importance in public construction. His signature under the plan, dated 27 April 1875, confirmed the planning for the new stables for the veterinary school. The text “Neuer Stall der Medizin. Klinik” using a blue pen probably goes back to the planning for necessary new buildings for the veterinary school at the beginning of 1908. At that time, 10,000 horses per year were already being treated in the existing buildings.

After the equine clinic was completed in 1839, the building was used as an animal stable and warehouse until the veterinarians moved to Dahlem in 1991. In 2014, extensive renovation and conversion work took place. Today, there are laboratory and seminar rooms on the ground floor and offices of the Institute of Biology on the upper floor.

Author: Kerstin Hinrichs, Technical Department

Further links (only in German):

Bauakten- und Planarchiv der Technischen Abteilung

inherit, News, Project

BMBF to fund a new Käte Hamburger Kolleg at the HU from 2024 onwards

“InHerit” – Heritage in Transformation

What shapes society? What constitutes identity or difference? How can we define belonging, ownership or the changing relationship between history, present and future? Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU) from 2024, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study “Heritage in Transformation” (InHerit) revolves around these central questions of our time. InHerit will be led by art historian Eva Ehninger and HZK director Sharon Macdonald.

Together with international fellows, heritage will be analyzed as a pluralizing, ongoing activity; heritage’s influence on changing social relations will be a key focus of examination; and the transformation and expansion of heritage itself, through innovative knowledge exchange formats, will be actively pursued. The resulting new form of heritage research positions the humanities at the centre of addressing fundamental global transformation processes, leading to the reshaping of the humanities’ own epistemological frames of reference.

InHerit’s core research themes are based on these paradigm shifts:
(1) the decentring of the West or Global North;
(2) the decentring of the human, and accompanying focus on connections to, and interdependencies with, nature; and
(3) the transformation of attributions of value, especially in relation to changes in reflections on the parameters of collecting.

InHerit’s emphatically transdisciplinary, practice-oriented approach, in which the humanities are central, will tackle urgent social, cultural, political and environmental challenges, and, thus, directly address the key idea of the BMBF programme “Understanding Society – Shaping the Future.”

About the Käte Hamburger Kolleg

Globalisation, law, religion, work or the environment – with the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, the BMBF offers outstanding scholars the freedom to conduct research on a broad spectrum of social issues in the humanities since 2008. As Centres for Advanced Study, the Käte Hamburger Kollegs give scholars in the humanities and social sciences the freedom to work on topics of their choice, free from many of the obligations of everyday academic life, together with fellows from all over the world who are invited to Germany for up to twelve months.

Further information

Read the BMBF announcement about the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (BMBF, 06.02.2023)
Read the HU announcement about the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (HU, 06.02.2023)
Report on the application process for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (HU, 06.03.2023)

Contact

Eva Ehninger (eva.ehninger@hu-berlin.de)
Sharon Macdonald (sharon.macdonald@hu-berlin.de)

Copyright: Eva Ehninger: Liquid Blues Production/Boris Hars-Tschachotin; Sharon Macdonald: Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Sven Müller
News, Object of the Month

Object of the month: Model of the Aletsch Glacier

Object of the Month 02/2023

How a Swiss craftsman created the model of the Aletsch Glacier and it came to the university

A relief of the Swiss Alps, 14 square metres in size, was once one of the main attractions of the Kunstkammer in the Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace). Assembled from ten sections, it provided an overview of mountain ranges and valleys in previously unseen accuracy. A section of the model was found and recognised in a database a few years ago by a doctoral student at the Institute of Geography. It is now in the Humboldt Forum and can be viewed there.

On 10 May 2017, a small group of scientists from various disciplines met in a room on the top floor of the Institute of Geography in Adlershof. They wanted to check whether the art historian Eva Dolezel was correct in her assumption about a topographical model. Dolezel had written her dissertation on the historical Kunstkammer of Berlin and in the process had come across parts of an outstanding object that drew Berliners to the former palace where the Kunstkammer was housed over two hundred years ago: a relief of the Swiss Alps. Evidence shows that Alexander von Humboldt was also very taken with the model, which consisted of ten parts and was about 14 square metres in size.

How the relief was created and came to be in the Kunstkammer

The work was created by Joachim Eugen Müller (1752-1833), a craftsman from the canton of Obwalden (Part of Switzerland), whose knowledge of the Swiss Alps was outstanding and who possessed an incredible spatial imagination to form a topographically almost exact image of the mountains in miniature without any existing map material. And he didn’t just create one. Many wanted such a work of art at the time. Among the many, and the few who could also afford it financially, was King Frederick William III of Prussia. Thus, in the course of the first quarter of the 19th century, a relief in matching individual parts came to Berlin and was placed in the Kunstkammer there and was open to the public.

The relief was made of a plaster mixture, enclosed in a wooden frame and painted on the surface with green for woods and meadows or white for snow and ice according to the natural local conditions. Towns, rivers, lakes and glaciers were visible. What remained hidden from the view of the observer were metal pins that Müller attached to the wooden panel at the point where he later shaped the higher peaks. This detail allows us today to identify the model as the “real Müller” (Fig. 1).

Model of the upper Rhone valley with Aletsch glacier.
Experts inspect the model of the upper Rhone Valley with the Aletsch Glacier on 10 May 2017. The hand of the Swiss relief expert Oscar Wüest, who verified the model, can be seen: the small red cone contains a magnet. This is attached to a peak of the miniature Alps. An important indication that the object is indeed part of the historical relief.

From the database via the doctoral thesis to the Humboldt Forum

With the dissolution of the Kunstkammer, the trace of the relief was lost. In 2010, a project was launched at the HU to record material models in university collections nationwide. In the process, a mountain relief called “Model of the Upper Rhone Valley with Aletsch Glacier” was added to the publicly accessible database. Eva Dolezel discovered it there and put one and one together. Her conclusion: the model in the Geographical Institute must very probably be part of the historical Alpine relief in the Berlin Kunstkammer. And this assumption was ultimately confirmed.

The subsequent attention led to a second career for the relief. Today it is on display in the Humboldt Laboratory, but it is also part of the exhibition “Traces. History of Place” exhibition at the Humboldt Forum. It can be visited during the usual opening hours. The relief can serve as a good example of the limitless potential of many previously undiscovered objects in university collections. And the group of researchers mentioned at the beginning has not yet given up hope that perhaps more pieces of the former Swiss Alpine relief will be discovered.

Relief with the replica of the Aletsch Glacier.
View of the relief with the replica of the Aletsch glacier in the centre of the picture and various other landscape features, such as lakes, as they appeared two hundred years ago.

Text and Photos: Oliver Zauzig

Further links (only in German):

Artikel: Ein wiederentdeckter Königsschatz

Teilstück des Alpenmodells im Humboldtforum

Teilstück des Alpenmodells in der Datenbank

News, Publication

New volume in the series „Bildwelten des Wissens“

Bildwelten des Wissens – volume 18.
Museale Reste. 

Edited by Nina Samuel and Felix Sattler. 

Remnants are a challenge for the museum as an institution. They are ambiguous figures, and their attributions open up and thus contribute to transcending the taxonomic, disciplinary, architectural, and institutional boundaries of museums. They can be found everywhere—in exhibition spaces as well as storage depots, and in laboratories just as in the administration. In each of these contexts, there are respectively different forms of professional self-conception, knowledge, and practical handling that determine the status of remnants.

The volume contributes to specifying terms such as remnant, trash, traces, and boundaries more precisely within the context of the museum and to reassessing them for debates in conservation, curating, art history, and museum anthropology.

Available as Open Access publication (PDF)

Museale Reste Publikation
News, Object of the Month

Object of the Month: Lise Meitner Monument by Anna Franziska Schwarzbach

Object of the Month 01/2023

Lise Meitner Monument

Since 2014, Lise Meitner faces Unter den Linden; on the other side of the cour d'honneur of the main building, Theodor Mommsen and Max Planck face her. The monument to Hermann von Helmholtz completes the historical series, which is broken up and continued both in terms of contemporary history and aesthetics by Lise Meitner's representation - no longer larger than life and in a space-consuming pose, but set back and asymmetrically on the plinth. The bronze monument to Lise Meitner (1878-1968) is the youngest in the university's cour d'honneur and the only one to date to honour a female scientist. Lise Meitner (1878-1968) combines many special features in her scientific biography: she was the second woman to receive a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1906; in 1913 she was the first woman to become a scientific member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society; she was the first woman to work as an assistant to Max Planck; in 1922 she became the first female physicist in Prussia to habilitate at the University of Berlin; and finally, in 1926, she was appointed as the first associate professor for experimental nuclear physics. In retrospect, she herself describes the fact that she took her work with the students very seriously as "a great human responsibility for our young colleagues, with whom we are together all day and for whose overall human development everything we do and say can have an influence".

Lise Meitner Monument
Lise Meitner Monument
Lise Meitner Monument
Lise Meitner Monument
Lise Meitner Monument
Lise Meitner Monument

Lise Meitner Monument

Nuclear power for peaceful use

Even before her theoretical interpretation of nuclear fission in 1939, she received the first of a total of four nominations for the Nobel Prize in 1919 – but she did not receive the Nobel Prize itself. This honour was bestowed on Otto Hahn in 1945, with whom Lise Meitner worked and researched together for decades – and whom she sometimes referred to, self-confidently teasingly, as “chicken”. She became known to the scientific community early on and met Marie Curie and Albert Einstein personally. As a Jew, she was forced to give up her scientific work by the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which was passed in 1933. In 1938, she was able to emigrate to Sweden. There, from 1947 to 1960, she held a research professorship and was head of the nuclear physics department at the Stockholm Institute of Technology. From then on, she devoted herself not to the construction of the atomic bomb, but to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. After her retirement in 1960, she moved to Cambridge, where she died eight years later, having received many international honours and awards.

Monument with signature, nuclear reaction and calculation

The Berlin sculptor Anna Franziska Schwarzbach won the European art competition with her design for the Lise Meitner Monument. The site also almost occupies the place where the monument to Heinrich von Treitschke once stood – the historian who triggered the Berlin anti-Semitism controversy with his sentence “The Jews are our misfortune” and whose monument was finally removed after being moved by the National Socialists in 1951.
Lise_Meitner
Anna Franziska Schwarzbach
Schwarzbach contrasts the relationship between the figure and the plinth: on the base plate lies a plinth with various cuts and cracks that are associatively linked to the fractures in Meitner’s biography. The portrait-like figure itself stands somewhat apart, at once delicate and small and prominent, representing marginalisation as much as merit. On the front of the plinth is Lise Meitner’s signature, on the smooth left side surface a drawing of the nuclear reaction and fragments of a calculation. Thus the attributes have also migrated to the plinth and are not attached to the figure. Criticised as decorative, following female stereotypes and lacking the potential for irritation as an impulse to reflection, the monument is subordinate to the coherent appearance of the Court of Honour. On the everyday walk into the main building of the university, the Lise Meitner Monument nevertheless evokes German history, university and scientific history as well as questions of equal rights – whether it is an anachronism should be decided by each:r.

Author: Christina Kuhli, Custodian of the HU
Art Collection / Custody of the Humboldt University

Photos: Matthias Heyde

Colloquium, Event, News

HZK-CARMAH Colloquium – The Phyletic Museum

What time: 06 February 2023, 2 p.m. right on time.
Where: The event will take place at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (Haus 3, Gerlachbau next to the Tieranatomische Theater, Campus Nord, Philippstraße 13) and virtually (access data for the video conference will be provided on request by email to oliver.zauzig@hu-berlin.de).

The Phyletic Museum in Jena was founded in 1907 by Ernst Haeckel, who made Charles Darwin’s theories known in Germany. The main theme of the museum is accordingly evolution. In the museum, living and dead animals are related to people of the past and present. The film project accompanies the work of the museum educator and shows her practices in dealing with objects, her interpretation of the (biological) world and the communication of biological knowledge to the public and the student body. The focus is on the history and use of the teaching collection of the Institute of Special Zoology at the University of Jena, which the museum houses – and the small and large irritations that its objects trigger in viewers.

Wolfram Höhne is an author and filmmaker. He works at the interface of art and cultural heritage research. He is currently the academic coordinator of the research training group “Identity and Heritage” at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Technical University Berlin.

Larissa Förster is a cultural anthropologist working on the (colonial) history of museum and university collections, provenance and restitution research, and questions of postcolonial memory culture. She is an associate member of CARMAH. Together with the historian Holger Stoecker, she wrote the book “Haut, Haar und Knochen. Koloniale Spuren in naturkundlichen Sammlungen der Universität Jena” [engl. transl. “Skin, hair and bones. Colonial Traces in Natural History Collections at the University of Jena”] (2016).

Michael Markert is a historian of science and works on natural science teaching collections and their objects – zoological wall charts, anatomical models, physical apparatus – as well as related topics such as collection ethics and digitisation. He is currently a project manager developing workflows for enriching museum metadata at the Thuringian University and State Library.

The film and lecture are in German.

News, Publication

Margareta von Oswald: Working Through Colonial Collections. An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections

What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections.

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.

With a preface by Sharon Macdonald.

Ebook available in Open Access.

Information, News

Resonance Room as part of the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at the Gropius Bau

The Resonance Room shares local knowledge and experiences of mental health in Berlin.

Since September 2021, a number of projects have developed that question the understanding of and approach to mental health in this city: How do individual health and society interact? How does history affect the present? What forms of care, solidarity and community are designed and practised in urban society?

The resonance of different voices from the neighbourhood, academia and civic society can be experienced here. As a meeting place, the Resonance Room gathers these voices and engages them in dialogue.

The Resonance Room was developed by Dr. Margareta von Oswald, Mindscapes Curatorial Research Fellow (HZK, CARMAH, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Diana Mammana, Project Manager Neighborhood Exchange at the Gropius Bau.

Mindscapes is Wellcome’s international cultural program on mental health.

Sound Archive, News, Publication

Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive. Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive’s Acoustic Legacies by Irene Hilden

Irene Hilden’s PhD thesis on the Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) is now available, published by Leuven University Press.

The book focuses on sound recordings produced under colonial conditions. It examines sound objects and listening practices, revealing the “absent presences” of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories.

Irene Hilden is postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Ebook also available in Open Access.