Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-8r8nv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T02:48:39.332Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Invention of the Multicultural Museum in the Late Nineteenth Century: Ethnography and the Presentation of Cultural Diversity in Central Europe*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2015

Reinhard Johler
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Information

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 46 , April 2015 , pp. 51 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2015 

Anton O. Zeithammer's lecture titled “Ideas on the Establishment of an Austrian Ethnographic Museum,”Footnote 1 held on 20 December 1859 at the “Meeting of the Imperial-Royal Geographic Society of Vienna” (and later published in the “Reports of the Imperial-Royal Geographic Society” in 1860), has largely been forgotten today and has played no significant role in the current historiography of museums. There are likely several reasons for this. For one, Zeithammer was merely a high school teacher in Pest at the time; only later was he elected to the Imperial Parliament in Vienna, where he advocated for the Bohemian Compromise between Czech and German nationalists in 1891 and published two summary books on the topic. Also, the years 1859 and 1860 were difficult ones for the Austrian Empire. The battle of Solferino was lost, and with it Austria's Lombard territories, the constitutional debate remained unresolved, and a compromise with Hungary had yet to be reached. Zeithammer's museum recommendations thus came during the final gasps of neoabsolutism, and his ideas reflected a unified Austrian Empire. With the Compromise of 1867, however, Zeithammer's conception of an ethnographic museum was suddenly outdated.

Despite this fact, Zeithammer's ideas deserve a closer look. They corresponded closely with repeated suggestions for the construction of an Imperial Museum on the Ringstraße in Vienna, although such a museum was never realized. Zeithammer's idea differed from others in that he conceived of such a museum in Austrian ethnographic terms. Although an imperial-royal ethnographic collection already existed in Vienna at the time, it was largely filled with objects collected from expeditions outside of Europe and was barely known to the public. Zeithammer's concept also preceded the opening of many other large museums in Europe. Thus, his idea was in fact a new one: that an ethnographic museum for Austria should be built in Vienna.

The desire for the establishment of a museum—to be administered by the Geographical Society—was closely connected to increasing skepticism about the industrial age at the time and to corresponding fears about the demise of so-called native national costumes, national cuisine, and the like. But it was equally important for Zeithammer that ethnographic knowledge about the peoples of Austria would lead to more learning about their common bonds. He thus sought to restrict the activities of his ethnographic museum to the territories of the Austrian state, and he also sought to delineate carefully the types of exhibitions it should display. He foresaw two main divisions in which one, the somatological division, would be oriented toward natural history and anthropology, and the other was to have a different, much broader ethnographic orientation. Within these two divisions, Zeithammer imagined eight subdivisions, which together would represent something like the collective canon of ethnographic-folklore research and exhibition. Exhibits were to range from cartographic ethnographic overviews to costumes and architectural styles, to customs, morals, religions, languages, and folk crafts. As undeveloped as this suggestion seems—Zeithammer had given relatively little thought to the representation of the many peoples—the goal of the Austrian ethnographic museum was clear:

According to the principles discussed here, I believe that an ethnographic national museum should be established that significantly supports and facilitates the scientific creation of knowledge about the ethnographic conditions of the Austrian peoples, initiates and expands the collection of ethnographic information, and even leads to practical implications for some questions in governing and legislation.Footnote 2

In this conception, the term “ethnographic museum” referred to the ethnic diversity of a uniformly governed imperial state. It thus anticipated what was later conceived of as “unity in diversity” in the Dual Monarchy (and in modern Europe). After the constitutional Compromise of 1867, however, a shared depiction of the Habsburg monarchy was—with but a few exceptions—hardly possible. Rare exceptions included the published compendium initiated by Crown Prince Rudolf, titled The Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image, Footnote 3 which was edited by two separately operating offices in Austria and Hungary, and a 1906 work by the Austrian Engineer and Architects Association The Farmhouse in Austria-Hungary and its Borderlands.Footnote 4 It is thus little wonder that Zeithammer's Austrian ethnographic museum was so quickly forgotten.

Revisiting his ideas today, however, helps us recognize an independent and barely recognized development in the museum landscape of Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. The Habsburg Central European ExperienceFootnote 5 made ethnographic museums the museums of the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse region. The invention of this museum type was closely connected to the establishment of ethnography as a scientific discipline at the time. More and more, ethnographic research did not simply mean describing differences between groups; in truth, it often meant creating such distinctions in the first place—including in museums and exhibitions.Footnote 6 Thus, the ethnographic museums founded in the Habsburg Monarchy can, with good reason, be understood as precursors to modern multicultural museums.

National Museums versus Ethnographic Museums

Sharon Macdonald has argued that museums were both a symptom of and an instrument in the formation of the modern nation-state. They served to create a key technique of classification and thus played a central role in the nationalist quest for order and mapped boundaries.Footnote 7 The museums of the Habsburg monarchy also played a role in this development of national museums of Europe, but they were also forced to pursue another—what I call ethnographic—way. The early history of these museums is outlined by Marlies RafflerFootnote 8 in her depiction of the National and Landes-Museums of the Habsburg monarchy. At the time, the actual meanings of the terms Landes- and “national museum”Footnote 9 were particularly flexible, as evidenced by the establishment of the Hungarian National Museum in Pest in 1802Footnote 10 and the Bruckenthalmuseum in Hermannstadt (today Sibiu) in 1802/03, the 1811 opening of the Joanneum in Graz, the 1817 founding of the Landes-Museum for Moravia and Silesia in Brno, and the opening of the “Vaterländisches Museum of the Bohemian Kingdom” to the public in Prague in 1818. These museums—and other Landes-Museums opened shortly afterwards in Ljubljana, Innsbruck, and Linz—had patriotic goals and concentrated on the depiction of the historical developments of their respective lands. Footnote 11 Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, such museums also began to provide the context for the first ethnographic surveys and collections. These, in turn, became the material basis for the large state exhibitions of the 1880s and 1890s in L'viv/L'wów, Prague, and Krakow, and led to the foundation of numerous ethnographic museums prior to the turn of the century, particularly those in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. For the most part, these exhibitions and museums sought to illustrate the ethnic-cultural diversity of peasant populations and—in the language of the nineteenth century—insistently maintained that there was a reciprocal relationship between neighboring ethnicities, even as these groups increasingly had serious national, political conflicts with one another.Footnote 12

These museums and exhibitions represent a distinct and independent contribution to anthropology and ethnography during the museum era that began in Europe, starting in the 1870s.Footnote 13 In France and England, and even in Germany, large museums that focused on non-European cultures and peoples were established. Although ethnological-anthropological museums, called Völkerkunde-Museums in German, were also established in the Habsburg monarchy (as they were in all of Central Eastern Europe), they played a less important role there than did the ethnographic (Volkskunde) museums, which focused on cultural diversity within the multinational empire.

In my opinion, this touches upon a second distinctive feature of the time. In the nation-states of Western Europe, national museums predominated, whereas ethnographic museums were (admittedly to a varying extent) the museums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the empires of East Central Europe. This development was no coincidence, and these institutions became experts in the depiction of cultural diversity. In any case, the predominance of these museums does not represent a cultural lag between East Central European exhibitions and museums and their Western counterparts, nor are they a demonstration of the failure to establish imperial publics, as has recently been claimed.Footnote 14 Instead, they represent an interesting and distinct form of museum development within and outside of the Habsburg monarchy that must be distinguished from the Western European traditions.

Ethnography in the Habsburg Monarchy

In 2009, Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen stated that “processes of assimilation and mixture between empires and national states” occurred in the nineteenth century, thereby attempting to avoid the narrow approaches to research on the multiethnic great empires of Europe that are common today.Footnote 15 Their argumentation parallels that of Graz historian Moritz Csáky, who has pushed back against the image propagated by national historiography of the Habsburg monarchy as an anachronistic structure without a chance of surviving. On the contrary, Csáky believes that Austria-Hungary—as a state and with its crown lands and territories—not only mirrored the diversity of the entire Central European region, but also became a productive “laboratory for ethnic and cultural diversity,”Footnote 16 because of the “constant presence of difference,”Footnote 17 throughout the monarchy.

Indeed, the composition of the population within the Habsburg monarchy was a highly complex mixture of religions, languages, and ethnicities.Footnote 18 Even after the Compromise of 1867, neither the German-speaking population in the Cisleithanian region nor the Hungarian population of the Transleithanian region (despite intense efforts at assimilation in the latter) formed an absolute majority of the population.Footnote 19 It is not without reason that Hungary was called a “true miniature Europe” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a place where, as the polyhistorian Johann von Csaplovics put it, “almost every European tribe and language and religion and occupation and level of civilization, and finally all of the ways of life, traditions, and customs,” found a home.Footnote 20 At the end of the nineteenth century, Austria was described with almost the exact same words: in a catalog published in 1897 for the opening of the “Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art,” ethnographer Michael Haberlandt wrote that in Austria “live a colorful abundance of ethnic groups which represent in a single extract the great ethnographic diversity of Europe.”Footnote 21

According to Viennese social and cultural anthropologist Andre Gringrich, this diversity within the monarchy enabled the “academic world” to conduct a unique form of research.Footnote 22 Such research played a critical role in the formation and European propagation of a new discipline: ethnography.Footnote 23 Indeed, as Justin Stagl has shown, the very term “ethnography” originated in Gottingen around 1770 and referred to “German contact with the Slavic peoples.” As an “inland nation without colonies, but with linguistic enclaves spread across Europe as far as Russia. ... Germans were less [interested] in overseas primitives than they were in the less developed ethnic groups of Eurasia and the pre-German, pre-Christian, native peoples of Germany.”Footnote 24

In Hungary, the term “ethnography” was made popular by Pál Hunfalvy's “Magyarország Ethnographiája,” published in 1876. This work, which concentrated on the Hungarian Territories, was devoted to a linguistic-historical description of the “nature” of the “tribes that live in the territories of Hungarian St. Stefan.”Footnote 25 Hunfalvy came from a German-speaking Zipser family. One of his major achievements was the 1889 foundation of the Hungarian Society for Ethnography, where he served as director until his death in 1891. Hunfalvy made the construction of an independent, national ethnographic museum a primary mission of the society,Footnote 26 despite the fact that the Hungarian National Museum already had a cultural-anthropologically focused Ethnographic Division that was established in 1872. The Hungarian Society for Ethnography sought to remove this division from the museum, ultimately without institutional success. In 1905, museum curator János Jankó provided a detailed explanation for the desired split:

But if we also have to abdicate that our exotic and international collections rival those of other countries, then the cultural-historical development of our nation demands that we resolutely collect the fruits of this developmental process, the so-called Ethnographica, in a treasure chamber, thus securing an ethnographic collection for our nation the likes of which the western states, as a natural consequence of their conditions, can no longer create. In this field, our first priority is to illustrate the living conditions of the currently living races of people in our fatherland through the ethnographic objects of the individual peoples and regions.Footnote 27

Despite a significant public presence—for example, through the “Ethnographic Village” of the Hungarian “Millennium Exhibition” in 1896—the Hungarian Society for Ethnography was unsuccessful in obtaining its own independent museum. Instead, it remained associated with the non-European collections of the National MuseumFootnote 28 and thus differentiated itself institutionally from the museum development in the Austrian half of the monarchy. There, the term “ethnography” was closely associated with a historically conceived statistics and the two-volume work “Ethnography of the Austrian Monarchy,” published in 1857 by Karl Freiherr von Czoernig.Footnote 29 The later development of Austrian Volkskunde in the 1890s also sought to relate itself closely to this version of Austrian Völkerkunde.Footnote 30 At the same time, however, the term “ethnography” was used in Austria to describe non-European cultural-anthropology (ethnology) as popularized, for example, by the linguist Friedrich Müller. In 1868, Müller wrote an ethnographic report on the Novara circumnavigation of the globe,Footnote 31 and in 1873 he published his standard work General Ethnography.Footnote 32

In Vienna, an ethnographic collection had existed since the beginning of the nineteenth century—not least as a result of the purchase of the Cook Collection at that time. And while the Novara Commission's recommendation for the establishment of an independent ethnographic museum was largely disregarded, an Anthropological-Ethnographic Department was established in the k.k. Natural History Museum in 1876 and headed by its director Ferdinand von Hochstetter.Footnote 33 After Hochstetter's death, the department was directed by the geologist and scientific autodidact Franz Heger and was significantly expanded by the ethnographica assembled and collected for the World Fair at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 34 With the opening of the “Natural History Museum” in 1889, the department and its researchers Moritz Hoernes, Wilhelm Hein, and Michael Haberlandt were poised to become a hotbed of ethnography, both in research as well as in museum presentations. Still, the question of the meaning and content of a “domestic ethnography” remained controversial, not in the least because of the personal animosities that existed within the department.Footnote 35

To clarify the situation, Heger wrote about his conception of the future of the ethnographic museums in an 1896 Festschrift for Adolf Bastian. According to Heger, the ethnographic museums owed, “in most cases, their existence primarily to the increased interest that people have shown in the last few decades for the life and products of primitive people.” But with the “advancement of science,” research on “halfway civilized cultures” had moved to the fore. Now, there were “the beginnings of ethnographic collections devoted to the lower classes of European society,” which in his opinion would cause ethnography to take on a strong cultural-historical orientation.Footnote 36

In Vienna, these ideas had a concrete background. In 1894/95, Michael Haberlandt and Wilhelm Hein had founded an association (Verein für österreichische Volkskunde), a journal (Zeitschrift für österreichische Volkskunde), and the Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art (Museum für österreichische Volkskunde).Footnote 37 The use of the term Volkskunde enabled them to distinguish themselves from ethnography, despite the fact that the museum in Vienna saw its mission in terms of comparative research that focused primarily on the Austrian parts of the monarchy, but also took the European-wide Völkerkunde into consideration.Footnote 38 This approach was similar to one suggested by the Swiss Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer for a new type of folklore museum. He had juxtaposed research into national-tribal peoples with comparative European research, thus giving the term “Museum for Ethnology” a European turn.Footnote 39

The ethnographic museums discussed here stood for exactly this idea. And although they followed the establishment of large museums in London, Paris, and New York, their adherence to a Europeanized ethnology changed the content of their exhibitions in an original way. Although the Musée d'Ethnographie, which opened in Paris in 1878, had a small “Salle d'Europe”Footnote 40 (mostly devoted to Bretagne), the real continuation of the idea—the application of a European ethnology in museums—was realized in the Habsburg monarchy and in East Central Europe in general. The reason for this was simple: the unification of multinational empires, themselves composed of multicultural regions of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, promoted the development of particularly ethnographic museums—that is, of museums that focused on diversity and comparison, and which saw their mission in performing difference.Footnote 41

It is thus no coincidence that this type of museum and, to a lesser extent, this type of exhibition was dominant in these regions up until World War I. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has explained, “ethnographic artifacts” are always “objects of ethnography” and can thus only be created by “ethnographers,” so the demand for ethnographers—and primarily for multilingual Völkerkundler as opposed to nationalist-minded Volkskundler—was particularly high. In turn, their depictions led to a dominant and specifically archaic image of Central Eastern Europe.Footnote 42 The Balkans and Eastern Europe were often described as “museums of peoples” in reference to both industrial development and the diversity of the population. In this way, the exhibitions and objects displayed in ethnographic museums reflected the cultural reality of the time.

At the same time, another argument—also suggested by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett—is important. In contrast to historical or art-historical museums, ethnographic museums create their own objects. In a complex process of sorting, coding, and aestheticizing, mostly banal everyday objects become highly meaningful museum pieces. Occasionally, these objects even find their way back into the normal world, for example through the promotion of cottage industries. As George W. Stocking has shown,Footnote 43 the objects collected by ethnographic museums tend to come from particular areas of “cultural lag” and are transformed in the museum into material textsFootnote 44 —that is, into texts that have a special authenticity, credibility, and multivocality because of their material nature. In this case, the collected and displayed ethnographic artifacts had a special meaning. For the ethnographers, the artifacts had been shaped by a collective, primitivistic European substrate and represented diverse and reciprocal cultural relationships. At the same time, these artifacts could also be—and, after the turn of the century, increasingly were—seen to have national connotations.Footnote 45

Overall, such an evolutionary description of the material world was no compliment to the cultures represented in the museums and focused on economic backwardness and absent social developments. In ethnographic explanations, however, this handicap of technical underdevelopment became a bonus for cultural authenticity. And, in a way, this interpretation turned the European map, and especially the European ethnographical museum landscape, on its head. Here, Stockholm and Moscow, Budapest and Vienna, and L'viv and Prague led the way. Even institutions in Hermannstadt, Sarajevo, and Innsbruck moved to the forefront in the foundation of ethnographic museums. These institutions were not stragglers, but rather museological forerunners.

Still, over the last decade of the nineteenth century, a shift began to take place based on the radically different structures that existed within the Habsburg monarchy. After the passage of the nationality law of 1868, the Kingdom of Hungary saw itself as a Magyar national state, and the increasing primacy of the Magyar language led to a more nationalist orientation of ethnographic museums in Hungary. This development clearly contrasted to that which occurred in the Cisleithanian parts of the monarchy, where the Constitution of 1867 codified an “ethnicity factor”Footnote 46 that would have a lasting effect on the multicultural development of ethnographic museums. These differences in the imperial and nationalist interests between various museums could be seen even in relatively minor events.

The Excursion of the “German and Viennese Anthropological Society” to Budapest in 1889

From the 5th to the 10th of August 1889, a joint meeting of the German and Viennese Anthropological Society took place in Vienna. Both societies were parents to the various ethnographic schools of thought, but also for the gradually independent folklore traditions that arose in Germany and Austria in the 1880s.Footnote 47 After the conclusion of the sessions, the seventy-four-person Assembly traveled by steamboat between the 11th and the 14th of August on an excursion to Hungary.Footnote 48 The welcome in Budapest was cordial, and the program was multifaceted. One destination for the assembly was the Hungarian National Museum, where director Franz von Pulszky gave a personal tour. Other visits included the anthropological museum, the trade museum, and the museum of applied arts. The ethnographic department of the National Museum was also a point of particular interest. The guests were visibly impressed by what they saw, and they were also impressed by the positive reception they received in Budapest. The president of the Viennese Anthropological Society, Baron Ferdinand Leopold von Adrian, and the founder and president of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Ancient History, Rudolf VirchowFootnote 49 —a real star at the time—both thanked their hosts profusely. According to Virchow, the Hungarians had “worked quickly” and had “in one generation caught up to all other European sciences, particularly in archaeology and anthropology.” And, despite a few humorous allusions to Hungarian “chauvinism,” everyone unanimously toasted to the “beauty of Hungary” and the “beauty of Hungary's women.”Footnote 50

Before Virchow, Count Koloman Esterházy had proposed a toast “in the name of the Transylvanian Museum Society of Eljen” to its “German brothers and a patriotic greeting for the advancement of mankind.” Baron Andrian accepted the toast with pleasure and, in doing so, also emphasized “that in Hungary, the native ethnography was cultivated with more zeal” than in his own country of Austria. It is quite possible that Andrian arrived at this conclusion as a result of attending a lecture by Antal Herrmann during the fifth session of the Vienna conference titled, “On the Ethnology (Völkerkunde) of Hungary.”Footnote 51

The presenter of that lecture, Antal Herrmann, deserves more extensive appreciation and acknowledgment. Here, there is only room for this: born in 1851 in Kronstadt to an ethnic German family, Herrmann studied in Klausenburg (Brașov) under, among others, the comparatist Hugo Meltzl.Footnote 52 Meltzl was one of the first to demand the establishment of a Hungarian folklore society at the beginning of the 1880s.Footnote 53 In 1887, Antal Herrmann began the “Ethnological Reports from Hungary,” which was published in German until 1907. From 1898 to 1918, he taught ethnography in Klausenberg as the first adjunct professor in the Kingdom of Hungary and was instrumental in the foundation of multiple museums there. After the end of the war, he moved to Szeged, where he died in 1926. Herrmann was—like many other prominent intellectuals born into German families—pro-Hungarian, to a large extent assimilated, and because of his language skills, could easily travel around the multilingual Hungarian Kingdom.Footnote 54 This was the conception of the “Ethnology of Hungary” presentation that Herrmann brought to Vienna and which, for the most part, detailed the program of the Society for Hungarian Ethnology (Völkerkunde) that he had founded on 27 January 1889 together with Pál Hunfalvy.Footnote 55

In his presentation, Herrmann emphasized that on the one hand, “domestic ethnography, the objects of the native folk life are equal to or even more valuable than the external and the exotic,” e.g., the classic focus of ethnology. On the other hand, he saw the task of Hungarian ethnology in the “tendency to balance out the differences between the races” and the equal scientific treatment of “all of the tribes of the land.” Thus, the mission of this young new discipline—and in that liberal age, the mantra was often repeated by both Hungarian and, later, Austrian folklorists—was the respectful acknowledgment of such differences and an emphasis on the reciprocal dependency of these different peoples and their cultures within the boundaries of their respective states. In a patriotic way, researchers felt themselves given “the task to give all of the various tribes of their country the same attention” and, at the same time, to research the “countless reciprocal interactions” between them.Footnote 56

In his annual report, Johannes Ranke, the secretary general of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Ancient History who taught in Munich, gave an overview of the development of anthropological-ethnographic museums in the German empire that was clearly influenced by his experience on the excursion in Budapest. In Germany, he asserted, “anthropological research” was developing into an “independent, purposeful, and advanced science,” and which, especially in light of the museums planned and already founded by Rudolf Virchow, was on its way to becoming a “patriotic ethnography, to a folklore of the indigenous peoples and tribes.” Ranke went even further, stating that “we most joyously welcome the establishment of a Museum for German Ethnology in Berlin. May it be a worthy side piece to the museum for general ethnology, a central point at which all of the rays [of ethnographic research] will converge.” The foundation of this ethnographic museum of the German tribes was intended to be accompanied by the founding of a number of smaller museums in which—following the example set by the Germanic National Museum—the “ethnography of the countries and provinces would be displayed.” In the end, however—and in contrast to another museum that Ranke mentioned, the Museum for German Folk Costumes and Products of Home Industries—the Museum for German Ethnology was never built.Footnote 57

As Rudolf Virchow wrote in his report, the former museum was founded in 1889 in Berlin and was designed according to the way that “Mr. Hazelius has managed in Stockholm”—namely with “entirely furnished rooms in their original contexts.”Footnote 58 As Virchow proudly stated, “we are now capable of displaying a specimen collection of the entire range of so-called national costumes and national equipment currently found in Germany,” of which it was clear that there were many “commonalities in specimens from the various parts of the country.”Footnote 59 In reality, the success of the museum was relatively modest. It remained a privately financed, private museum that had an extremely limited collection and limited space. In 1904, the museum and its collection were integrated into the prehistoric division of the Berlin Ethnology Museum as the Collection for German folklore. It was, and was quickly renamed as, an over-filled Costume Museum.Footnote 60

Despite these modest future prospects, Virchow and Ranke called for the establishment of such folk costume museums in both Vienna and in Budapest that were “worthy of the capital cities of both of these countries” in their report. This despite the fact that both were well aware that the situation in Austria and Hungary was significantly different: both the national diversity and the economic backwardness of the monarchy provided “even more material for an original ethnography of the peoples and tribes than in Germany.”Footnote 61 At the same time, in addition to the recently founded “Society for Hungarian Ethnology,” Austria-Hungary had made significant advances in the areas of anthropology and ethnography, above all thanks to the efforts of Archduke Rudolf, the heir to the throne who died in 1898.

This leads us back to Austrian ethnography, and thus to a somewhat different developmental history of museums. As early as 1884, Baron Andrian-Werburg, the director of the Anthropological Society of Vienna, had proposed the formation of an ethnographic commission, whose goal would have been to promote “the study of the ethnography of Austria-Hungary and the ethnography of the Balkan countries as strongly as possible.”Footnote 62 This idea, along with the establishment of an Austrian ethnology in general, was heavily supported by Archduke Rudolf. In 1887, the first volume of a twenty-four-volume compendium titled The Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image [Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild] was published in both German and Hungarian. Rudolf, who had initiated the project himself, wrote in the introduction that the compilation was designed to emphasize both the scientific and the patriotic meanings of ethnography, which, through “objective comparison” and “far away from premature theories and the passions of the [political] parties,” would enable a “comprehensive overall picture of our fatherland and its tribes.” For this reason, a particularly Austrian ethnology was to be promoted as a fully fledged science, just as was the case in “Germany, England and France and, more recently, even in Russia.”Footnote 63

In 1889, however, the heir to the throne committed suicide. And despite the fact that publication of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image continued, that year was a turning point in the history of Central European ethnography. In Berlin, the Museum for German Folk Costumes and Products of Home Industries opened its doors, and in Budapest the Society for Hungarian Ethnology was founded. The renaming of this group to the Hungarian Society for Folklore has already been mentioned. It began a trend that became even more important with the opening of the Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna shortly thereafter. In contrast to the new Hungarian national identity and the Berlin Costume Museum, however, the term “folklore” was used in Vienna with a more ethnographic understanding. Unlike in Hungary, where the focus was on assimilation, and unlike in Germany, where the focus was on so-called tribal differences among regions of Germany, the Austrians focused on the continually widening national differences that were found in the Dual Monarchy and its constituent territories.

It is thus little wonder that the Viennese Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art established by Michael Haberlandt and Wilhelm Hein was not conceived as a national costume museum, as Franz Heger reported in his overview of ethnographic research. At the same time, to Heger's regret, it was also not modeled on the type of ethnographic museum that Crown Prince Rudolf had proposed in vain. Instead, it most resembled the idea of a museum that had been proposed “as early as 1860 by A.O. Zeithammer.”Footnote 64 Initially, however, the most important aspect was the connection of the ethnographic museums with the world exhibitions and the subsequent national exhibitions of the time.

World Exhibitions

As Martin Wörner has detailed, the world exhibitions of the nineteenth century were the initial impetus for the creation of countless ethnographic exhibitions and the foundation of ethnographic museums in North, East, and Central Europe. From the very beginning, the goal of the world exhibitions was to display the advancement of mankind and the competition between different peoples. Following these goals, however, required intensive observation of the cultural diversity of mankind, and with it, a close and evolutionarily tinged look at the histories of different peoples. For example, invitations were sent out for people to construct traditional buildings on the Champs de Mars at the 1867 world exhibition in Paris. In addition to Russian buildings, Austria and Hungary—in the same year as the Compromise—were particularly well represented by the so-called “Austrian Village,” which displayed farmhouses from Galicia, Upper Austria, Walachia, Hungary, and Tirol.Footnote 65 At the Vienna world exhibition in 1873, an exhibition on “The Farmhouse with its Furnishings and Tools” was prominently detailed in the exhibition program and was particularly well visited by the public. Austria-Hungary was again especially well represented: other than a single farmhouse from Russia (and a North American wigwam, which was ultimately denied a spot), farmhouses from Austria-Hungary dominated the exhibition. While Cisleithania was represented by a farmhouse from Vorarlberg, Transylvania was represented by a Saxon farmhouse from Michelsberg, a German farmhouse from Geidel in Hungary, a Székely farmhouse from Transylvania, and a Romanian house from Oravicza in Banat.Footnote 66

There is no place here to go into more detail about the individual farmhouses displayed at the exhibition. Still, it is important to note that the buildings were built especially for the exhibition according to extant regional styles. Although each house had its own display concept, the houses were furnished with regional furniture, tools, and craft products. In addition, each house was accompanied by local people who were brought to Vienna and who, dressed in traditional costumes, demonstrated their traditional household activities and provided information to visitors.Footnote 67 This broad-scale ethnicization of farmhouses, tools, and folk art had two important effects: not only did they become important resources for the creation of national culture; they also represented material evidence of the nation—or, in the case of the Habsburg monarchy, of the empire.Footnote 68

This example provides a hint at one central aspect of the world exhibitions: they popularized ethnic readings of rural cultures. A second but just as important effect was that they functioned as motors in the ethnographic “museums period” of the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 69 In East Central Europe in particular, they not only became templates for the design and content of similarly conceived state exhibitions, but also made extremely significant contributions to the establishment of ethnographic museums in the 1880s and 1890s. Only by building such museums could the ethnographic objects collected for the world exhibitions be permanently displayed to the public. For their part, the already existing ethnographic museums of the time—for example, the folklore museums of Vienna and Budapest—made their collections available for display at these world exhibitions.

The world exhibitions also gave ethnographic museums important impulses regarding the content of their collections. They were testing grounds for innovative techniques in the display and representation of artifacts, and they popularized these methods for the new ethnographic museums opening across Europe. One example is the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow,Footnote 70 but even more important were exhibition techniques developed by the Swede Arthur Hazelius and the Dane Bernhard Olsen.Footnote 71 The linguist and ethnographer Arthur Hazelius, mentioned above in connection with the Berlin Museum for German Folk Costumes and Products of Home Industries, attracted significant attention at the 1867 world exhibition by displaying traditional costume scenes placed in front of large landscape images. These displays anticipated the so-called “living room principle”: the genre-like depiction of figures in living spaces. They also pointed the way for ethnographic exhibitions in open-air museums that used living people and animals. According to the same principles, Hazelius opened the Scandinavian Ethnographic Museum in 1873 (renamed the Nordiska Museet in 1880) and the Skansen in Stockholm in 1891, which quickly became world-famous.Footnote 72

The success of this type of ethnographic museum was not only based on systematic collection activities, but also on the closely related and complex clarification processes by which everyday objects—houses, tools, pieces of clothing—were systematically sorted, cataloged, aestheticized, and assigned to a known category of the nineteenth century—for example, to particular nations. Thus, in order to find a place in a museum or an exhibition, objects that would normally not have been very demonstrative had to be transformed into representations of entire cultures and nations. Once this transformation took place, the objects could be shown over and over again, something that happened often in the exhibitions. Beforehand, however, they needed to be processed by scientific institutions—the ethnographic societies and ethnographic museums—whose institutionalization saw East Central Europe not as peripheral concerns, but as their central focus.

State Exhibitions and Ethnographic Museums

It is clear that the world exhibition in Vienna made important contributions to the foundation of the ethnographic department at the Hungarian National Museum in 1872, and further, that world exhibitions in general had a strong influence on the state exhibitions of the late nineteenth century and the associated establishment of ethnographic museums. These world exhibitions had an enormous mobilizing power and were instrumental in the popularization of ethnographic thought. The same is true regarding the large state exhibitions of the 1880s and 1890s: they were important amplifiers of the rapidly emerging ethnographic movements of the time. The primary mission of these state exhibitions was to promote industry, commerce, and agricultural activities, but a secondary goal was also the cultural—in other words, national-separatist or pan-imperial—sorting and depiction of the ethnic-cultural and religious diversity in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.Footnote 73 The state exhibitions were thus closely related to one another, and their organizers learned from each other. At the same time, they often found themselves in competition with one another, particularly with regard to questions of national importance.Footnote 74 In other words, the organizers of these exhibitions were highly dynamic and future-oriented and sought to provide an answer for why conditions here were different than in the nationally ordered Western Europe.

This development could be seen in the ethnographic village built for the 1884 Galician General State Exhibition, as well as at the Hungarian State Exhibition in 1885, where a “pavilion of cottage industries” displayed “a wealth of material, traditional objects, especially farmhouse equipment and tools from all across the lands of the Crown of St. Stephan.”Footnote 75 In turn, this pavilion was an inspiration for the “Krakow State Exhibition” in 1887, and a variation on the concept could also be found in Prague at the “Bohemian State Exhibition” in 1891.Footnote 76 This latter event was an industrial exhibition, but the farmhouse displayed there—the “Česká chalupa”—became an enormous sensation and was well received by the public. It became the starting point of the Čecho-Slavic Ethnographic Exhibition initiated in 1895 by the director of the Bohemian National Theater, František A. Šubrt.Footnote 77 This exhibition, which received more than three million visitors, was supported by a nationwide, propagandistic, researching, and collecting “ethnographic movement.” It showed farmhouse styles from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, as well as from Slovakia, which belonged to Hungary at the time. This latter exhibit caused controversy, as did the fact that, from the very beginning, the German-speaking residents of the region renounced their participation in the exhibition.Footnote 78

Another project conceived by Hungarian ethnographers, but never realized because of nationalist considerations, was the acquisition of Upper Hungarian exhibition pieces from Prague for the famous Millennium Exhibition in Budapest in 1896. This included an ethnographic village that depicted the Hungarian Kingdom and which had taken a significant amount of energy and care to assemble. The village consisted of a central avenue; on the left side were twelve houses built in the Magyar style, and on the right were twelve houses built in the architectural styles of various other nationalities in the kingdom.Footnote 79

For Ottó Hermann, who first worked as the museum curator in Klausenberg before moving to the Hungarian National Museum, the ethnographic village was “the clearest piece of evidence for the full sincerity and serious approach of Hungary, and a fundamental refutation of the accusation that ‘speaks of Hungarian violence and chauvinism without knowing.’”Footnote 80 As discussed earlier, the ethnographic department of the Hungarian National Museum was also conceived of with similar intentions and a similar national partitioning. Here, it is important to note that state exhibitions were often rapidly followed by the establishment of museums and the creation of scientific ethnographic associations, as in L'viv with the establishment of the Association for Folklore and the famous museum opened by Count Wladimir Dzieduszycki, or in Prague with the journal Česky Lid in 1891 and the Čecho-Slavic Ethnographic Museum. In Vienna in 1894/95, Michael Haberlandt and Wilhelm Hein were able to found the museum, a journal, and the Association for Austrian Folklore after repeated calls during state exhibitions for a “comprehensive museum on the peoples of our monarchy,” situated in the imperial capital city.Footnote 81 This museum understood itself as an “ethnological museum,” and thus in many ways—if not entirely—resembled its Hungarian sister museum. It was understood as transnational and loyal to the state and attempted to find order in the diversity of the monarchy through scientific comparisons.

Conclusions

World War I crippled scientific exploration in many ways, but it also inspired some great ethnographic research projects. The war was quickly seen as a unique opportunity and as a huge, once-in-a-lifetime laboratory. Both on the front and within prison camps, this laboratory brought people and cultures together in numbers and at a density that had never been seen before, and was therefore particularly interesting for anthropologists and ethnographers. Across Europe, they began a wide range of research projects, above all assembling incredibly large collections of cultural artifacts. These collections are extensively discussed and analyzed in my recent book, Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones: World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe.Footnote 82

The larger scientific societies, such as the Phonogram Archives in Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna, were also involved in these collections, and folklore museums heavily supported such projects. During the war, for example, the Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna participated both as collector and researcher during the so-called historic-ethnographical Balkan expedition and organized multiple important exhibitions on topics such as “Folk Art in the Occupied Territories.”Footnote 83

After the defeat and the demise of the Habsburg monarchy, these war collections quickly disappeared into storage facilities, often into those of folk museums.Footnote 84 This disappearance coincided with new developments in the purpose and function of the museums. The multinational collections that had been assembled by the Museum for Austrian Folk Life and Folk Art (which characteristically changed its name to the Viennese Museum for Folk Life and Folk Art after the war) lost their original significance almost completely. For the few visitors to the museum after the war, these collections testified to a fallen empire. They neither reflected the new Republic of Austria's conception of itself, nor did they fit into the newly created and nationally formed world of East Central Europe. This transformation has shaped the reputation of these ethnographic collections and the ethnographic museums of the region up until the present day. In the eyes of the public they are generally regarded as antiquated and outdated.

This essay has sought to provide an explanation for such developments. At the same time, it has illustrated the independent development of a museum tradition that led to the invention of multicultural museums in the Habsburg monarchy. The ethnographical museums established in both Budapest and Vienna were faithful reflections of their respective states. They sought to prove the common bond between the states—with Hungarian or German dominance—and thus to represent a model of statewide multiculturalism despite the structural differences between the two parts of the monarchy. For this reason, both museums illustrated cultural parallels with great success and, at the same time (because of their evolutionary approaches), elaborated a cultural succession in the development of (national) folk cultures. On the other hand, the ethnographical museums were not able to convincingly represent a cultural hybridism—that is, cultural interactions and commonalities.Footnote 85 In the competition for interpretation of the time, the museums lost out to nationalistic interpretations of history and culture, even before World War I. This is one side of the story.

The other side of the story brings the argumentation presented in this essay to a point. The plurality of the Habsburg monarchy, and in East Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century more generally, led to the invention of a special and independent type of ethnographic museum: the European ethnological museum. In the establishment of these ethnographic museums, local regions were not peripheral concerns; they were the central focus. The political realignment of East Central Europe after World War I did not immediately destroy this ethnographic museum landscape, but it did make lasting changes. Looking back, it is clear that these museums sought to show something that has yet to be demonstrated in modern Europe: a unity in diversity.

Footnotes

*

Because of the different developments in the history of the social sciences, it is important to first clarify a few terms and their translations. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the terms “social” or “cultural anthropology” are commonly used to refer to the study of foreign and, earlier, “primitive” cultures. The scientific study of oral histories and traditions is known as “folklore.” In the German language tradition, the study of foreign and non-European cultures was termed Völkerkunde (ethnology), whereas the study of one's own culture was termed Volkskunde (folklore). But there was a further differentiation in the use of Volkskunde as a scientific term: whereas the word referred to a focus on German culture inside Germany, in Austria-Hungary it referred to the study of the many different cultures that belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. Thus, until the end of World War I, Volkskunde in Austria-Hungary was highly ethnographically oriented and represented an ethnological folklore (völkerkundliche Volkskunde).

References

1 Zeithammer, A. O., “Ideen zur Begründung eines österreichischen ethnographischen Museums,” Mittheilungen der kaiserl.-königl. Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien 4 (1860): 60–67 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 66.

3 Johler, Reinhard, “Vom Leben, Nachleben und Weiterleben des ‘Kronprinzenwerkes’ in Österreich,” in Ethnographie in Serie. Zu Produktion und Rezeption der „Österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie in Wort und Bild,” ed. Fikfak, Jurij and Johler, Reinhard (Vienna, 2008), 291–325 Google Scholar.

4 Österreichischer Ingenieur- und Architekten-Verein, ed., Das Bauernhaus in Österreich-Ungarn und in seinen Grenzgebieten (Vienna, 1906)Google Scholar.

5 Feichtinger, Johannes and Cohen, Gary B., eds., Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience (Oxford, NY, 2014)Google Scholar.

6 Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D., “Introduction: Museums and Multiculturalism,” in Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D. (Washington, London, 1991), 1–9 Google Scholar.

7 Macdonald, Sharon, “Introduction,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. Macdonald, Sharon and Fyfe, Gordon (Oxford, 1996), 1–18 Google Scholar.

8 Raffler, Marlies, Museum. Spiegel der Nation? Zugänge zur Historischen Museologie am Beispiel der Genese von Landes- und Nationalmuseen in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2007)Google Scholar, 150 ff.

9 Burian, Peter, “Die Idee der Nationalanstalt” in Das Germanische Nationalmuseum Nürnberg 1852–1977, ed. Deneke, Bernward and Kahsnitz, Rainer (Munich, 1978), 11–18 Google Scholar.

10 Josef Korek, “Der Museumsgedanke und die Sammlungsmethoden in Ungarn: Die ersten fünfzig Jahre des Ungarischen Nationalmuseums (1802–1852),” in Deneke and Kahsnitz, Das Germanische Nationalmuseum Nürnberg 1852–1977, 29–36.

11 Walter Wagner, “Die frühen Museumsgründungen in der Donaumonarchie,” in Deneke and Kahsnitz, Das Germanische Nationalmuseum Nürnberg 1852–1977, 19–28.

12 J. A. Frh. v. Helfert, “Volksnachbarliche Wechselseitigkeit,” Zeitschrift für österreichische Volkskunde 2 (1896): 1–3 Google Scholar.

13 Stocking, George W. Jr., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (London, 1985), 3–15 Google Scholar.

14 Hofmann, Andreas R., “Utopien der Nation: Landes- und Nationalausstellungen in Ostmitteleuropa vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 58, no. 1–2 (2009): 5–32 Google Scholar.

15 Leonhard, Jörn and von Hirschhausen, Ulrike, Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2009), 82–95 Google Scholar.

16 Csáky, Moritz, “Die Vielfalt der Habsburgermonarchie und die nationale Frage,” in Nation, Ethnizität und Staat in Mitteleuropa, ed. Altermatt, Urs (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 1996), 44–64 Google Scholar.

17 Csáky, Moritz, “Die Stadt in der Moderne—am Beispiel Zentraleuropas,” in Begegnungen: Festschrift für Konrad Köstlin zur Emeritierung am 30. September 2008 (Vienna, 2008), 103–32Google Scholar, at 107.

18 Wandruszka, Adam and Urbanitsch, Walter, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vol. 3, Die Völker des Reiches (Vienna, 1980)Google Scholar.

19 Schwicker, J. H., Die Deutschen in Ungarn und Siebenbürgen (Vienna, Teschen, 1881)Google Scholar.

20 Csaplovics, Johann v., Gemälde von Ungern. Erster Teil (Pesth, 1829), 204Google Scholar.

21 Haberlandt, Michael, “Einleitung,” in Katalog der Sammlungen des Museums für österreichische Volkskunde (Vienna, 1897), 1–4 Google Scholar.

22 Gingrich, Andre, “Kulturgeschichte, Wissenschaft und Orientalismus. Zur Diskussion des ‘frontier orientalism’ in der Spätzeit der K.u.K. Monarchie,” in Schauplatz Kultur–Zentraleuropa. Transdisziplinäre Annäherungen, ed. Feichtinger, Johannes (Innsbruck, 2006), 279–88Google Scholar.

23 Kósa, Lászlo, “Die Idee des ‘Europa im Kleinen’ in der ungarischen Ethnographie,” in Die ungarische Sprache und Kultur im Donauraum, ed. Jankovics, Jozsef (Budapest, Vienna, 1991), 635–41Google Scholar.

24 Stagl, Justin, “Ethnographie Ethnologie Volkskunde Völkerkunde. Die Entstehung neuer Wissenschaftsdisziplinen aus den deutsch-slawischen Kontakten im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Europa und die fremden Nachbarn. Vorlesungen über vergessene Nachbarn (Salzburg, 1998), 103–30Google Scholar.

25 Hunfalvy, Paul, Ethnographie von Ungarn. Mit Zustimmung des Verfassers ins Deutsche übertragen von Prof. I. H. Schwicker (Budapest, 1877)Google Scholar.

26 Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 29/19 (1889)Google Scholar, S. [21]–[22].

27 János Jankó, “Die ethnographische Abteilung des Ungarischen Nationalmuseums,” Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Ungarn (1905): 41–53.

28 Hofer, Tamás, “Wissenschaftliche und museologische Beziehungen des Ethnographischen Museums,” Néprajzi Ertesitö LV (1974): 79–86 Google Scholar.

29 Czoernig, Karl Freiherr v., Ethnographie der Oesterreichischen Monarchie, vol. 1/1 (Vienna, 1857)Google Scholar.

30 Johler, Reinhard, “Das Ethnische als Forschungskonzept: Die österreichische Volkskunde im europäischen Vergleich,” in Ethnologia Europaea, ed. Beitl, Klaus and Bockhorn, Olaf (Vienna, 1995), 69–101 Google Scholar.

31 Müller, Friedrich, “Einleitung in die Ethnographie,” in Mittheilungen der k.k. geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien 12 (1869): 482–504 Google Scholar.

32 Müller, Friedrich, Allgemeine Ethnographie (Vienna, 1873)Google Scholar.

33 “Die anthropologisch-ethnographischen Sammlungen des k.k. naturhistorischen Museums in Wien,” in Das Ausland 57 (1884): 122–24Google Scholar.

34 Welt-Ausstellung 1878 zu Paris. Katalog der Oesterreichischen Anthropologisch-Ethnographischen Ausstellung (Vienna, 1878)Google Scholar.

35 Feest, Christian, “The Origins of Professional Anthropology in Vienna,” in Kulturwissenschaften im Vielvölkerstaat. Zur Geschichte der Ethnologie und verwandter Gebiete in Österreich, ca. 1780 bis 1918, ed. Rupp-Eisenreich, Britta and Stagl, Justin (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 1995), 113–31Google Scholar.

36 Heger, Franz, “Die Zukunft der ethnographischen Museen,” in Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstage von Adolf Bastian (26. Juni 1896) (Berlin, 1896), 585–93Google Scholar.

37 Nikitsch, Herbert, Auf der Bühne früher Wissenschaft. Aus der Geschichte des Vereins für Volkskunde (1894–1945) (Vienna, 2006)Google Scholar. Thorpe, Julia, “Exhibiting the Austrian–Hungarian Empire: The Austrian Museum for Folk Culture in Vienna, 1895–1925,” Museum & Society 13/1 (2015): 42–51 Google Scholar.

38 Johler, Reinhard, “Auf der Suche nach dem ‘anderen’ Europa: Eugenie Goldstern und die Wiener ‘Völkerkunde Europas,’” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde LIX/108 (2005): 151–64Google Scholar.

39 Hoffmann-Krayer, Eduard, “Über Museen für vergleichende Volkskunde,” in Kleine Schriften zur Volkskunde von Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, ed. Geiger, Paul (Basel, 1946), 205–22Google Scholar.

40 Wörner, Martin, Vergnügung und Belehrung. Volkskultur auf den Weltausstellungen 1851–1900 (Münster, 1999), 237–50Google Scholar.

41 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “Objects of Ethnography. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display,” in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven D. (Washington, London, 1991), 386–444 Google Scholar, at 401.

42 Ibid., 386.

43 For a more specific analysis, see: Stocking, George W., “Essays on Museums and Material Culture,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. Stocking, George W. (Madison, 1985), 3–14 Google Scholar.

44 Penny, H. Glenn, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, London, 2003)Google Scholar.

45 Michael and Haberlandt, Arthur, Die Völker Europas und ihre volkstümliche Kultur (Stuttgart, 1928)Google Scholar.

46 Stourzh, Gerald, “The Ethnicizing of Politics and ‘National Indifference’ in Late Imperial Austria,” in Der Umfang der österreichischen Geschichte: Ausgewählte Studien 1990–2010 (Vienna, 2011), 283–323 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Karl Pusman, “Die ‘Wissenschaften vom Menschen’ auf Wiener Boden (1870–1959). Die Anthropologische Gesellschaft in Wien und die anthropologischen Disziplinen im Fokus von Wissenschaftsgeschichte Wissenschafts- und Verdrängungspolitik,” (Münster, 2008).

48 von Hochstetter, Ferdinand, “Allgemeiner Verlauf der Versammlung,” Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 68–80 Google Scholar, at 75.

49 Lewerentz, Annette, “Rudolf Virchow als Anthropologe und seine Bedeutung für die Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte,” in Zwischen Charité und Reichstag. Rudolf Virchow. Mediziner, Sammler, Politiker, ed. Saherwala, Geraldine, Schnalke, Thomas, Vanja, Konrad, and Vogel, Hans-Joachim (Berlin, 2002), 123–37Google Scholar.

50 Ranke, Johannes, “Bericht über die gemeinsame Versammlung der Deutschen und der Wiener anthropologischen Gesellschaft zugleich XX. allgemeine Versammlung der Deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien vom 5. bis 10. August 1889 mit Ausflug nach Budapest vom 11. bis 14. August,” Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 65–80 Google Scholar.

51 Herrmann, A., “Zur Völkerkunde Ungarns,” Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 203–4Google Scholar. In 1892, the society was renamed—in a nationalistically narrowing way—to the “Hungarian Society for Folklore.”

52 Fassel, Horst, ed., Hugo Meltzl und die Anfänge der Komparatistik (Stuttgart, 2005)Google Scholar.

53 “Javaslat egy Magyar Folklore Társulat alapitàsa ügyében,” Acta comparationis litterarum universarum V (1881), no. XCVII–CGoogle Scholar, 15.11–31.12.1881, 1858–1860.

54 Mohay, Tamás, “Zu den Anfängen der akademischen Lehre in der ungarischen Ethnographie,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 101 (1998): 57–64 Google Scholar.

55 Balasa, Iván, “100 Jahre Ungarische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 1889–1989,” Acta Ethnographica Acad. Sci. Hung. 35 (1989): 3–38 Google Scholar.

56 Herrmann, A., “Zur Völkerkunde Ungarns,” Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 203 Google Scholar.

57 Ranke, J., “Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht des Generalsekretärs,” Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 221–22Google Scholar.

58 Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 222–23Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 222.

60 Ulrich Steinmann, “Die Volkskundemuseen in Wien und Berlin. Gegenseitige Einflüsse und Beziehungen von ihrer Gründung bis 1945,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 17/66 (1963), 1–16 Google Scholar.

61 Ranke, J., “Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht des Generalsekretärs,” Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte XX (1889): 221–22Google Scholar.

62 Ausschusssitzung am 8. Jänner 1884, in Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 14/4 (1884): [6]Google Scholar.

63 Erzherzog Rudolf, “Einleitung,” in Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, Übersichtsband, 1. Abteilung, Naturgeschichtlicher Theil (Vienna, 1887): 5–17 Google ScholarPubMed.

64 Heger, Franz, “Die Entwicklung der ethnographischen Forschung in den Jahren 1848–1898,” Mittheilungen der k.k. Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien XLI (1898): 71–92 Google Scholar.

65 Wörner, Martin, “Bauernhaus und Nationenpavillon. Die architektonische Selbstdarstellung Österreich-Ungarns auf den Weltausstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde XLVIII/97 (1994): 395–424 Google Scholar.

66 For a more specific analysis of the fair's content, see: Rampley, Matthew, “Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World's Fair,” Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2010): 110–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Das Bauernhaus mit seiner Einrichtung und seinen Geräthen (Gruppe XX), Schröer, Bericht von K. J. (Vienna, 1874)Google Scholar.

68 Johler, Reinhard, “Die Kunst, das Volk und seine Kultur. Miszellen zur Volkskunst,” in Volkskunst. Referate der Österreichischen Volkskundetagung 1995 in Wien, ed. Tschofen, Bernhard and Nikitsch, Herbert (Vienna, 1997), 331–64Google Scholar; Stoklund, Bjarne, “The Role of the International Exhibitions in the Construction of National Cultures in the 19th Century” Ethnologia Europaea 24 (1994): 35–44 Google Scholar; Johler, Reinhard, “‘Ethnisierte Materialien’—‘materialisierte Ethnien.’ Zur Nationalisierung von Volkskunst und Bauernhaus in Österreich(-Ungarn),” in Das entfernte Dorf: Moderne Kultur und das ethnische Artefakt, ed. Moravánsky, Ákos (Vienna, 2002), 61–87 Google Scholar.

69 Stoklund, Bjarne, “International Exhibitions and the New Museum Concept in the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Ethnologia Scandinavica 23 (1993): 87–113 Google Scholar.

70 Gudrun Calov, “Nationalbestimmte Museumsgründungen in Russland,” in Deneke and Kahsnitz, Das kunst- und kulturgeschichtliche Museum, 43–48.

71 Olsen, Bernhard, Virke og Vaerker (Copenhagen, 1979)Google Scholar.

72 Holger Rasmussen, “Nationalmuseen in den nordischen Ländern,” in Deneke and Kahsnitz, Das kunst- und kulturgeschichtliche Museum im 19. Jahrhundert, 37–42; Sandberg, Mark B., Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar.

73 Wendland, Anna Veronika, “Eindeutige Bilder, komplexe Identitäten. Imperiale, nationale, regionale Identitätskonzepte und ihre Visualisierung auf der galizischen Allgemeinen Landesausstellung in Lemberg 1894,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 58, no. 1–2 (2009): 111–61Google Scholar.

74 It was no accident that the study of folklore developed differently along linguistic borders. See: Judson, Pieter M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006)Google Scholar.

75 Zipper, Albert, Führer durch die Allgemeine Landes-Ausstellung sowie durch die Königl. Hauptstadt Lemberg (Lemberg, 1884)Google Scholar.

76 Heger, Franz, “Die Ethnographie auf der Krakauer Landesausstellung 1887,” Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 18 (1888): 190–201 Google Scholar.

77 For more on the connections between the “čecho-slavic” folklore movement, the “čecho-slavic ethnographic exhibition” and the resulting Czech folklore, see: Josef Vařecka, “Die ‘Böhmen’-Bände des ‘Kronprinzenwerkes’ und die tschechische Volkskunde,” in Fikfak and Johler, Ethnographie in Serie, 104–14.

78 Murko, M., “Zur Geschichte und Charakteristik der Prager ethnographischen Ausstellung im Jahre 1895,” Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 25/15 (1895): 90–98 Google Scholar.

79 Bünker, J. R., “Das ethnographische Dorf der ungarischen Millenniums-Landesausstellung in Budapest,” Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 27/17 (1897): 86–110 Google Scholar.

80 Hermann, Ottó, “Ethnographische Elemente der Millenniums-Ausstellung Ungarns, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Urbeschäftigungen,” Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 26 (1896): 3–13 Google Scholar.

81 Heger, Ethnographie auf der Krakauer Landesausstellung, 201.

82 Johler, Reinhard, Marchetti, Christian, and Scheer, Monique, eds., Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones: World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe (Bielefeld, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Marchetti, Christian, Balkanexpedition. Die Kriegserfahrung der österreichischen Volkskunde—eine historisch-ethnographische Erkundung (Tübingen, 2013), 220–28Google Scholar.

84 Thorpe, Julie, “Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War,” in Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, ed. Panayia, Panikos and Verdee, Pipa (Basingstoke, 2011), 102–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Johler, Reinhard, “‘Hybridism’: Istria, Folklore Studies, and Cultural Theory,” in Out of the Tower. Essays on Culture and Everyday Life, ed. Scheer, Monique, Thiemeyer, Thomas, Johler, Reinhard, and Tschofen, Bernhard (Tübingen, 2013), 147–67Google Scholar.