Project intern Ulrike Folie worked for 3 months in the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, researching and documenting the Hermann Schoede. Here she describes the collection and her findings:

I have been working in the stores of the Oceania Department of the Ethnological Museum, Berlin for three months, examining objects and photographs from New Guinea, more precisely from the region between the border of Papua, Indonesia up to Wewak, Papua New Guinea. The work was centered on 600 objects that were acquired and photographs that were taken by the Berlin explorer Hermann Schoede on the northern coasts of Papua New Guinea, the former German colony Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land. The objects were given to the Ethnological Museum, Berlin in 1907 and 1910.

I searched for the objects collected by Schoede, photographed them and noted down data, referring to the objects and their labeling as well as to the inventory book. Some objects have not only travelled from New Guinea to Germany but were taken as loot to the Soviet Union and eventually came back to Berlin from Leipzig where they had been stored since the 1970s.

The collector Hermann Schoede, himself a studied field surveyor, was a private scholar who travelled and collected driven by his own interests and financed by himself. He was trained in collecting practices by Felix von Luschan, who was the head of the Oceania and Africa department of the Ethnological Museum, Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century and who encouraged Schode to collect ethnographic objects. Schoede travelled New Guinea on a leased schooner. We might assume that he didn’t stay very long in one place, often sleeping on his ship, except for the area of Aitape where he might have stayed inland for some weeks, as pictures show the formation of a camp.

Schoede’s focus was on collecting objects and not on scientifically studying the people he met. It seems that his motivation came from a personal interest in travelling rather then a deep scientific interest. He collected everything that seemed relevant to him, which includes many objects of ritual use and objects of daily use, including two house parts and some stairs and also a few skulls.

Despite studying the collection there are still many unanswered questions: How did Schoede come into possession of the objects? How much did he pay? How did he barter? How were things valued?

But from picture descriptions we can assume that he was accompanied by local people when exploring areas in searching for objects. He didn’t seem to build intense relationships to the people he met, as he never notes people’s names, instead physical descriptions such as old man, man in his best years, young girl or the term Kanake, originally derivating from the hawai’ian word kanaka, meaning human and at that time being commonly used without the racist connection it has in nowadays German language use.

Schoede’s  photography was meant to add specific aspects to the collected objects. Its purpose is documentation and illustration. The pictures focus on objects, either being produced or presented by the salesperson. Some of these pictures are staged in front of white cloth. Schoede also photographed villages while wandering around. Schoede’s notes attached to these pictures are particularly important as they put the entire collecting and travel setting on a specific time line.

To conclude I have found documenting this collection very interesting but challenging. When documenting the collection I was supposed to touch every object without knowing what it was. All of the objects should be treated the same way as they are stored in a scientific understanding, regardless to their original meaning. Knowing that I dealt with objects, some of which had to do with ancestory cults and/or things that were supposed to be treated exclusively in men’s or initiated hands, I sometimes felt a bit uncomfortable. Thus whilst on the one hand we try to understand the real and original meaning of an object as a materialisation of culture and on the other hand we ignore its former reality for scientific reasons where all objects are the same: objects.

Ulrike Folie