Since 2010 they have been part of the association of Dresden State Art Collections (SKD). The oldest pieces in the Dresden Museum of Ethnology are part of a donation dating to 1904. Willi Rickmers (1873 – 1965), the son of a wealthy Hanseatic merchant family, was financially independent and indulged in the hobby of mountain climbing, which led him to the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Pamirs. In the course of his travels to Central Asia in 1894 – 98 he bought nearly 800 objects, including excellent suzanis and carpets. All together there were 58 objects from Bukhara, the Caucasus and Persia. Thirty-six of these are still in the museum’s collection today.
His attempts to establish himself in business in Central Asia, for example by acquiring gold mining rights, were unsuccessful. In 1906 he redirected his activity to winter sports in Germany and the nascent tourism industry. In 1928 he took part in an expedition once more, the “German-Russian Alai-Pamir Expedition”. Little is known about his later life from about 1935 until his death in 1965.
Gertrude Rennhard (1916 – 2010) worked for many years as a secretary in the Swiss Foreign Ministry, then in the Swiss Embassy in Rome, and from 1962 in the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. After her retirement, she moved to Küstnacht on Lake Zurich. In addition to her interest in the culture of the people where she served, she also made many long-distance trips to various parts of the globe, including Uzbekistan in the period 1962 – 1976. She was a collector with wide academic and ethnographic interests, a genuine connoisseur of arts and antiques. Some objects were donated to the Dresden Museum of Ethnology during her lifetime; others came into the museum’s possession in 2011 as a bequest from her estate.
Prof. Dr Siegfried Stahl’s (1920 – 2014) passion for collecting began quite late in life, in 1994 with Peruvian textile fragments. At first he had a special interest in Africa before turning to Anatolia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. His heirs donated his extensive textile and carpet collection to the Dresden Museum of Ethnology in 2014 – 15.
You can learn more about the topic in the book-album "Collections of the Federal Republic of Germany" (volume XI) in the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections".
The main sponsor of the project is the oilfield services company Eriell-Group.
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