In early twentieth-century Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode sparked a controversy with his sweeping proposal to reorganize a group of the city’s museums. Debates about the role and structure of museums played out in 1907 and 1910 with two striking series of articles that appeared in the journal Museumskunde: Journal for the Administration and Technology of Public and Private Collections. The first was a six-part essay by Otto Lauffer on history museums, and the second was a ten-part piece by Oswald Richter regarding ethnographic museums. Together, they initiated a century of significant dialogue.

The Museum in the Cultural Sciences offers the first full English translations of two very influential articles published in the German journal Museumskunde: Journal for the Administration and Technology of Public and Private Collections in the early twentieth century. They show how sophisticated the discussion of museums and museum display was over one hundred years ago and how much could be gained from revisiting these reflections today.

Contributors include Julien Chapuis, Edward S. Cooke Jr., Anke te Heesen, Viola König, Deborah L. Krohn, Alisa LaGamma, Peter N. Miller, Glenn H. Penny, Ruth B. Phillips, Jeffrey Quilter, Matthew Rampley, Nicholas Thomas, Céline Trautmann-Waller, Eva-Maria Troelenberg, and Mariët Westermann.

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