Ethnological Museum of Berlin

Founded in 1873, Ethnological Museum of Berlin is one of the renowned museums in the world with over 500 000 collections. The collections feature ethnographic, archaeological and historic-cultural objects from Africa, Asia, America, Australia and the South Seas. In addition, it has an ethnomusicological archive of 140,000 sound recordings, 285 000 photographs, 20 000 films and 200 000 pages of written documents. The historical collections include 30 000 cylinders (original recordings and copies, positives and negatives). The archive’s last cylinder field recording was made in 1953.

It houses recordings which were initially used in comparative musicology on traditional music of the world and now used for studies in ethnomusicology. The archive consists of approximately music 350 collections from Africa (30%), North America (20%), Asia (20%), Australia and Oceania (12%), and Europe (10.4%), as well as multiregional collections (7.4%), which contain material from various continents.
The collection was taken to Russia in 1944 during the invasion of Germany during the Second World War and in 1991 the collections held by the Soviets were returned to the Museum für Völkerkunde (the museums name until 1999).

The museum’s Africa exhibit includes works of art and ritual objects range from masks and vases to musical instruments from African countries such as Cameroon, Nigeria and Benin.

The museum is open to members of the public from Tuesday to Friday at 10h00am to 17h00pm and at 11h00am until 18h00pm on Saturday and Sunday. It is closed on Mondays.