Part one: André Koch

The research project on the Umlauff family’s trading company emerged from investigations by André Koch into the provenance of exhibits at the Museum Koenig Bonn (LIB), where archival materials including historical letters, photographs, invoices, labels and notes were examined to provide thorough context information for educational guided tours for visitors. The museum's founder Alexander Koenig (1858–1940) was an avid hunter and collector whose ambition was to establish a zoological museum showcasing his personal trophies and collections for the edification and education of the interested public and professionals. As a wealthy heir, Koenig undertook several expeditions to Africa and Northern Europe in order to collect various animal species. For big game and other iconic species which he could not collect personally, he frequently turned to natural history dealers. Accordingly, archival research revealed that several significant specimens in the museum's collections and exhibition were acquired by Koenig from the Hanseatic Umlauff company (Fig. 2). Notable acquisitions include a Northern white rhinoceros (Koch 2023), an Okapi (Koch 2022) and a male gorilla (Umlauff 1901). Further investigations were prompted by biographical information about Carl Hagenbeck, Johannes Umlauff's (1874–1951) uncle, which referenced two remarkable crocodile skins forming part of the impressive gharial group at the Natural History Museum in Vienna (Koch and Schweiger 2023). In order to obtain more information, the unpublished memoirs of Johannes Umlauff from the Tierpark Hagenbeck archive in Hamburg were consulted. This typescript of personal memories, newspaper articles, photographs and information from order books proved to contain extensive data about Umlauff's worldwide client network, documenting 69 national and 80 international museums, institutions and private collectors who purchased naturalia from the company. Additional correspondence and documentation were sought from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) archive. These findings led to cooperation with the co-organisers for developing a comprehensive research project, starting with a workshop assembling existing research and expertise on the Umlauffs’ trading activities and their impact on global museum collections.

Part two: Katja Kaiser

Research conducted at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) revealed complex networks surrounding Umlauff's trading activities. While both Sabine von Mering (MfN) and Katja Kaiser (MfN) had encountered the Umlauffs in inventories and archives, systematic research had been limited so far. The initial investigation was undertaken in the context of developing guidelines for handling natural history collections from colonial contexts. It initially focused particularly on human remains, including a ritual-engraved skull from Papua New Guinea originally from Heinrich Christian Umlauff's (1868–1925) ethnographic trade company. Additionally, a key discovery that led to further research was the prominent role of Georg Zenker (1855–1922), a German colonial official in Cameroon (Kaiser 2023). His name appeared disproportionately often in correspondence between Umlauff family members and Paul Matschie (1861–1926), the curator of the mammal collection at MfN from 1890 to 1926. Zenker, who lived in German Cameroon for three decades, served as both colonial official and plantation owner while collecting zoological, botanical, ethnological and anthropological specimens for Berlin museums. The correspondence reveals a triangular relationship where Zenker sent collections to MfN, Matschie identified duplicates and these surplus specimens were forwarded to Umlauff for commercial distribution. This arrangement raises critical questions about colonial contexts of acquisitions and injustice in natural history collecting. The correspondence documents complex professional and personal relationships, including Umlauff's dissatisfaction with Zenker's non-exclusive arrangements with other museums (Fig. 3). Despite MfN's apparently privileged position — with Umlauff claiming in 1898 to always offer new specimens to Berlin first — questions remain about whether such promises were made to all museum directors, particularly wealthy collectors like Alexander Koenig who likely spent considerably more money than Berlin on Umlauff materials. Therefore, at MfN, there is a special interest in finding out more about the business relationships, the market position of the MfN, the number of acquisitions from colonial contexts and the quantity of Umlauff material in our collection.

Johann Friedrich Gustav Umlauff (1833–1889), founder of the J.F.G. Umlauff company, was a brother-in-law of the Hamburg-based menagerie owner and zoo founder, Carl Hagenbeck. There were several companies under the names of Hagenbeck and Umlauff, run by different members of the two families, partially operating in parallel at the same time, partially building on previous ventures. All of these Umlauff and Hagenbeck companies dealt in ethnographic objects for at least short periods of time and a number of them acted as organisers or venue providers for ethnic shows (“Völkerschauen”). Acquiring these artefacts often went hand in hand with the trade in wild animals and natural history objects. Carl Hagenbeck, his sons and heirs, but also his half-brothers John (1866–1940) and Gustav (1869–1947) arguably can be counted amongst the most active and financially successful traders in artefacts and animals, as well as organisers of the European-wide ethnic show business. The collaboration and business overlapped between different members of the Hagenbeck and Umlauff families and companies were manifold and maximised their respective networks. Similarly, ethnographic and other artefacts criss-crossed between the different companies. The contribution explored the personal and business entanglements of the different Umlauff and Hagenbeck companies, as well as the continuity in creating exoticised settings through the use of artefacts and ambience, using the media of ethnic shows, museum displays and early films. The Umlauff companies’ portfolio included equipping silent movies and creating dioramic scenes for natural history and ethnographic museums. A criss-cross of trajectories of objects, from collection items to museum objects to props for film sets and back to specimens in museum collections obscures provenances, as well as non-specific information in inventories, listing Umlauff even as collector and not trader, thereby bypassing the invisible middlemen. The Umlauff-Hagenbeck companies were able to maximise their profits due to their multiple diversified revenue streams and the use of colonial transport logistics. This infrastructure allowed for the processing of live animals, animal cadavers, shells, other natural material and objects, ethnographic artefacts and even people.

Ethnography’s coming of age in the nineteenth century was tied to the proliferation of museums dedicated to this discipline. Practitioners argued that Indigenous cultural manifestations were doomed to fall before the relentless expansion of European Imperialism and, therefore, urged to collect as much as possible. Ethnographic museum officials wrote copious letters to colonial actors on the imperial periphery to collect the cherished vanishing objects, inviting additional motives for ethnographic acquisition. Commercial companies saw an opportunity to enlarge their marketable portfolio by including Indigenous artefacts. Likewise, firms such as Umlauff emerged in the German metropole, specialising in selling cultural and natural scientific objects to further exploit commercialisation. This mercantile link proved somewhat of an embarrassment for museum officials, who fancied ethnography as a purely scientific endeavour. Although J.F.G. Umlauff added the name “museum” to his business in the late nineteenth century, ethnographic practitioners still maligned Umlauff as a lesser endeavour meant to plug holes in their ethnographic acquisitions. However, this situation changed shortly before the First World War, when Georg Thilenius (1868–1937), who assumed the helm of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum in 1904, would re-align Umlauff’s role. The commercial company became a “fence” in the more troubling meaning of the word by laundering artefacts for the presumably purely scientific institution when Thilenius’s aggressive acquisition politics ran the Hamburg Museum into financial and political difficulties in 1906. Umlauff acquired objects for a higher-than-average price from the Hamburg Museum and explored foreign markets in the high-paying United States. Similarly, Umlauff successfully explored the seismic shift of clients for artefacts to include, besides ethnographers, artists and their wealthy dealers. This modification partially contributed to Umlauff’s economic survival beyond the First World War.

Natural history dealers, such as Umlauff, Godeffroy, Reiche, Ruhe and others, operated within a large network of colonial officials, officers and many other local actors, including rulers, hunters and informants (Tsogang 2020; Tsogang 2023a). While the involvement of German individuals is well documented in archival materials, such as correspondence, the contributions of local actors to natural history collections have been rendered invisible and can only be revealed through in-depth research. Studies on ethnographic and natural history collections from the former German colony of Cameroon have shown that transdisciplinary collecting practices prevailed (Assilkinga et al. 2023). The men on the ground extracted artefacts and natural history specimens and, in many cases, they also appropriated human remains. This dehumanisation and objectification are characteristic of the often violent collecting practices carried out by colonial personnel who were dilettantes in most disciplines, yet had colonial administration and armed forces on their side. As reports by German colonial officials, the military and the merchants (Tsogang 2023b) reveal, these so-called collectors were well aware of the cultural significance of artefacts, as well as of plants and animals for the locals, who were reluctant to sell them. Contexts of colonial violence and war were, therefore, regarded as beneficial for acquiring these cultural artefacts and traders, like Umlauff were well aware of the violent, unjust and corrupt circumstances surrounding these acquisitions (Umlauff 1914; Tsogang 2025: 66-80). Further research requires a re-evaluation of colonial collections, addressing the silences and biases in sources and knowledge production. Documents such as travel logs, should be analysed, since published reports often obscure the role of local contributions and knowledge. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of provenance and acquisition contexts is required to improve general attributions of locality, such as 'Cameroon'. As the case of J.F.G. Umlauff can also reveal, archives that were created to increase the value of artefacts and natural history specimens in ethnographic and animals market networks can, when read against the grain today, provide evidence of local resistance and the illegitimacy of many collections in various European museums today.

Bernhard Wörrle (Deutsches Museum, Munich): The Acquisitions of the Deutsches Museum from J.F.G. Umlauff

Between 1907 and 1929, the Deutsches Museum in Munich acquired over one hundred exhibits from J.F.G. Umlauff. The short presentation provided a brief insight into this collection that comprises mainly non-European ethnographica as boats, musical instruments, lamps, lighters, weaving tools etc., which formerly were used in the exhibitions to represent early stages of technological development. The presentation then shortly discussed the poor state of sources concerning the provenance of the exhibits that, in many cases, obviously came from colonial contexts. In most cases, neither the preserved correspondence between the Deutsches Museum and the Umlauff company nor the company’s business records reveal anything about who collected the objects — and how (Wörrle 2024: 38-40). Exchanges of holdings between museums in the past make it often even more difficult to trace the origin of these exhibits today.

Jana C. Reimer (Museum am Rothenbaum - Kulturen und Künste der Welt, Hamburg): Dealing with Ethnographic Collections – Holdings from the Umlauff Trading Company at MARKK Hamburg

As many other ethnographic museums, the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) Hamburg, acquired significant holdings through the Hamburg trading company J.F.G. Umlauff. As the discussion of a selection of these holdings showed, there are aspects of Umlauff's business and the museum's work that should be viewed critically from today's perspective: the actual context of origin often remains in the dark. Up to the 1960s, around 6,200 Umlauff objects were added to the museum collections; about 3,300 are still stored at MARKK today. Its document archive holds an extensive collection of files and original account books from the first half of the 20^th century. The photo archive also preserves the Bührmann Collection, which contains photographic documents relating to the history of the Umlauff company, its connections to Hagenbeck and the museum. These materials still await further research.

Joël Zouna (Technische Universität Berlin): Cameroonian Cultural Heritage in Umlauff Transactions

Leveraging the networks and infrastructures established to facilitate connections between the metropolis and the colonies, the Umlauff firm gained prominence by the end of the 19^th century through its trade in naturalia, particularly to North American and European museums. It also offered ethnographic objects to its business partners including the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which, in 1925, acquired a significant collection comprising nearly 1,800 objects and 600 photographs from Cameroon, a German colony between 1884 and 1919. Various actors, such as the Field Museum's director at the time, Frédérick Skiff (1851–1921) and New York art dealer Jan Kleykamp, played a role in this relatively underexplored transaction. The paper is based on archival research conducted in the State Archives of Hamburg, the Stockholm Museum of Ethnography archives and the photographic collection held by the Ross Archives of African Art at Yale University, which includes copies of the sales catalogues for the Cameroonian collections assembled by Umlauff. It also builds on the extensive inventory work carried out by research teams from the Technische Universität Berlin in collaboration with the University of Dschang in Cameroon, which culminated in the publication of “The Atlas of Absence. Cameroon’s Cultural Heritage in Germany” in 2023 (Assilkinga et al. 2023). Its aim was to trace the transatlantic trajectory of these collections, shedding light on the lesser-known commercial strategy behind the ethnographica sold by Umlauff. By focusing on the significant acquisitions made by the Field Museum, the contribution also highlighted the little attention still given to these collections nearly a century after their acquisition.

This contribution elaborated on the European culture of making the non-European “other” a spectacle, drawing on the example of the Umlauff company which, over decades, supplied exhibitions with non-European animals, mounted as taxidermic specimens, ethnographic objects and “types” of Non-European ethnic groups in the form of life-like manikins. The contrast to this Western capitalist economy of collecting and exhibiting is emphasised by the example of one of their collectors, Georg Zenker (1855–1922), who, in the German colony of Cameroon, was confronted with other economies when he hunted animals. Zenker’s correspondence with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin suggests that he was often unaware of traditional hunting practices, economies and the religious and cultural significance of animals and hunting. Instead, Zenker was mainly interested in setting up a profitable business selling natural history specimens, especially great apes, to museums. For local hunters, however, the meat of the animals they killed was of economic value and conflicts arose when Zenker tried to implement German working economies (Lange 2006). This paper once again highlighted the role of the local population and impressively demonstrated the wealth of information contained in archival material.

This presentation focused on the business relationship between Johannes Umlauff (1874–1951) and the Natural History Museum in Winterthur through their correspondence from 1928 to 1936. It discussed the provenance of four great ape specimens – two chimpanzees, one gorilla and one orangutan – acquired from J. Umlauff during this period. Today, these specimens are stored deep underground in the museum’s depot in the building of the Hotel Banana City. It aimed at bringing back to light the hidden history of these specimens by highlighting the little-studied interwar period, after the heyday of Umlauff’s “Riesengorillas” before the First World War. This subsequent period marked the decline of the German natural history market because many German museums lacked the budget for large acquisitions, as the contributions by Buschmann and Zouna also stressed (see above). The economic crisis in Germany enabled smaller foreign museums, such as the one in Winterthur, to acquire specimens from J. Umlauff’s stock at reduced prices. The study of their provenance offered insight into colonial collection practices by identifying the collectors of these great ape specimens: Max Zenker and Florian Narr in Cameroon. Exploring the activities of Max Zenker, a son of Georg Zenker, supplemented previous research on the Zenker family by focusing on the sons’ collecting efforts after their father’s death. Through the hunting report and photos of the German colonial officer Florian Narr, attention is also brought to the images that J. Umlauff circulated alongside the apes themselves. The presentation thus highlighted aspects of J. Umlauff’s acquiring, taxidermy and business practices that have not yet been examined.

These findings were supported by a response by Annekathrin Krieger (Landesmuseum Hannover) (Krieger 2024).

With this contribution, it was proposed to explore the collecting practices of a lesser-known German naturalist who went into the field in southern Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Ludwig Krebs (1792–1844) travelled to the Cape Colony in 1817, at the age of 25, where he found employment with the pharmacists Pallas & Poleman of Cape Town. He immediately started collecting botanical and zoological specimens for that firm. In 1820, Hinrich Lichtenstein (1780–1857), director of the Zoological Museum in Berlin, gave Krebs an official commission to collect specimens for the museum. In the twenty years to follow, Krebs sent sixteen large consignments to Berlin, which the museum mostly auctioned off, amounting to an overall value of 12,424 Reichsthaler. Krebs never published any report or memoir about his travels through the Cape Colony. However, his extensive correspondence with Lichtenstein provides some insight into his everyday life and work as a professional collector. While working with these written records held at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, it became obvious that close attention must be paid to the violence involved in “collecting” animals: how did the practice of killing animals for natural history purposes relate to economic considerations and imperatives? How did the manner in which an animal was killed and prepared for shipping determine the price it would catch? How did market demands impact hunting specimens in the field? Who was paid what amount, if any, for providing services to Krebs’ collecting enterprise, whose labour was simply forcefully taken? The goal was to understand how both the individual act of killing an animal and the larger phenomenon of massive specimen extraction from the wild was embedded not only in a moral economy, but also in a pecuniary one and how these processes were also interwoven with violence committed against human life, that is, within the broader historical context of colonial violence and its politics of difference.

Charlotte Hoes (University of Göttingen): Transimperial Opportunism. Divergent Methods and Adaptive Strategies in the Wildlife Trade

To contextualise the findings on the Umlauff companies, some results of a research project on the international animal trading companies of Carl Reiche (1827–1885) and Ludwig Ruhe (1828–1883), based in the small German town of Alfeld, were presented. These animal traders also dealt with ethnographic artefacts in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, albeit to a lesser extent. As dominant players in the global trade in 'exotic' animals, the two Alfeld companies distributed zoological specimens and ethnographic artefacts to various places and institutions in Europe. Highlighting the transimperial entanglements of the trade, including the transportation of live animals and humans, raised questions about the knowledge systems required to keep animals alive. Furthermore, the practices of dealing with animals and even humans touched on the topics of agency and resistance to these practices, shifting the focus from Alfeld to colonised territories. As with the Umlauff case, the Reiches and Ruhes provide an opportunity to explore the connections between collector and trade networks of zoological specimens, as well as their correlation with ethnographic items and so-called 'Völkerschauen' ('human zoos').

Callum Fisher (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Between Nature and Culture: The Dispersed Collection of the Former Museum Godeffroy

Another project presentation drew attention to the relational ties between collections dispersed across disciplinary, institutional and national boundaries. Here, the focus was on observing how the boundaries between ‘ethnographic objects’ and ‘natural history specimens’ are enacted. The project explored the ways in which objects with a similar provenance come to be so differently embedded in disciplinary frameworks and asked which generative potential lies beyond these categories. The project dealt with objects from colonial contexts and the ways in which museum practitioners engage with their contentious legacies. In particular, the study worked with parts of a collection divided between Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum – Künste und Kulturen der Welt (MARKK) and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) in Paris. With regard to research on the Umlauff trading house, overarching questions were relevant here: similarly to Richard Fossi's presentation, the argument of the objectification of culture and nature and adding to that, how the dichotomy between these two fields affected the understanding of collections in certain types of museums. Furthermore, the contribution stressed the role of situated knowledge and how this affects the work with colonial collections in museums today.

Commercial traders were central figures in the booming nineteenth-century global trade in natural history specimens (Coote et al. 2017). They supplied museums and private collectors with in-demand specimens and facilitated their delivery through access to the increasingly globalised world of international trade, shipping and finance. Seeking to achieve a profit for their endeavours, the two key questions for the trader were ‘who’ and ‘how’. In other words, who should they trade with – geographically and institutionally – and how should the trade transaction occur – through buy/sell, exchange/barter or donation? Both of these questions were distinctive ones for the specimen trader – few businesses traded with such a wide network of individuals and institutions or conducted barter and donation. Obtaining extensive information about traders is difficult since few detailed archives survive; exceptions include Henry Ward (1834-1906) of New York. Instead, it is often through the more extensive collections of natural history museums, along with a collage of other sources, that it is possible to reconstruct the history of traders. This presentation drew primarily upon evidence of the activities of commercial traders from several major Australian museums and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Amongst the conclusions are that trader networks were geographically and institutionally diverse, yet social, personal and professional connections also mattered. Secondly, traders understood and acted upon the relative merits and shortcomings of each transactional form in acquiring and disposing of natural history specimens.

As demonstrated during the workshop, the Umlauff family’s trade network was a global venture. However, apart from a few central figures such as the founder Johann Friedrich Gustav Umlauff or Georg Zenker, our knowledge about the many people who participated in gathering and providing specimens is still limited. In addition to the traders, the process of “collecting” and preparing specimens for sale involved numerous local collectors, guides and informants, but also taxidermists, photographers and illustrators. New insights into the contributions of such hidden figures can be gained by opening up information on collection agents in different roles. Wikidata is used to document the relationships between traders, trading companies, natural history museums, “collectors” and other relevant entities. This open knowledge base is a multilingual and collaborative tool that stores structured data in a human- and machine-readable format. By creating and using persistent identifiers for different entities, such as people, places, taxa, expeditions, publications etc., scattered data can be connected, referenced and also linked to archival material and collections (von Mering et al. 2024). The information in Wikidata is reusable and can be updated and enriched by others, thus filling knowledge gaps and improving the quality of collection data. This improves the transparency and accessibility of natural history collections and archives, enabling provenance or other historical research related to the colonial contexts of specimens provided by Umlauff companies (Kaiser and von Mering 2024). Knowledge graphs help to visualise relationships within the global trade network, highlighting exchange routes and correspondence networks, but also uncovering hidden local contributors and their stories (Fig. 4). Linked Open Data related to collections including those on natural history trading houses allow us to expand our view of the museum' histories and how specimens were acquired from different sources (von Mering et al. 2025).