Ethnological Museum of Berlin

The Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (English: Ethnological Museum of Berlin) is one of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (English: State Museums of the Prussian Heritage Foundation), the de facto national collection of the Federal Republic of Germany. Its exhibitions are presently located in the Humboldt Forum in Mitte, along with the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (English: Museum of Asian Arts). The collections remained in the so-called “Forschungscampus Dahlem” (English: “Dahlem Research Campus” Berlin). The museum holds more than 500,000 objects and is one of the largest and most important collections of works of art and culture from outside Europe in the world. Its highlights include important objects from the Sepik River, Hawaii, the Kingdom of Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania, China, the Pacific Coast of North America, Mesoamerica, the Andes, as well as one of the first ethnomusicology collections of sound recordings (the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv).

The Ethnologisches Museum was founded in 1873 and opened its doors in 1886 as the Royal Museum for Ethnology (German: Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde), but its roots go back to the 17th-century Kunstkammer of the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia. As the museum’s collections expanded in the early 20th century, the museum quickly outgrew its facility in the center of Berlin on Königgrätzer Straße (today named Stresemannstraße). A new building was erected in Dahlem to house the museum’s store rooms and study collections. In the Second World War, the main building of the museum was heavily damaged. It was demolished in 1961, and the buildings in Dahlem (in what was then West Berlin) were reconfigured to serve as the museum's exhibition spaces.

Following German reunification, although many of the Berlin museum collections were relocated, the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum remained in Dahlem. Starting in 2000, concrete plans were developed to relocate the collections back to the center of the city. In 2021, the Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst were reopened in the Humboldt Forum in the reconstructed Berlin City Palace (German: Berliner Stadtschloss) immediately south of the main Museum Island complex.