
The GDR as a Collector
Ethics and Curatorial Concept at the Museum of Musical Instruments
Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
Published on 12. May 2026
Book
Hardback
216 pages
978-3-99094-640-4 (ISBN)
Description
Time and again, the language of collecting and preservation is
cloaked in florid rhetoric whenever museums, their purposes and
their holdings are evoked - even though the museum world is
scarcely bound by legal definition. A closer look at the history and
evolution of any institution, not least our own, quickly dispels such
illusions. This volume contrasts the bourgeois collecting ideals of
prominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century owners with
the Marxist-Leninist notion of collecting as practised in the GDR.
The research centre DIGITAL ORGANOLOGY at the Museum of Musical
Instruments, University of Leipzig, brings together an expanding
pool of closely interlinked research data across multiple collections.
These data provide a framework for tracing the histories of musical
instruments and the collections to which they belong. This infrastructure
is designed not only to support detailed, object-based
studies, but also to enable large-scale analysis through distant-reading
tools. The same applies to provenance research, which, with its
legal and ethical obligations, poses major challenges for university
museums - in organological scholarship, academic teaching, and
the wider transfer of knowledge to society.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Wien
Austria
Dimensions
Height: 225 mm
Width: 148 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
405 gr
ISBN-13
978-3-99094-640-4 (9783990946404)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Josef Focht | Heike Fricke
The GDR as a Collector
Ethics and Curatorial Concept at the Museum of Musical Instruments
E-Book
05/2026
1st Edition
Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
€29.99
Available for download