Abstract
The collecting history of the Brandenburg-‐Prussian Kunstkammer began in the late seventeenth century after the original sixteenth-‐century collection was destroyed during the Thirty Years War. The ethnographic objects that were collected over five hundred years by the rulers of Brandenburg and Prussia with a Western purview were originally housed within the Berliner Schloss as a part of the Brandenburg-‐Prussian Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. Torn down in 1950 by the East German government, the Berliner Schloss is being rebuilt, with a projected opening date of 2019. The new Berliner Schloss will contain the Humboldt Forum, a global, cultural museum that will house the non-‐Western ethnographic collections that were part of the original Brandenburg-‐Prussian Kunstkammer. The collections that will be housed in the new Berliner Schloss will be encoded with cultural value and will position Germany within a global context, rather than retain the country’s historic identity as a harbinger of empire.