The Library & Collection Medical Humanities (BSMH) at the Institute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine houses a collection of teaching images and an associated collection of books from the partial estate of the anthropologist and eugenicist Hans Grimm. Other parts of the estate are located at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory and the archive of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. During the Nazi era and beyond, Hans Grimm worked at the Institute for Human Heredity and Eugenics in Kiel and at the Anthropological Institute in Breslau. From 1955, he led the newly founded Institute of Anthropology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
The collection comprises approximately 6,700 35mm slides dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. There is a particular focus on the Nazi era and the early years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The extensive holdings allow one to trace the history of anthropology. The collection can also be used to compare contemporary collections of teaching image collections and provide historical context.
The content will undergo more in-depth indexing and contextualization by including the associated book holdings and archival materials from the Natural History Museum and the HU Archive. Additionally, interdisciplinary seminars are planned in which students of cultural studies, information science, and medicine will process and contextualize the collection through in-depth research.
Project goal
The aim is to restore, index, and digitize a portion of the collection for further research into the history of anthropology in Germany.