Georg Höltker (1895-1976) - Collector and Mediator of Melanesian Ethnographica
Georg Höltker (1895-1976)
Collector and Mediator of Melanesian Ethnographica
Harald E. Grauer
The name of the Divine Word missionary (SVD) and anthropologist Georg Höltker is closely connected with numerous ethnographic artefacts from New Guinea, which can be found in museums and private collections in Europe and the USA. At the same time, it should be noted that numerous legends have been formed around this person. For example, rumors and written publications say that he was a missionary in the Philippines or in the highlands of New Guinea, but also that he never explored New Guinea or even never set foot on this tropical island...
Georg Höltker in Bosmun taking a photo (photo taken by J. Much) from Archives of Anthropos Institute, Sankt Augustin
To counter such myths, it seems useful to take a look at the biography of this extraordinary person, whose life was marked by numerous biographical breaks, personal successes, but also deep disappointments. Höltker's story begins in the Wilhelmine Empire at a time when the German Empire had recently entered the race for colonial possessions and had, among other things, asserted its claim to the northeastern part of New Guinea internationally against the interests of the British Empire.
The future missionary priest and anthropologist was born in 1895 in the deeply Catholic region of Westphalia (northwestern Germany) in a small town on the border with the Netherlands. He was a son of a Catholic worker. After attending eight years of elementary school, he began to work in a factory, like his father, in keeping with his milieu of origin. Through contact with Divine Word missionaries and their popular magazines, he decided to prepare himself to enter this Catholic missionary society. In 1910 he entered the SVD boarding school in Steyl upon Maas in the Netherlands. This small village was on the other side of the German-Dutch border. Attendance at this missionary high school was intended to prepare him for entry into the order, for the priesthood, and for work as a missionary abroad. The assassination in Sarajevo and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War abruptly interrupted this period of his life. As a subject of the Kaiser, he was drafted into military service in 1915, even before he could graduate from high school, and experienced the horrors of gas and trench warfare on the Western Front with his Westphalian infantry regiment.
Wounded several times and awarded the Iron Cross II Class, he was demobilized in 1918/19 without having been a prisoner of war. With a leg injury that was to hinder him for the rest of his life, he re-registered with the Divine Word missionaries in 1919 and entered the novitiate of the congregation. Thanks to a special permission of the order's leadership for veterans of the Great War, he was allowed to study theology at the order's own seminary St. Gabriel near Vienna - even without the obligatory “Abitur” (baccalaureate). Already during his theological studies he attended courses in linguistics and cultural anthropology with the then famous anthropologist and linguist Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954) and Paul Schebesta (1878-1967), who had been expelled from Mozambique during the First World War. Both were confreres and were to play an important role in his future career. Attending a seminar with the latter led to Höltker's first scientific publication. Together with his academic teacher Paul Schebesta, he published a study on African shields in the ethnological and linguistic journal Anthropos. The theoretical reference point of this study was the culture-historical approach preferred by Wilhelm Schmidt, which aimed at reconstructing so-called culture circles (Kulturkreise) and historical lines of development.
After Georg Höltker had received the priestly ordination in May 1925, and had worked for a short time at a missionary high school of the SVD in Silesia, he received permission from his order, probably on the recommendation of Wilhelm Schmidt, to complete further studies. From 1926 to 1930 he studied at the universities of Vienna and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin. While in Vienna, in addition to ethnology and physical anthropology, he also studied art history with a focus on Asia and psychology with the Gestalt psychologist and linguist Karl Bühler (1879-1963), in Berlin he attended courses in ethnology Richard Thurnwald (1869-1954) and especially with the Americanists Walter Lehmann (1878-1937), Karl Theodor Preuss (1869-1938), and Walter Krickeberg (1885-1962). Höltker's dissertation dealt with the family among the Aztecs, drawing in particular on information from Bernardino de Sahagún's (1499-1590) work. He was not allowed to submit his study in Berlin, however, due to his lack of a baccalaureate, and was therefore awarded a doctorate in Vienna with special permission from the University of Vienna.
During his studies, Höltker not only learned the theoretical positions of the so-called Vienna School of ethnology, but also became acquainted with a functionalist approach to research under Richard Thurnwald in Berlin. The later was not only a famous functionalist anthropologist, but an expert for Melanesia, as well. Höltker’s studies with the Berlin Americanists familiarized him with the research tradition of German ancient Americanist research going back to Eduard Seler (1849-1922). He also used his time as a student to volunteer in the redesign of the Vienna Museum of Anthropology and to write numerous popular articles for missionary journals of the Steyl missionaries. He also wrote an article about the Benin bronzes. This was also reprinted and translated into Dutch. If one looks at the subjects Georg Höltker studied, they corresponded to a large extent to the four fields of anthropology in the United States at that time.
Georg Höltker in the Vatican Collections (c1930) with the cast of an Aztec stone bundle, from the Archives of Anthropos Institute, Sankt Augustin
After a brief period at the newly established Pontificio Museo Missionario Etnologico Vaticano in Rome, Wilhelm Schmidt called Georg Höltker back to Austria to the St. Gabriel Mission Seminary near Vienna. There the editorial office of the journal Anthropos was located. He joined the editorial staff of the magazine and took over the post of editor-in-chief from Wilhelm Schmidt. As the new editor-in-chief, he continued the international and multilingual orientation of the journal. At the same time, he taught ethnology at the SVD missionary seminary and at a Viennese training school for teachers.
The year 1935 brought a surprising turn in Georg Höltker's life. While Höltker's scientific focus had been on Mesoamerica since his studies in Berlin, and he had been an armchair and museum researcher until then, he was now unexpectedly offered the opportunity to do field research in the area of former German New Guinea, which had also been one of the important mission areas of the Divine Word missionaries since 1896. Georg Höltker, mediated by Franz Kirschbaum and Wilhelm Schmidt, was allowed to travel to New Guinea via the USA as a participant in the "Crane-Peabody Museum New Guinea Expedition". Even though the planned expedition failed before it had begun, this enabled Georg Höltker to visit the USA and Harvard University and to travel to New Guinea. He lived on New Guinea from 1936 to 1939 and conducted research in the context and surrounding area of the mission stations of the Steyler Missionaries and the Steyler Missionary Sisters.
Since the originally planned research trip could not be realized, he had to design a new research project on site. He planned an anthropological survey for the regions in which the Society of the Divine Word was active, i.e. the northeastern coastal area with the offshore islands, the Sepik and parts of the highlands around the Chimbu area. This survey was committed to the salvage paradigm and ultimately the four-field approach. Anthropological data were to be collected from the population groups concerned, language documentation was to be created and cultural descriptions were to be drawn up using standardized questionnaires. In addition, ethnographic objects were to be acquired and photographic documentation was to be created in order to ensure a holistic documentation of the cultures in question. To achieve this goal, Georg Höltker relied on the cooperation of the missionaries and missionary sisters working on site. He cooperated with them in his research and instructed them in field research techniques so that they could collect anthropological and ethnographic data themselves.
Important cooperation partners for him were the missionary Karl Böhm, who worked on the islands of Manam, Boesa and Biem, and Heinrich Aufenanger, who worked with the Gende in the highlands. At the same time, he received support for his research project from his confreres Wolff and Joseph Schebesta, who were active on New Guinea and held important church functions. In the spring of 1939, however, he had to cut short his research stay because of health problems. Before his departure in March of that year, he organized the shipment of his ethnographic collection of over 2000 objects to Switzerland, to Fribourg, and the sending of stone objects to Rome. Georg Höltker then traveled to Fribourg, Switzerland, before the outbreak of World War II, where he met his confreres from the Anthropos Institute. They had already gone into exile in the Catholic canton of western Switzerland in 1938 after the so-called Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich.
In the canton of Fribourg, Georg Höltker was able to start his work immediately. He began to give lectures about his field research in different places in Switzerland in order to get himself talked about in interested circles in Switzerland. At the same time, he began to evaluate his field research records and continued the documentation of his ethnographic collection begun in New Guinea. He gave the main part of his collection to the University of Fribourg. He also sent objects destined for the Ethnological Museum to Vienna and began sending objects to other museums in the war-neutral countries, Sweden and Switzerland. He continued the publication activity begun in New Guinea on the ethnography of the island and became involved with the newly founded missiology journal "Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft". In this context, it should be noted that he also reflected and published on the appropriate documentation of ethnographic artefacts. After the end of the war, he began to resume contacts with his confreres working in New Guinea, as far as this was still possible. This enabled him to import ethnographic objects to Switzerland and then forward them to interested institutions. It was important for Höltker to be able to produce photographs of the objects he collected for research purposes.
In 1948 he received an appointment as professor of ethnology at the University of Fribourg where he succeeded Wilhelm Schmidt. The burdens of the professorship, which involved a considerable teaching load, led to a noticeable decline in his publication activity. In 1954 he had to resign from his professorship, officially for health reasons. The background to this resignation was an internal conflict within the order over Wilhelm Schmidt's scientific legacy, in which Georg Höltker, who had been promoted by Wilhelm Schmidt, was unable to assert himself and lost out. To the astonishment of his colleagues in the field of ethnology, who knew nothing of this internal conflict, he was transferred by his superiors as a teacher to a grammar school in eastern Switzerland. This transfer was accompanied by a ban on publication, which Georg Höltker also obeyed.
After teaching at the school for five years, he was allowed to move to the missionary seminary of Sankt Augustin near Bonn (Germany). In the course of this move, he also had several hundred objects from the ethnographic collection brought to Sankt Augustin. At the Missionary Seminary he taught ethnology again and he resumed to publish scientific articles. In his publications at that time he devoted himself primarily to the processing of his research notes from the time before the Second World War. With regard to publications, it should be noted that during this period and until his death he also published in journals in the German Democratic Republic. He was probably the West German ethnologist who published the most in East German journals in the 1960s. He stopped teaching at the seminary in the late 1960s but, with deteriorating health, devoted himself to publishing the results of his research until his death. About a year before his death, he was able to celebrate his 80th birthday in the presence of his colleagues, and on this occasion he received a commemorative publication containing a representative selection of his contributions to New Guinea. On January 22nd, 1976 Georg Höltker died and was buried in the cemetery of the Missionary Seminary Sankt Augustin.
Although the ethnographic collection he transferred to the Missionary Seminary formed an important part of the collection of the museum “Haus Völker und Kulturen” (House of Peoples and Cultures), which opened in the early 1970s, he was hardly involved in the planning and establishment of this museum due to his advanced age.
Along with Franz Kirschbaum, Georg Höltker was the most important collector of ethnographic artefacts in New Guinea from the context of the Divine Word Mission, and the objects he acquired cover a wide range of topics. At the same time, it should be noted that he was still importing objects from New Guinea after World War II, and his name was also attributed to objects that other members of the SVD transferred to Europe. His name developed into a kind of "brand name" that was associated on the art market to increase value even with artefacts from New Guinea that did not pass through the hands of this distinguished ethnologist.
Last passport photo of Georg Höltker, from the Archives of Anthropos Institute, Sankt Augustin
Bibliography:
Grauer, Harald: Georg Höltker SVD (1895-1976). Eine biografische Darstellung und Analyse seiner Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Ethnologie und Missionswissenschaft. Baden-Baden: Academia, 2022. (Studia Instituti Anthropos ; 51)
Grauer, Harald: Georg Höltker (1895-1976) als Sammler von Ethnographika vor dem Hintergrund postkolonialer Museumskritik. In: verbum SVD 61: 212-247.
Höltker, Georg: Menschen und Kulturen in Nordost-Neuguinea. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Sankt Augustin b. Bonn: Verlag des Anthropos Institutes, 1975. (Studia Instituti Anthropos ; 29)
Lutkehaus, Nancy: The Society of Divine Word Missionaries. Late 19th and 20th century ethnographers along the northeast coast of New Guinea. In: Leonard Plotnicov, Paula Brown, and Vinson Sutlive (eds.), Anthropology’s debt to missionaries. Pp. 103-114. Pittsburgh: Department of Anthropology / University pf Pittsburgh. (Ethnology Monographs ; 20)
Piepke, Joachim G.: The Kirschbaum Collection of the Missionary Ethnological Museum in the Vatican. In: Anthropos 107: 560-564.
Rüegg, François (ed.): Ethnographie und Mission. Georg Höltker und Neuguinea. Siegburg: Franz Schmitt Verlag, 2018. (Studia Instituti Missiologici SVD ; 110)
