Max Thiel - Ethnographic Collector
The “Sultan” of Matupit: Max Thiel as Ethnographic Collector
By Rainer F. Buschmann
Maximilian (Max) Franz Thiel was born in Munich on January 12th 1865. His mother Rosette Albertine Thiel was a sister of Eduard and Franz Hernsheim, who established the Hernsheim Company in 1875. The Hernsheim Company initially sought to benefit from the copra trade in the Islands of Micronesia, but soon expanded into the Bismarck Archipelago. By the late 1870s, Eduard established a station on the Island of Matupit located in the sheltered deep-water harbor of Blanche Bay off the island of New Britain. Both Eduard and Franz Hernsheim, among others, successfully lobbied the German Government to declare the Bismarck Archipelago and the northeastern corner of New Guinea a German protectorate in 1884.
In 1883, at the tender age of 18, Max Thiel arrived in the Marshall Islands (Jaluit) to assist his uncles in their commercial endeavors.
Max Thiel as a young man in Jaluit
By 1886 he transferred to Matupit and quickly became Eduard Hernsheim's most trusted employee. When his uncle suffered a debilitating stroke in the 1890s and retired to Germany, Thiel took over the operations at Matupit. Under Thiel's leadership, the Hernsheim Company experienced a second wave of expansion, establishing stations in the Admiralty Islands, the Solomon Islands, and other locations in the German colony.
The Hernsheim Station at Matupit Museum am Rothenbaum. Kulturen und Künste der Welt.
Following the year 1910, Thiel transferred the management of the Hernsheim Company to his deputy Emil Timm and moved to Hamburg. It was Timm who in 1912 would relocate the company from crowded Matupit to Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Thiel witnessed the Australian occupation of the territory during the Great War and the consequent expropriation of the Hernsheim holdings only from afar. During this time, Thiel assumed the role of chairperson of the Hernsheim Company until his retirement in 1932. He passed away in Hamburg on May 16, 1939.
Max Thiel is less remembered for his business acumen and more for his hospitality and glamorous festivities at his lavish residence at Matupit. Local residents as well as visitors passing through the island spoke in exalted terms about his catering to their every need that included hard-to-get items in this colony distant from the German metropole. His parties, coinciding with important events such as New Year’s or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Birthday, were widely known and his invitations coveted throughout the colony. His extravagant celebrations earned him the nickname “Sultan of Matupit.” He remained unmarried throughout his stay in New Guinea and earned a reputation as a playboy. The elaborate billiard room was decorated with numerous artifacts returned from the Hernsheim stations throughout the Pacific. It was in this room where travelers, ethnographic practitioners, and local notables came face-to-face with the anthropological treasures of the islands surrounding New Guinea.
Max Thiel holding a hat standing on the verandah of on of the Hernsheim Company on Matupit. Museum am Rothenbaum. Kulturen und Künste der Welt.
The colony of German New Guinea had a prominent place in the development of German ethnology. Often regarded as the founder of German ethnology and first director of the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) argued that the fabled Polynesian islands had lost their ethnographic enchantment by the nineteenth century. Melanesia, which included New Guinea and its surrounding islands, on the other hand, promised rich treasures that were threatened by the arrival of commercial companies, colonial officials, and missionaries. In conjunction with mushrooming ethnographic institutions around Germany, Bastian’s urgent call to understand German New Guinea as a vital ethnographic borderland established a salvage agenda, which made ethnographic objects into scarce commodities. Competition among leading German ethnological museums located all over the young nation—unified only in 1871—provided for an explosive mix that individuals such as Max Thiel were eager to exploit.
The competitive politics of ethnographic collecting that descended upon German New Guinea around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries created a network of secondary collectors—individuals whose primary task was not the ethnographic acquisition of artifacts. Besides Max Thiel, this network included prominent names such as Karl Nauer, captain of the Norddeutsche Lloyd steamer Sumatra circulating throughout the Bismarck Archipelago, and Franz Boluminski, colonial official at the Kavieng station in northern New Ireland, the “wonderland” of the expressive mortuary carvings known as Malagan and Uli.
Uli collected by Max Thiel for the Stuttgart collection. Linden Museum Digital, 049272
Thiel’s endeavors as an ethnographic collector went through several phases. Initially, he sought to capitalize economically from the increasing demand by cashing in on his ethnographic collections. The monetary windfall, however, failed to materialize, as ethnological directors simply did not possess the financial means to meet Thiel’s exorbitant price tags. Similarly, individuals such as Felix von Luschan, in charge of Berlin’s African and Oceanic collections, placed increasing demands on the objects returned to Germany. Artifacts were not enough, Luschan maintained, but they had to be accompanied by exact determination about cultural usage and manufacture. This clash between science and commercialism is best exemplified by a collection assembled by Thiel, through resident traders and schooner captains in his employ, and offered for sale in Germany in the late 1890s. Thiel wanted 20,000 marks for the roughly 2,200 artifacts assembled mostly in the Admiralty Archipelago and the Western Isles of Wuvulu and Aua. Luschan inspecting the collection felt that it was more “arsenal than science” and that Thiel had deprived “the poor [Wuvulu] people of thousands of weapons… enough to supply all museums in the world.” Eventually Luschan would go even further: “The whole exercise amounts to a plundering action unique in the history of ethnography.” This assessment, of course, needs contextualization. Luschan had labored hard to push the price to about half of what Thiel was asking, only to find that most of the collection slipped through his hands. Thiel, however, was furious and told Emil Stephan, one of Luschan’s associates: “Do you believe that I am able to give my captains lectures on international law before sending them on their voyage?” Stephan wrote to Luschan somewhat facetiously: “God no, the way I have come to know these well-behaved skippers”
Max Thiel on a horse at Matupi. Museum am Rothenbaum. Kulturen und Künste der Welt.
The statement illustrates two issues. First, that Thiel collected most of his artifacts through Hernsheim employees or other colonial residents. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, that Thiel took such negative criticism to heart. In 1902 he hired F. E. Hellwig, who had assembled ethnographic collections during a stay in German New Guinea in the late 1890s. Hellwig was one of the first German ethnographic collectors to perform stationary research in Luf, Wuvulu, and Aua and returned to Germany with a well-determined ethnographic collection numbering well over 3000 artifacts in 1904. Georg Thilenius, the director of the Hamburg museum, would ultimately purchase the collection for 20,000 marks. Through Hellwig’s collection, Thiel felt vindicated from ethnographic plunder. Yet, as an investment the ethnographic assemblage proved a financial flop as Thiel was rumored to have made no profit. Thiel discovered, however, an alternative prize for his ethnographic collections.
Thiel throwing a party for his former employee H. R. Wahlen and F. E. Hellwig. H. R. Wahlen is at the head of the table while Thiel is standing behind him. Courtesy Michael Duttge
Upset by Luschan’s accusations and the cold and distant scientific tone emerging out of Berlin, Thiel found more sympathy in Karl von Linden, whose ethnological collection would result in the establishment of the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. Linden was skilled craftsman of letters capturing the poetics of the collection activity. “I am almost ashamed to say that I am crazy about the extravagant carvings of [New Ireland],” Linden wrote to Thiel and asked him to collect as much as possible for Stuttgart before it was too late. Exact cultural determination, Linden said, could always been done retroactively once the artifacts were safe and sound in Germany. Besides his endearing letters, Linden also discovered another way of attracting collections to Stuttgart. As he wrote to a colleague in Leipzig: “Obviously my blue eyes alone won’t entice any patron to relinquish [a collection to the museum]; alas I soon discovered the proper cure for buttonhole ailments… As far as I can remember each of my patients has left my clinic in good health”. Buttonhole ailment was a metaphorical disease depicting an almost irrational craving for German state decorations or orders carried in the buttonhole of one’s overcoat. Other names given to this “illness” were chest pains or heavy chest.
Thiel professed that he was no “order carrier” but agreed that such items were useful “for decorative purposes during festive events”. Ethnographic donations were useful also in acquiring the title of Norwegian Consul in 1907. Between 1908 and 1910, Thiel acquired the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle fourth class, the Saxony Knight’s Cross of the Order of Albert, and the Württemberg Knight’s Cross of the Order of Frederick for his ethnographic collection activity. The Prussian decoration is particularly telling. When officials in Berlin argued that the lowly Order of the Crown rather than the higher-ranking Order of the Red Eagle would be more suited for a businessman, Thiel contacted Luschan about the affront and threatened to withhold further collections. Embarrassed by this incident, Luschan and his associates made sure that Thiel would spot the proper order in the end. This last phase of Thiel’s collection activity, which includes the majestic Admiralty bowl, paid more attention to quality rather than quantity. Thiel listened to the need of museum curators in Berlin, Hamburg, and Stuttgart and supplied the ethnographic artifacts they desired. In August of 1908, for instance, he visited Linden in Stuttgart and assisted in the determination of artifacts while also establishing what was missing from the collection. The majestic Admiralty bowl may very well have been one of these artifacts.
Thiel’s collection activity went through several stages until he finally settled for orders and titles for payment. He certainly proudly carried his consular title and prominently displayed the orders that derived from his ethnographic collections. Such “bling” could only underscored his moniker of “Sultan” of Matupit.
Admiralty Bowl, Bowers Museum, Santa Ana
