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Max von Oppenheim

Max von Oppenheim (1860 – 1946), second son of bank partner Albert von Oppenheim (1834 – 1912), rejected the career he had been expected to pursue in the family business, finding his calling in numerous aspects of the Orient instead, as explorer, archaeologist, ethnologist, collector and political advisor. The openness and tolerance he showed in his dealings with Oriental lifestyle and culture set him apart from the majority of his contemporaries.

Oppenheim's most important achievement was the excavation of the 3,000-year-old Aramaean city of Guzana at Tell Halaf in what is now Syria. He was able to display a large number of his findings in his privately-financed Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin. He also gained lasting rewards from his exploration into Arabic culture. His studies on the history of the Bedouins and their way of life are outstanding. Oppenheim documented his travels in Southwest Asia and his excavations in a unique photographic collection. He had been interested in Oriental arts and crafts ever since his youth, and assembled a thematically diverse collection in the course of his life. In 1922, he founded an Orient research institute in Berlin, which adopted an interdisciplinary approach. Oppenheim ultimately became known for a memorandum he wrote in the initial stages of World War I, in which he recommended the German government to incite Muslims living under British and French colonial rule to wage a "Holy War" against their colonial masters.

In spite of considerable losses resulting from World War II, Max von Oppenheim's legacy is now more alive than ever. The Max Freiherr von Oppenheim Foundation, which he founded in 1929, serves as coordinator and sponsor for a large number of projects. Since 2002, a team from the Berlin Museum of the Ancient Near East has been reconstructing the Tell Halaf sculptures, which were destroyed by a bombing raid in 1943. Upon completion of this work, an exhibition of the artefacts long believed to be lost is planned for 2011. German archaeologists resumed the excavations at Tell Halaf in 2006. Oppenheim's photographic collection has now been digitised and is available for all to see on the Internet. The items in his collection are also to be shown in a new light; when the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum of Ethnology opens its new building in Cologne in Summer 2010, a room is to be dedicated to Max von Oppenheim's Oriental collection.

Max von Oppenheim's photographic collection

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