Von Portheim-Stiftung (VPST) Völkerkundemuseum of the von Portheim-Stiftung (VPST)

The collections of the vPST museum comprise more than 40,000 works of art and ethnographic objects from Asia, Africa and Oceania, as well as historical photographs, manuscripts and natural history material

The Ethnological Museum is solely supported by the Josefine and Eduard von Portheim Foundation in Heidelberg. The founding holdings of the museum consist of the extensive collection of the Jewish scholar and collector Victor Goldschmidt, who maintained the museum as well as several research institutions until the Second World War.

Since 1921, the foundation’s headquarters and its extensive collections have been located in Palais Weimar, where the first exhibition was open to visitors in 1924. From these collections, only the Ethnographic Institute survived the Nazi period; it forms the core holdings of today’s Ethnological Museum. In recent decades, this collection has been continuously expanded through targeted acquisitions and extensive donations.

To this day, the collections of the Ethnological Museum form the basis for current museum work as well as for academic research. Through changing exhibitions, art and culture from different regions of the world are presented based on selected themes.