Publications of the Museum
2017
Vaizdai iš Lietuvos: Roberto Minzloffo etnografinių scenų albumas. Sud. Lina MOTUZIENĖ, Vasilijus SAFRONOVAS. Neringa, 2017.
How did the end of the 19 th century Germans perceive Lithuania and Lithuanians? In a way, Robert Minzloff’s photoalbum „Vaizdai iš Lietuvos“ and the brochure by Georg Sauerwein that explains the circumstances of how the album was created provide an answer.
Minzloff’s album, published in 1894 by Otto von Mauderode’s printing house in Tilsit is the first ethnographic photography collection about Lithuanians. Even though its individual photographs have later been reproduced numerous times, the whole album has become a bibliographic rarity. Possibly the only publicly accessible copy of it is kept in the Berlin National Library – by the way, for a while it was believed that it was lost during the WWII. For this particular publication, the Minzloff album was digitalized as is now newly published. It is accompanied by Sauerwein’s text, first published in Lithuanian and German, and by academic introductions by historians and art historians. They reveal Robert Minzloff’s activities in East Prussia, Lithuania and the Curonian Spit, analyze the contexts in which the photoalbum first appeared, and Georg Sauerwein’s work that drew attention to the Prussian Lithuanian situation in the German Empire.
