Ernst Vatter (ethnologist)

Ernst Wilhelm Vatter (born July 30, 1888 in Wiesbaden , † April 23, 1948 in Chile ) was a German ethnologist.

Life

Ernst Wilhelm Vatter was the only child from the first marriage of his father Ernst Karl Vatter. His father divorced his father's mother Auguste when Ernst was 8 years old. He grew up with his father, but always had a good relationship with his mother. His father married a second time 7 years later. The daughters Lilli and Else arose from this marriage.

Vatter passed his Abitur in 1906 and began studying geography. He first studied for two semesters in Heidelberg and then in Marburg until he graduated in 1911 . He wrote his doctoral thesis on braiding techniques, which would remain his passion throughout his life, with Theobald Fischer and completed it after his death with Otto Krümel and Alfred Rühl . Fischer and Rühl's interest in the anthropological questions of geography awakened Vatter's interest in ethnology.

In 1913 Vatter began his work in the Frankfurt Völkerkundemuseum (now the Museum of World Cultures ) as a research assistant. He was supposed to support the director Bernhard Hagen in his research. Soon he began to publish their own larger projects, presumably, he was also at Carl Strehlow multi-volume monograph of the Australian Aranda and Loritja tribes involved, which appeared in 1915 in the museum.

During the First World War , Vatter was initially deferred for health reasons, but was then employed as a cartographer in the Ukraine in 1916 . After the war he returned to the museum and got a permanent job as a research assistant. After Bernhard Hagen's death, Vatter and his colleague Johannes Lehmann were the museum's leading curator. The 1920s were also the most scientifically fruitful period of Vatter's career. He completed his habilitation in 1923 with a work on Australian totemism , at that time a main topic in ethnology. The subject of his habilitation thesis , as well as a small volume on racial studies, show that Vatter was definitely interested in the theoretically discussed questions of his subject at the time. The museum work also made him aware of the possibilities there were to approach foreign societies outside of Europe through their material culture and art. In his publication he tried to find an interpretation based on the object, in which he included further historical and sociological connections.

In 1926 he published his next major publication “Religious Sculpture of the Primitive People”, which is still an important work for art ethnology today for historical reasons. In this publication, Vatter broke away from questions of form and instead examined the role of the artist in non-European societies. He left questions of the theory of evolution behind, turned away from the debate between abstraction and naturalism and advocated that artistic creation should only be understood from the wider social and religious environment of the community.

In addition, after he had previously given lectures at Frankfurt University from time to time, he was appointed by the lecturer as a private lecturer in ethnology. Vatter was a good speaker and liked teaching. He also married Marie Louise Altheim in 1920, with whom he had two children: Rose-Renate and Ernst Wilhelm. In 1927 Vatter divorced. The reason for the divorce was Hannah Hirsch, one of his students, whom he finally married in February 1828. Hannah was 18 years younger than Ernst and came from a Jewish family. Hanna and Ernst had three children: Peter, Michael and Martin.

From 1928 to 1929 Vatter was on the East Indonesia expedition. Hannah was there too, she was very closely involved in the planning right from the start. The collection created on the expedition is representative and contains many items that are purely functional and of no aesthetic value. Vatter tried to get an overview, all objects were discussed as ethnographic pieces and interpreted in their social context. He saw the expedition as a significant step for his museum work and teaching, but after his return from Indonesia Vatter was only able to work constructively as a museum ethnologist, teacher and scientist for a few years. The book on the expedition was published in 1932 and in 1934 an article about the Naga figures by Alor appeared in the Yearbook for Prehistoric and Ethnographic Art. In this, Vatter is primarily interested in a comparative methodology that partly approaches the diffusion theory .

In October 1934, despite resistance within the city council, Leo Frobenius was appointed director of the Völkerkundemuseum. Frobenius was the opposite of Vatter in every way. Vatter also considered Frobenius personally to be unfair and scientifically a charlatan , while Frobenius accused Vatter of being the real mastermind in the campaign against him. After Frobenius was appointed director, he started a public smear campaign against Vatter and his colleague Lehmann by getting two Frankfurt newspapers to report negatively about the custodial work of the two. It quickly became clear that Vatter or Lehmann would not be able to work with Frobenius, whereupon Lehmann asked for his early retirement and Vatter for a transfer to another office. The city council agreed, so Vatter began working in the city library in 1935. On June 29, 1937, Vatter's license to teach was withdrawn, and on August 18, 1937, he was retired at the age of 49 due to "Jewish spin-offs". On July 27, 1939, Vatter finally emigrated to Chile with his wife and children from his second marriage , the children from his first marriage stayed with their mother. With the emigration , Vatter gave up all scientific work and died on April 23, 1948 of a heart attack .

literature

• Ruth Barnes: East Indonesia in the 20th century: On the trail of the Ernst Vatter Collection , publisher: Museum of World Cultures Frankfurt. Frankfurt am Main, 2004, pp. 114-120.