| Summary: | This chapter details the return of the Yup'ik Flying Swan mask to Berlin in the early 1990s after a half-century-long postwar odyssey. The mask held a distinguished place in Berlin's Museum für Völkerkunde. For almost two decades, it hung top and center within a prominent glass cabinet in the Eskimo exhibit among the museum's celebrated new Schausammlung. The chapter then discusses the destruction of war, in which collections were devastated and many scattered across vast distances. It reports that some 33,000 objects from the African collections, mostly items from West Africa, were lost in “safer” locations, and on the East Asian collections, only 40 percent survived. Over time, it became clear that Soviet trophy brigades had seized some 75,000 or more archaeological and ethnographic objects from the bunkers, the Royal Mint, and the mines and the castle in Silesia. Amid this postwar devastation, the chapter highlights how Germany's surviving ethnologists quickly returned to their science and began trying to reconstitute their museums. It looks at the creation of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 1957, founded by the federal government to obtain and preserve Prussian cultural heritage.
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