Lost and Found: Two drawings by Franz Krüger

The blog series on the collection work of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) deals with core questions such as the decision for or against the acquisition of certain objects, the different ways in which they are found and acquired, the changing research questions posed by the objects in the collections, the provenance and origin of the objects, and many other aspects.

Beside the search for museum objects from possible Nazi persecution contexts or confiscations and dispossessions that occurred in the Soviet occupation zone und later in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as well as cultural goods from colonial contexts, many museums in Germany are also concerned with losses from their collections that occurred through war. This is the case with the Deutsches Historisches Museum, to which the collections of the pre-1945 Zeughaus were transferred. The history of this erstwhile enormous stock of objects related to military history is still being researched by the DHM’s technical experts and provenance researchers. Among these objects are two drawings by the Berlin artist Franz Krüger. Dr Heike Krokowski, scientific staff member of the DHM’s provenance research department, tells us their story.