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Max Ginsberg was born on May 20, 1872, in Berlin. His mother, Franziska Sachs (1848–1938), was from Berlin, and his father, Adolph Ginsberg (1839–1898), was from Czestochowa (Tschenstochau) in Poland. Max had three sisters—Frida, Rosa, and Alice—and three brothers—Ludwig, Wilhelm, and Sigmund Ginsberg. He married Henriette Sachs, who was born on August 10, 1875, in Berlin. The Ginsberg and Sachs families were related multiple times by marriage. Henriette and Max Ginsberg had three children: Adele, Adolph, and Bernhard Ginsberg.
The collector Dr. Max Ginsberg
Several Jewish individuals played a significant role in the development of the Museum for Islamic Art's collection in the early 20th century. Dr. Max Ginsberg (1872-1938), a Berlin-based merchant and banker, was one of them. This film acknowledges his contributions to the museum, particularly the 1933 solo exhibition "Islamic Art from the Collection of Dr. Max Ginsberg" and the loan of a carved wooden panel from 1923, which remain key aspects of his legacy within the institution.
The family business
Initially, the Ginsberg family was involved in textile production and processing in Silesia. They owned factories in the region around the cities of Czestochowa, Zawiercie, and Łódź, where large-scale fabric production took place. After moving to Berlin, the Ginsbergs founded a bank in 1866, which was managed by Max and his brother Ludwig Ginsberg, along with their grandnephew Herbert Ginsberg. The bank, Gebrüder Ginsberg, was once located at Oberwallstraße 12–13 in Berlin-Mitte.
However, like their residential properties, the businesses of Jewish citizens were not immune to the Nazis' actions, and in 1938, the bank was "Aryanized." This term, used by the Nazis, referred to the practice of enriching private or public individuals or organizations through the seizure of Jewish property.
His brother Ludwig Ginsberg and his great-nephew Herbert Ginsberg, with whom Max ran the bank, also collected works of art. Ludwig Ginsberg owned the largest private collection of Menzel prints, while Herbert Ginsberg was passionate about East Asian art. There are projects on both collectors and their collections—as has been the case with Max Ginsberg since 2021—that explore the provenance of the objects.
The family home of Max Ginsberg and the Villa Augusta.
Max Ginsberg's parental home was located at Viktoriastraße 9 in the upscale Berlin Tiergarten district. Later, he lived in Villa Augusta at Brückenallee 1, also in Berlin-Tiergarten. When the Nazis came to power, they forced many Jewish families from their homes. In the fall of 1937, Henriette and Max were also compelled to leave their more privileged residence and move to their daughter Adele and her husband Dr. Max Nothmann's home at Nassauische Straße 7/8 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.
Enthusiasm for Islamic Art
Hermann Burchardt
One of Henriette Sachs' uncles was the photographer and explorer Hermann Burchardt (1857–1909). Burchardt traveled to many Islamic regions of the world, including Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and the Gulf region, where he ultimately lost his life in a raid in Yemen. It is thus possible that Max Ginsberg's fascination with the art and culture of Islamic regions came through his uncle. In any case, in 1923, Ginsberg loaned the Islamic Department—later the Museum for Islamic Art—a carved wooden panel with the request that it be displayed with a reference to Hermann Burchardt. The two men were likely close, as after Burchardt's death, Max Ginsberg inherited his collection of two thousand glass-plate photographs from his travels. Ginsberg, in turn, donated this significant ethnographic collection to the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, now the Ethnological Museum.
The wooden panel of Dr. Max Ginsberg
The special exhibition "Islamic Art in Private Ownership in Berlin"
The loans, in particular, allowed the museum to organize exhibitions with the borrowed groups of objects and artworks that would not have been possible with just the museum's own collection. This brought in new and larger audiences, contributing to the museum's visibility and development. In 1932, the exhibition titled "Islamic Art from Private Ownership in Berlin" took place at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, now the Bode Museum, where nearly all the exhibitors were Jewish collectors.
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Jewish collectors of Islamic art
At the beginning of the 20th century, several Jewish Berliners were intensively involved in building the collection of the Museum for Islamic Art. How did they shape the museum and its collection? This highlights people without whom the museum would probably not exist in its current form.
