Rautenstrauch Joest Museum

The Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum - Cultures of the World is Cologne's ethnological museum. It is the only municipal ethnological museum in North Rhine-Westphalia and is located in the south of the old town. In 2010, the museum was reopened in the Kulturquartier am Neumarkt. The museum owns one of the ten largest and most important ethnographic collections in Germany. These include more than 65,000 objects from Oceania, Africa, Asia and America. The basis of the collection is the estate of the Cologne geographer and ethnologist Wilhelm Joest (1852-1897). Two years after Joest's early death on a research trip, his sister Adele Rautenstrauch and her husband, the merchant Eugen von Rautenstrauch, donated their brother's collection of 3,400 objects to the city of Cologne.