Taxidermy Animals from the Zoology Collection (19th–20th century)

The Department of Zoology and Botany (today’s Natural History Museum) is one of the Universalmuseum Joanneum’s oldest. Its functions have always been contradictory: to provide a complete picture of Styria’s indigenous flora and fauna and to present an image of the whole wide world. Many of the more exotic taxidermy donations and acquisitions evoke the darkness of the imperial past.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, traveling circuses with foreign animals became fashionable, spearheaded by zoologist and entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913). The animals often suffered under harsh conditions and died in droves. Cadavers of monkeys and other animals were donated to the Joanneum’s botany and zoology collections to be preserved by taxidermists.

Otto Bullmann (life dates unknown) was a farmer in German South West Africa (now Namibia) who named his farm Styria. It was located in the district of Gobabis, one of the places where the German genocide against the Herero and Nama unfolded between 1904 and 1908. Two decades later, Gobabis had recovered and became “cattle country” with five hundred or so large-scale cattle farms. The taxidermy specimens donated by Bullmann and his family include an aardvark, an emblematic animal in Herero mythology.

Adolf Neunteufel (1909–1979) went to South America (initially Argentina) in 1932 at the age of twenty-three. He made a living selling taxidermy specimens to European museums. Most of the animals he supplied to the Joanneum were birds. In 1941, Neunteufel published an autobiographical book, Yasi-yateré: Acht Jahre Tierfang und Jagd im Urwald von Paraguay (Nine Years of Animal Trapping and Hunting in the Jungle of Paraguay), which went through at least two editions. In it, he describes flying a swastika flag over his tent and praises the German master race and the Anschluss, about which he hears on the radio in the wilderness. The income from this book enabled Neunteufel to live as a freelance journalist in Prague during World War II. Afterward, he returned to South America.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Adolf Meixner (1883–1965), head of the Department of Zoology and Botany at the time, wanted to put together an exhibition of pedigree dogs. Citizens donated deceased dogs. Plus, the museum offered to euthanize unwanted dogs on its premises, as in the case of one German shepherd, put to sleep because its owner could no longer afford the dog tax.