263 twenty - three The Missing Link: “Antiquarianism,” “Material Culture,” and “Cultural Science” in the Work of G. F. Klemm Peter N. Miller Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867) is well and truly forgotten. The last stand-alone piece devoted to him made him into a prophet of Nazi racial theories and was published in a volume of essays cheerfully entitled Kultur und Rasse. 1 And yet, it is in his work that the concepts of “material culture” (Materiellen Cultur) and “cultural science” (Culturwissenschaft) were first developed. In a way, then, our steps toward the reuniting of ma- terial culture and the cultural sciences lead back to Klemm. But, because he placed himself at the end of a long line of collector-scholars originat- ing in the early modern period, our steps back to him take us back still further, to antiquaries like Ole Worm and Peiresc. Klemm, then—last of the antiquaries, first of the cultural scientists, around whom pivots pre- modern and modern epistemologies of material culture. Klemm explained in later life that his interest in realia was first aroused by the sight of the different armies passing back and forth through Chemnitz in the Napoleonic wars, with their weapons, gear, uniforms, and different ethnic composition. He fell in love with Greek and Latin at the gymnasium, while the tercentenary celebrations of Lu- ther in 1817 focused his attention on to the Middle Ages in Germany. Intellectually, the key text for him was Ebert’s Bildung des Bibliothekars (1820)—not a book that figures largely in our conception of key texts of the later Goethezeit—which showed him how a collection could func- tion as the foundation for encyclopedic learning. 2 He read Herder and Voltaire, from whom he realized for himself the “goal of studying human conditions in family, state, war, religion, science and art.” He took to ex- Miller_CulturalHistories.indd 263 3/6/2013 12:18:16 PM