As it is the case with all private institutions, the Volkskunde-museum Wien is not subject to the Art Restitution Act. Nevertheless,in 2015, the museum voluntarily chose to abide by it and was­supported in this decision by the Ministry of Culture. The decisionultimately led to the restitution of the Mautner Collection.Why is the Mautner Collection of such significance? Since theearly days of the museum, members of the upper middle-class textileindustrialist family Mautner have been involved in the museum and themuseum and collection activities in various capacities, financially andwith object donations. Through their shared research interests andcommon goals, they were closely connected through the then emerg-ing field of ethnography as a scientific discipline and new commoninterest to the museum, its association and also homeland culturalpractices. Ethnology came into play at the time with the idea of pre-serving objects and practices from industrialization and urbanizationand subsequently improving or even redesigning them. The collectionand research activities of Konrad Mautner(1880–1924) illustrate thisas well as the practical implementation in the renewal of traditionalcostumes by his wife Anna Mautner(1879–1961).After 1938, Anna and other members of the Mautner family werepersecuted under the racist Nuremberg Laws as Jews and wereobliged to flee. At the initiative of the museum, the Mautner’s privatecollection in Vienna was seized by the Nazi authorities, brought intothe museum and subsequently purchased by the museum, under thedirectorship of Arthur Haberlandt, at prices well below their marketvalue. The objects included research documents, textiles, as wellas illustrations of costumes, target boards, songs, furniture, pipesand pipe bowls, and photographs of folklife, particularly from the areaof the Salzkammergut. The objects from this collection were used­frequently, and without question, in exhibitions and publications forover half a century.In the 2010s, the Volkskundemuseum Wien began to re-examineits burdened past and the questionable acquisition of many of theobjects in the collection. In order to put an end to the exploitationof those parts of the collection that were acquired through injustice,the museum’s legal entity, the Verein für Volkskunde(Ethnographic­Society) committed itself to conduct research into the provenance8