ReflectionsThe Volkskundemuseum Wien has over 300,000 objects in its­collections. Gathering knowledge and providing information aboutthem and researching the history of the collections and of the institu-tion are among the museum’s core tasks. The long prevalent, almostmanic collecting passion of some ethnographers, the desire to findand preserve an as pre-industrial, rural-peasant imagined world wasalready evident when the Association and the VolkskundemuseumWien was founded in 1894. This enthusiasm was evidenced by theextended and insatiable collecting trips undertaken to neighbouringand remote areas of the Habsburg empire as well as the expedi-tions to parts of Bosnia occupied by Austro-Hungarian troops or toAlbania during the First World War. The Volkskundemuseum Wien istoday fully aware that objects in the collections have been acquiredin a variety of ways, sometimes involving violence. The objects haveremained in the museum on the basis of the long-prevailing principlethat the museum were the rightful place for all the objects, regardlessof the way in which they were acquired. It is often difficult today todistinguish between voluntary gifts and donations and those madeas a result of personal circumstances or financial necessity. And itis frequently hard to ascertain whether the provenance of objects isproblematic and therefore worthy of investigation.Although the background to some individual additions to the­collection is unclear, this is not the case with regard to the bureau-cratic processes of the expropriation and theft, organised and admin-istered during the Nazi period: they are evident and well documented.This exhibition focuses on these historic processes, the manner inwhich they have been handled by society and the state up to thepresent day, and on the effect of these processes on the collections(objects, library and archive) of the Volkskundemuseum Wien.As curators of the exhibitionCollected at Any Cost!we address,“why objects came to the museum through National Socialism andhow we deal with them”. This“we” is deliberately left open: it couldpertain to us curators, to all of the museum staff, and it could alsoinclude other museums, collections and libraries in the Republic ofAustria and the inhabitants of the country as a whole. In any case, it11