Kümmel, Otto

Otto Kümmel (22 August 1874 – 8 February 1952) was a German art historian, academic teacher, founder and director of the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin and general director of the Berlin State Museums.
Born in Blankenese, Kümmel was a son of the civil engineer Werner Kümmel and the seventh of twelve children. After taking his Abitur at the Athenaeum Stade, Kümmel studied classical archaeology and philosophy from 1893 at the University of Freiburg. In 1896 and 1897, he also attended lectures in Bonn and at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, where he learned the Chinese and Japanese languages. In 1901, he was awarded a Doctorate in Freiburg on the basis of a thesis on Egyptian ornamental plants. He did his military service as a one-year volunteer in Lahr.

In 1902 he did a Volontariat in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. From 1 April 1905 to September 1906, he was employed as curator at the Museum Natur und Mensch Freiburg in Freiburg. There, he met the ethnologist Ernst Grosse, who, like the painter Hermann Gehri, lived under the patronage of Marie Meyer.

Kümmel was married to Therese Klee and had a daughter and four sons, including the German physicist Hermann Kümmel. Two of his sons were killed in the Second World War. (Wikipedia, read 2021)