The exhibition ‘Wild Worlds – assimilation of foreigners in the modern’ discusses the relationship of the modern non-European cultures in the imperial period and the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s. The example of the artistic confrontations with Africa and Oceania, the exhibition shows just how diverse the preoccupation with the exotic and what is foreign presence in everyday life in the first half of the 20th Century had, only eighty years ago. The foreign and exotic is also encountered in waxworks, where people look at the zoo, at international exhibitions, in books, magazines, and in the newly-established ethnological museums. Many artists have busied themselves in their work with non-European cultural objects, and also met the stranger in popular culture. In addition to masks, fetishes and modern art on the so-called primitivism was also fed from these sources. The exhibitionin the George Kolbe Museum in Berlin, Germany, embeds the art, in a cultural context. The exhibition includes works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel, Georg Kolbe, Max Slevogt, Otto Freundlich, Fritz Behn, Ludwig Hohlwein, Gustav Heinrich Wolff.
