The Linden Museum is one of the largest ethnological museums in Germany.

It was founded at the end of the 19th century by Karl Graf von Linden (1838-1919). At that time, most ethnographic museums still aimed to work with empirical methods. This approach often led to a kind of "collecting mania," where the goal was to amass as many objects as possible.

Within just 20 years, Karl von Linden acquired more than 60,000 objects for the museum. These acquisitions were often facilitated by colonial conquests and the unequal power between colonized and colonizers in German and other colonies.

Today, it is widely acknowledged that many of these items were obtained under unjust circumstances.