Otto Kümmel

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 1912, together with the art historian William Cohn [de] (1880-1961) the Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1943 due to the war.

[4] In 1940, Kümmel was commissioned by Joseph Goebbels to compile in three volumes a secret, 319-page List of the Absolutely Looted Works of Art in Foreign Possession.

[7] Kümmel was the first European art historian to master the Japanese and Chinese languages, both written and spoken, and a luminary in his field.

His deep involvement in the looted art taken by the Nazis does not make it easy to assess his scholarly work and merits today.

[8] Gert Naundorf, professor of sinology at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, who wrote the article on Kümmel in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, also omits the period from 1933 onwards.