Hermann Obst

Hermann Obst (1837-1906) was Director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig, and the recipient of letters from Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, the excavator whose collections were later donated to the museum¹. The two had exchanged letters since 1890, and Ohnefalsch-Richter's side of the correspondence survives in the Leipzig museum¹.

In July 1896, while selling his stock at the Berlin Gewerbeausstellung, Ohnefalsch-Richter asked Obst for the addresses of smaller museums to which he could offer his collections¹. On 30 October 1897 he wrote that Valentin Weisbach had taken over all his antiquities and was giving them to museums, and on 7 November he mentioned his "very rich" Cypriot collections¹.

Melitta Brönner writes that Ohnefalsch-Richter then worked to interest Obst and to bring Weisbach round to a donation to Leipzig. The Deed of Donation to the Rat der Stadt Leipzig, for the Museum für Völkerkunde, is dated 14 December 1898, and Ohnefalsch-Richter congratulated Obst by letter the same day¹. The collection has been in the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin since 1992¹.