Cabinet of Curiosities Power and helplessness

Tick-Tock
In 1944, retired priest Alexander Schiesser bequeathed this pendulum clock with other objects from his home at Schmiedengasse 9 to the Knights Hall Association. The objects came from the former owners of his house: the rich salt merchants Johannes Dübelt, Johann Jakob Dübelt, his son, and Johann Rudolf Aeschlimann, his youngest grandson. The canton of Bern had granted these gentlemen the monopoly of the salt trade in the 18th. and 19th. centuries and they supplemented it with international trade in colonial goods.
The movement of the magnificent Louis XV pendulum was made by La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaker Josué Robert. Mr. Schiesser hoped that the clock would stand in the hall of the municipal council of Burgdorf and it was there that it tick-tocked for seventy years before coming into the museum’s collection. However, since the clock arrived in the museum, its hands have never moved.

The tribal chief of Burgdorf
Formerly, this chief of a Sioux tribe hunted on the prairies of Dakota, now this “noble savage” is found in the museum in Burgdorf with his feathers, his buckskin clothes, his moccasins and his tomahawk: this is how Switzerland imagined North American Indians in around 1900.
Working for an agency for people who wanted to emigrate, Carl Im Obersteg travelled across the United States and Canada and collected the clothes of our tribal chief. The character’s head and hands were made later at the request of the ethnological museum of Burgdorf. In reality, this chief never existed: the clothes and jewellery come from different places and it is only this model that brings them together to form the “typical” Indian. Like Karl May’s Winnetou novels, our tribal chief is also the product of a deep fascination in the Indians. Only the wealthy could travel far in the early twentieth century; characters like this fulfilled the general yearning to see the exotic.