GlobeRovers Magazine visits Rudolf Nägele and Jean Jaspersen-Naegele who reside in Germany when they are not travelling. During their travels they have built up an incredible collection of ethnographic items which they proudly display throughout their home. Their collection would be the envy of the world’s most prestigious museums!
This article appeared in the December 2017 issue of GlobeRovers Magazine
Rudi, a German citizen, and Jean, a US citizen, met on a blind date in Newton, Kansas in 1969. Since 1971, their home base has been southern Germany. First Munich, then Ulm, and now Thalfingen in the county of Neu Ulm, state of Bavaria. From these locations, they have explored the world together for the past 48 years.
Rudi has visited all 193 United Nations (UN) countries plus the Vatican, Taiwan and Palestine, while Jean is still short of Cuba, and the elusive Libya.
Having a wonderful conversation over a big mug of Bavarian beer, we started by asking Rudi and Jean about the number of countries they have visited…
Rudi: I have been to all 196 independent countries of the world over the span of more than 50 years. My serious travelling outside the European mainland began in 1963. The actual travelling time in foreign countries totals to 15 years. My professional working time in 17 of those nations adds up to another six years. We don’t count territories, colonies or international areas like Antarctica as separate countries. We include the 193 recognized by the UN as well as the Vatican, Taiwan and Palestine.
Jean: I’m at 194 so I still have two independent countries, Cuba and Libya, to do as of November 2017.
GlobeRovers: Which is your most preferred country for travel?
Rudi: Nepal, where we travelled during 1978 and 1979 over a five-month period on three different visits in our VW-camper. Nepal has interesting traditional cultures, breathtaking landscapes, excellent birding, good mountain trekking, and we loved the seasonal Hippie-experience that was the mode at that time.
Jean: Argentina. Its people, their political awareness and interest in world events, Tango dancing, gauchos, nature, and unusual birds and animals, landscape, the wonderful nature parks especially Peninsula Valdes with its unique marine mammal life – watching Southern Right Whales, Southern Elephant-Seals, Magellan-Penguins and beaching Orcas.
We saved all our 35 passports.
Rudi has 22 passports totalling 332 pages, 129 visas from 86 countries and 819 border stamps. Jean has 13 passports with 356 pages, 168 visas from 85 countries and 700 borders-stamps. Jean’s #11 passport contains a “record-breaking” 102 pages with visas and stamps.
GlobeRovers: You have an incredible collection of memorabilia in your home. Many of these items are museum pieces and certainly not your usual tourist junk and cheap souvenirs. When did you start your collection?
Rudi & Jean: Fortunately, we are both born collectors. When we met, Rudi was 30 and Jean 23. We realized then and even more now, that we have collected items all our life, and we still are collecting special things when they pass as a collector’s item in our critical understanding.
GlobeRovers: What kind of items did you collect?
Rudi & Jean: We took almost anything, as long as the items were typical for a country, culture or a tradition, unique in its own way, funny or curious.
We have also been serious collectors of special things from the time of childhood onward, not only after we started to sniff the air of other cultures. We can say that earlier, 30 plus years and more ago, most countries were distinctly different from one another. We do enjoy relics that remind us of such distinctly different societies.
We never collect items of a certain category with the intention to eventually reach a complete collection or increased monetary value over time. Therefore, we never purposefully go to flea-markets or an auction of any kind – the whole world is our flea-market. The items on display in our museum collection purely represent mementos and personal memories for both of us.
GlobeRovers: Roughly how many items are in your collection?
Rudi & Jean: We always wanted to find out the exact number of items, and now we counted them. So far, we registered 187 items from Germany, 413 from the Island of New Guinea (399 items from the 1974 expedition, nine from our visit to Irian Jaya, and five items from our 2014 visit). From the rest of the world, there are 733 items. The grand total is 1,333 items, though there are probably some we missed in our counts.
GlobeRovers: From how many countries have you brought these items?
Rudi & Jean: We brought our items from 108 countries, including Germany. In almost all the countries we gathered at least a stone, money bills and coins, though we didn’t include those small items in our counts. If we were to include them, we would come up with more than 190 countries.
GlobeRovers: Tell us about your most prized items and why you are proud to have them in your collection.
Rudi: We are most proud of the ethnographical items, photos, and movies Rudi brought back from his two major visits to the island of New Guinea: A nine-week expedition in 1974 to Papua New Guinea with my “New Guinea-Specialist Friend” Piet Bogner and a three-week excursion to the Dani-tribe in the Baliem Valley of West Irian (Irian Jaya) in 1981.
Without the New Guinea collection, we wouldn’t have come up with the idea of creating our own little museum.
As we never intended to sell anything in our collection, we never had any serious thoughts about their collector’s market value. We know that some of the authentic items I brought home from my expedition to Papua New Guinea in 1974 would get a good price in collector’s circles and museums looking for original artefacts of rapidly disappearing cultures.
GlobeRovers: What is your personal most favourite item in your collection?
Rudi: Without a doubt, it is the skull of a man who has been killed from behind with a steel axe. A big chunk of bone is missing on the right side of the skull. This skull and the smaller one brought back from his expedition to Papua New Guinea in 1974, are his favourites.
My expedition companion, Piet Bogner, and I stayed about ten days in a village near Mendi in the Southern Highlands south of Goroka. The nights we spent in our sleeping bags in a hut built from bamboo and palm leaves. We shared this hut with boys from the village who had finished their initiation ritual to manhood and consequently slept together, separately from their respective families. Other night guests were pigs. We did not mind sleeping with them but the lice, flees and especially bedbugs were almost unbearable. And the bites over our whole bodies stayed with us for a while causing their own problems.
We were able to develop a warm relationship with these very personable pleasant highland folks. Papa Sunkil, the very smart and humorous clan leader, gave the skulls to me as a friendly gesture.
I don’t know anything about the man and the circumstances of how he lost his life.
The smaller skull is from an 11 year old boy, a member of the Papa Sunkil clan.
Jean: My favorite is a hand woven bamboo rice field hat from the Philippines made in approximately 1944. It was a gift to my mother from one of her brothers who was a soldier stationed in the Pacific region, to include the Philippines, during WWII. He sent or brought this hat back with him. It is an amazing work of art, in excellent condition, and reminds me of one of my favourite uncles.
In the inserted picture is a fetish made from the skull of a pig, chicken legs, feathers etc. It is also from the Philippines and was placed under the roof to protect the house from evil spirits.
GlobeRovers: Which item was the most difficult to procure? Tell us the story behind it.
Rudi & Jean: It might sound very funny, but the two legs of our coffee-table are the items which cost us a lot of time and nerves, not to mention money. These legs, still “strong enough” to support a coffee-table top, originally failed to support our totally overloaded “Hanomag AL-28 4WD-truck”, nicknamed “Hani”, during our trip through Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. No wonder, for 21 months (1985 to 1987) on 52,000 km of partly indescribable African roads and dirt tracks, eight fractures emerged in the chassis. Rudi was able to shim and weld the broken parts with our own equipment by the roadside, in the desert, and in the bush. After our return to Germany, we cut the chassis into pieces and saved the two most “impressive repair jobs” as legs for a coffee table.
GlobeRovers: Displayed in a circle around the ceiling light of your living room you have more than 100 arrows? Tell us where do these come from.
Rudi & Jean: Rudi brought these 119 arrows (see photos on previous page) back from his Papua New Guinea expedition in 1974.
GlobeRovers: Your walls are also adorned with some of the most striking photographs of native people I have ever seen. Did you take these photos and where were they captured?
Rudi & Jean: Most of the pictures were taken in New Guinea and Eastern Africa because of the stunning native cultures. Other pictures are from the 1970 seven-month sailing trip in the Caribbean and the three longer camping car trips in Europe, Asia, Africa and all the Americas. All the photographs were taken by either Jean or Rudi. We both started photography at an early age.Rudi using his own still and borrowed N8/S8 cameras, Jean with her own small still cameras. Rudi has carried a film camera, and later video camcorders, into all 196 countries he visited, producing around 800 hours of movies. We have no idea how many still pictures we have captured during our many years of travel.
GlobeRovers: You also have a few model aircraft on display. Who built these and where are they from? Did any of them ever fly?
Rudi: Both model aeroplanes were built by me in the 1950’s and they were flying really well. Remote control was unimaginable at that time, so I had to watch out not to lose them.
The glider I flew for the first time again in March 2017 after more than 60 years!
The biggest “winged trophy” in our collections is that of a jet model aeroplane that crashed at the 1st Jet World Masters in 1995 in Neu-Ulm, close to where we lived. Due to this mishap, the German pilot and the German team lost both the Vice World Championships. All the German pilots, spouses, and officials signed the wing on the top and all of the international competitors on the bottom including the first three World Championship winners.
GlobeRovers: You also have an incredible collection of professionally mounted insects such as butterflies and other large scary bugs with big horns. Where did you collect them and how did you manage to transport them without damaging these fragile critters?
Rudi & Jean: Rudi grew up in a farming community surrounded by unspoilt nature. As early as I can think of, middle of the 1940’s, I was interested in the abundant insect life. During warm days there were beetles, ants, bees, wasps, butterflies, and dragonflies, everywhere. Now, 70 years later, they have all virtually disappeared. As a boy I collected some of them but had no idea how to display or store them.
Collecting insects seriously started during the expedition to Papua New Guinea in 1974, assisting Piet Bogner with his collection. Around half of the insects in our four display cases were taken during this expedition. A grasshopper from Papua New Guinea of enormous size was in our collection and we have never seen any grasshopper this size in a museum. This specimen was unfortunately lost in our storage fire in 2004.
After Papua New Guinea in 1974, we continued to collect insects during our trips around the world. The insects were put into a jar with potassium cyanide to kill them. To transport the fragile butterflies, they were placed flat on waxed paper and put in special purpose envelopes of different sizes.
We never attempted the complicated mounting. It was done by the Bavarian Zoological State Collection in Munich and later continued by a female company colleague in Ulm who did this as a hobby.
GlobeRovers: You have several incredible woodcarvings which would be highly prized items for any reputable museum. Please tell us more about these woodcarvings.
Rudi & Jean: There are a total of eight wood carvings from the Sepik River area in our collection. The people in this area, located in the northwestern part of Papua New Guinea are famous for this kind of carving art. These carvings have a strong ritual importance to the people. They keep the figures in the ghost house named the “House Tamburan”, which are built like the famous Toraja Houses in Sulawesi. On some of the figures, you can still see the four typical traditional colours: White from ash, black from charcoal, yellow from ground-up dried clay, and red from ground-up burnt clay. They symbolize spiritualized human, birds, crocodiles, opossums, and other animals.
The woodcarvings have different shapes. Some are standing, others hanging on the wall, and some are masks. The most important ones are big figures with a deep groove in the back.
During the Yam Festival the starch-rich yam tubers are laid horizontally on benches and during the sacred ritual the figures are placed on top of them and then carried around. The groove in the back will keep them in place.
GlobeRovers: Some of the items are quite large. How did do you bring them back home and have you ever had any items confiscated by customs or have gotten into trouble for shipping them?
Rudi & Jean: Many of the larger items we brought back with our own camping vehicles with which we travelled in 84 countries. When travelling with backpacks or suitcases, we shipped the larger articles. During all our trips, we were never bothered by customs officers at country borders. After returning home, we picked up the parcels at the customs offices, with no objections.
Nothing was ever confiscated, even when Rudi and his “New-Guinea-Specialist” and friend Piet Bogner had to appear at the customs officials in Munich, Germany, upon the arrival of three big boxes. They had been shipped from Papua New Guinea in 1974, and finally arrived late in 1975. We already feared that the shipment had been lost. The Munich customs officers sensed our love for the Papuans and their unique culture, so they treated us in a friendly way and let us go with only paying a moderate Value Added Tax. If we would have this same situation nowadays, they would virtually confiscate everything for various reasons.
GlobeRovers: Are you still collecting items as you travel, or have you come to the conclusion that you have no more space to display them in your home?
Rudi & Jean: Space was never a problem. Talking about living space, Rudi always jokingly says: “It is not the square metres that count, only the available cubic metres!”
Our collecting spirit slowed down considerably after March 2004, while we were still on our 3½-year trip in South America. There was a room fire in one of the three storage places in Germany and most of our collection from the 1977 to 1980 world trip was lost.
Nowadays when we see something interesting or curious, we still take it home and add it to our collection.
GlobeRovers: On your travels, you must have met many interesting people. Can you show an example of an item in your collection which is related to a special person or family you have met?
Rudi & Jean: In the National Geographic Magazine of January 1971 you will see Paulino Esteban and Thor Heyerdahl. Paulino is a member of the Aymaras people from Titicaca Lake in Bolivia. Together with three other family members, they built the reed boat “Ra II” for the Norwegian explorer and adventurer, Thor Heyerdahl, with which he was able to cross the Atlantic from east to west on his second attempt.
During our 3½-year trip through South America, we were looking forward to meeting this famous reed boat specialist. It finally happened on 8th November 2003. We had a wonderful time with Paulino Esteban and his family. All the family members signed our guestbook. Mrs. Paulino, being illiterate, signed with both of her thumbs.
GlobeRovers: What would you miss the most if this collection were to somehow get lost?
Rudi & Jean: We both consider the seven guestbooks that we brought back from our big trips as the most important category of items. Many of the significant people we have met with their words describing our time together are great memories. The books show the evolution of the trips, important events and encounters, unknown ahead of time, that happened along the way on each journey. The total number of pages in the seven guestbooks is 1,072! Only the items Rudi brought back from his expedition to Papua New Guinea in 1974 would surpass the importance of these guestbooks.
GlobeRovers: What is the future of your incredible collection? How about opening a small museum or donating them to an established museum or several museums?
Rudi & Jean: This is one of the dilemmas we are facing. We are seriously thinking about one or more museums to donate our collection to. However, we want to live as long as possible in our “museum-apartment”. The preparation for the transfer to a museum after both of us have passed away will be time-consuming. By taking our unique museum apart, it would destroy this personal life story collection and the “flair” would disappear!
We would prefer not to move the items but to rather have a qualified person or a family to live in it as curators.
GlobeRovers: Have you ever thought about publishing a glossy photo-book which catalogues all your items and displays the story behind each item?
Rudi & Jean: Fulfilling this kind of task is a dream of ours. To do this tremendous work we are not yet prepared. While working on this interview with Globerovers Magazine, the idea to one day realize this photo-book came quite a bit closer.
As already mentioned, we have 399 items from the 1974 Papua New Guinea expedition. When counting the items, we listed them under different categories. There are for example eight different types of weapons, eight types of axes, five types of arrows, eight types of bilums (traditional carrying bags), eight different musical instruments, 18 types of head and wig decorations, 25 different types of body decoration worn around the neck, nine types of decorations worn on the body itself, and five different arm decorations.
For a possible transfer to a museum, a glossy photo-book which catalogues all of our items and displays the story behind each item would be of indispensable importance!
GlobeRovers: Rudi and Jean, it was great talking with you. I wish you all the very best in your future travels and your photo book, and maybe most of all, the future of your incredible private museum. Now, may I please have another cold Bavarian beer? 🙂
Rudi’s Muldivo Calculator
This beautiful technical masterpiece is a pinwheel calculator with the name “Muldivo” and from the type labeled as “ME24675”. The word “Patent” is written on the topside. On the picture you can read all the letters and numbers. The calculator has a 6-digit setting register, a 5-digit revolution counter and a 10-digit accumulator register, so it is about the smallest one of its kind.
Rudi inherited it from his father and it is still functioning, but impracticable to use now. His dad was a professional cheese and butter maker and was the director of a co-op of milk-producing farmers. He had to do a lot of calculations and put the results into tables to figure out data to produce butter and three different types of cheeses. Near the end of each month the machine hardly ever stopped. Monthly payment for each of the farmers had to be determined, based on the daily delivery of milk and the percentage of milk fat. Therefore, samples of milk were taken randomly four times a month from an independent lab.
Usually during six days a week, for several hours a day, the typical sound of rotating the pin-drum and shifting of the lower device was a sound familiar to Rudi early in his life. This sound, together with the zither-playing of his father, who also taught this instrument, the cuckoo-clock and every half-hour bell-like sound from the living-room clock, (which we are still listening to), is stuck in Rudi’s memory forever.
Here are the research results from the internet about the calculator. A Google search for “Muldivo, Patent and ME24675”, generated no direct link, but there were other interesting search results. These types of calculators can be found in auction houses and eBay. For most of their offers, they cannot name the original manufacturer and the time of production. They are sold from around €100 up to several hundred €uros.
This pin-wheel type calculator was invented in 1873 in Russia by a Swedish immigrant named W.T. Odhner. A London based company, founded by Allan Easton in 1912 and existing until 1971, sold those calculators, but they did not produce them, under the brand name “Muldivo”. The first ones they imported from France and later also from “Walther” in Germany. Rudi guesses, that his father’s calculator was originally a “Walther”. The age is also unknown though Rudi’s father must have bought it around 1939.
More about Rudi and Jean
Rudolf (Rudi) Nägele was born on July 29, 1938 in Ichenhausen, Bavaria, Germany. Rudi studied “High Frequency and Telecommunication Technology” and worked as a radio communications engineer in Germany and in 16 other countries and in the USA as a technician for ”remote control and metering” in a power utility company in Kansas.
Jean Kathleen Jaspersen-Naegele was born on August 18, 1945 in Oakland, Nebraska, USA. Jean considers herself a super nomad. To-date she has changed residential addresses 23 times. Jean has a Master’s degree in Social Work from a US university and worked in the field of social work in the USA and Germany.
For more information, contact Rudi and Jean directly at jeanundrudi@yahoo.de
This article appeared in the December 2017 issue of GlobeRovers Magazine
Blog post and photos by Peter who has been travelling almost full-time since 2005 and has been to over 122 countries. He visited several countries, such as Japan, more than 20 times. Peter is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of GlobeRovers Magazine, an independent travel magazine focused on intrepid destinations.