Wilhelm SAAKE (1910–1982)

Born in Ahden near Paderborn in Westphalia, Saake completed his secondary education in a school run by the Divine Word Missionaries (SVD) in Steyl in 1931. He joined the order and did his philosophical studies at the SVD Major Seminary St. Augustin near Bonn and the theological studies in Rome at the Gregorian University. Then, he studied ethnology and related disciplines at the University of Vienna and University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He graduated in 1949, submitting his dissertation on the role of manioc/cassava in the life of the peoples of primeval forests of Latin America written under the supervision of Wilhelm Schmidt.
The following ten years (1950-1960), he spent in Brazil teaching ethnology at the SVD Major Seminary in São Paulo, at the Catholic University in São Paulo and at the University of Presidente Prudente. During that time, he also used opportunities to carry out field research among the various ethnic groups of the Brazilian plains (the Bororo, the Kalapalo, the Baniwa, the Canoeiro). His interest focused on the issues of acculturation of those groups to the conditions of the contemporary world. He also pursued the same topic in his research among the groups of German and Japanese immigrants in Brazil.
In 1960, he was appointed the director of the Anthropos Institute and commissioned with revitalising it and moving from Switzerland to St. Augustin near Bonn in Germany, where the new premises for the Institute were being constructed. He held the position of the director for twenty years (1960-1980), striving to give the Institute a new start after the turbulent decade of 1950s.
He successfully developed new academic contacts not only with scholars of the universities in the vicinity (Bonn and Köln) but also used an unexpected opportunity to acquaint the German-speaking anthropologists with the work of the Institute by hosting the biennial congress of the anthropologists at St. Augustin in October 1967. A series of monthly lectures under the banner of “Colloquia Ethnologica”, which run over several years during the winter semester, was another means of building up the position of the Institute among the German-speaking anthropologists but also among the intellectuals in the area of Bonn, the then capital of West Germany. Saake cared to develop contacts with the missionaries, encouraging them to gather and publish their ethnological and linguistic material. The second series of books – Collectanea Instituti Anthropos – was grounded for that purpose, although it eventually developed into a publishing platform for scholars of various persuasions.
Saake played a crucial role in expanding the collection of ethnological artefacts hosted by the Institute and then placing most of them at the disposal of the newly created Haus Völker und Kulturen (House of Peoples and Cultures).
Marred by a serious illness in the last years of his life, he died on 17 March 1982.