Karl Schlabow

Karl Schlabow (27 April 1891 – 30 September 1984) was a German archaeologist, museum director and conservator with specialisations in textiles and in restoration of bog bodies. He founded the Neumünster Textile Museum. Since his death, his restorations have been called into question as overly aggressive.

Life and career

Born in Neumünster, Schlabow studied painting at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, then spent two years in Peru. On his return in 1926, on the recommendation of the textile manufacturer Ludwig Simons, he became director of the Neumünster city museum, which he developed into a textile museum. On the advice of Otto Lehmann of the museum at Altona, Schlabow made an intensive study of the history of textiles and textile handcrafts, and in 1928 he was commissioned by Gustav Schwantes of the Kiel Museum of Prehistory to catalogue and arrange that museum's textile holdings, which dated to the Bronze Age and Iron Age and came from archaeological investigations of peat bogs and burial mounds. Several thousand years old, poorly preserved and extremely delicate, the finds were unattractive in appearance and unsuited to exhibition. With the assistance of a long-time assistant, Willi Schramm, and others, Schlabow restored them, including recreating missing sections as accurately as possible. A travelling exhibit of the pieces toured museums in Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin for over three years with great success, and then became an important part of the permanent exhibition at the Neumünster Textile Museum.

Schlabow was also a close associate of Herbert Jankuhn, the SS officer who directed the Museum of Fatherland Antiquities at Kiel, forerunner of the Schleswig-Holstein State Archaeological Museum at Gottorf Castle.