Leo Frobenius

Leo Viktor Frobenius (29 June 1873 – 9 August 1938) was an ethnologist and archaeologist and a major figure in German ethnography.

Life

He was born in Berlin as the son of a Prussian officer and died in Biganzolo, Lago Maggiore, Piedmont, Italy. He undertook his first expedition to Africa in 1904 to the Kasai district in Congo, formulating the African Atlantis theory during his travels.

During World War I in 1916/1917, Leo Frobenius spent almost an entire year in Romania, travelling with the German army for scientific purposes. His team performed archaeological and ethnographic studies in the country, as well as documenting the day-to-day life of the ethnically diverse inmates of the Slobozia prisoner camp. Numerous photographic and drawing evidences of this period exist in the image archive of the Frobenius Institute

Until 1918 he travelled in the western and central Sudan, and in northern and northeastern Africa. In 1920 he founded the Institute for Cultural Morphology in Munich.