Hans Heinrich Brüning Brookstedt

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Hans Heinrich Brüning Brookstedt was a Peruvian archaeologist of German origin. Born in Hoffeld, Germany on the 20 August 1848. His parents were Jochim Brüning and Anna Magdalena Brookstedt.

Young Hans Heinrich was formed as mechanical engineer and, at the age of 27 years, he decided to embark to Peru arriving at the port of the Callao on September 12, 1875. Five days later he disembarks in the Port Eten in Chiclayo and immediately he put himself to the service as mechanic of the sugar estate Pátamo. But curiously Brüning did not present himself as an engineer, but as merchant and then as manager.

Once taken root in the Peruvian north, he started visiting the bordering estates. It would be from 1894 that he was met by Enrique's name, according to the newspaper kept in the files of Hamburgisches Museum Für Völkerkunde, Hamburg, Germany. These personal notes reveal something amazing: they are written in German until 1890, and then in Spanish between 1906 and 1909, finally to return to his mother tongue until the end of his days.

It is known that the romance of Brüning for archaeology began in 1883 when he met Adolph Bandelier, a matador in the architectural studies of the pre-Hispanic buildings and, since then, Brüning took his bore camera and started re-treating the most ancient constructions and also to the inhabitants of the epoch.

A keen photographer and good drawer, he managed to raise planes that up to today attract attention of the understood ones, in addition to registering more than 2,000 photos in glass badges, in negative and positive movies, as it affirms Corinna Raddatz studious of the visual collection of Brüning.

He started buying and gathering archaeological pieces as ceramics, metals, precious stones and carved in wood. His life starts inclining for the ethnography, the archaeology and as a dear and respected man although of very few friends. It was undoubtedly a modest being: he hardly ever took a picture of himself.

When Enrique Brüning was 49 years of age (in 1897) and with twenty years in Peru, he decided to return to his country. He was still unmarried. He finished his library in Germany and he linked with institutions of the first level. He returned to Peru in 1898 on board of the steam ship Amasis.

In 1902, Brüning initiated a risky expedition in order to find the shortest way between the basin of the Cashew and the coast of the Pacific Ocean. He found this passage together with the Polish engineer Eduardo de Habich and the landowner Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro, with whom the pongo of Manseriche comes even. Brüning made the most of the opportunity to write an ethnographic description of the peoples aguarunas.

The inhabitants muchik of the Peruvian north were avoiding him, but Brüning was patient. He took chicha of jora with them, and gained their confidence to such a point that had more than hundred godfathers. This reception cost him to remain to living in the Town of Eten with the intention of studying the language muchik, and further on writing a dictionary of this native language that should publish in 1917. He is an author of other publications as Monographic Studies of the Department of Lambayeque, and a series of articles that he published in the German magazines Anthropophyteia and Globus.

As well as devoting himself to his ethnographic manuscripts, Brüning as big violinist and lover of the music, some cylinders of wax were obtained and it started recording music in the dialect muchik. Today the original ones survive in the Anthropological Museum of Hamburg of Germany and they are a part of the first recordings of popular music done in our country.

During 50 years that it was in Peru, he devoted himself to collecting ceramics, so much so that in 1916, the pieces were already could not fit in his room and started hindering him. He decided to sell part of his collection to the Peruvian State in 60,000 soles, when he was a president Augusto B. Leguía.

The pieces since then were a part of the First Regional Museum of Peru located in the proper house of Brüning, and already in 1921 it turned into the Museum of Brüning, being proper Enrique the first director named with a salary of four monthly soles.

But the charge him lasted very little time due to his 77 years of age and the discomforts of health. He resigned to leave a rainy evening of June 17, 1925, without nobody was dismissing it in the pier of Port Eten. Already in his homeland, a heart attack extinguished his life on July 2, 1928, in the city of Bordesholm, witin a few days of fulfilling 80 years of age.