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This paper attempts to analyse Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde (the ethnological museum in Berlin) in the last decades of the 19th century. Berlin’s museum für Völkerkunde was long understood as a purely research institution that differed from the other European ethnological museums as colonial museums. That was the vision of his founder, Adolf Bastian. This German ethnologist with cosmopolitan thoughts wanted to create a museal archive for a new science, ethnology, which should have a vast collection from all over the world. Therefore, Bastian’s museum became the greatest ethnological museum in the world in his time, which contributed significantly to the establishment of the German ethnology. However, it did not mean that Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde initially had nothing to do with colonialism. On the contrary, Bastin’s museum contributed to legitimacy of German colonialism. This was indirectly, but much more efficiently than eurocentric colonialism: colonial cosmopolitanism. With the analysis of Bastian’s ethnological thoughts and museal experiments, this article attempts to show the close relationship between Berlin’s ethnological museum and colonialism.