About Rudolf Berrenrath
Rudolf Berrenrath remembers: “My passion for minerals gripped me quite by chance. We were on a family holiday in the Bregenzerwald when a fellow mountain-lover showed me some angular, gold-coloured cubes and rock-crystal points. That was the beginning.” His curiosity was aroused, and on the same holiday he set off in worked-out clefts to look for crystal groups and double-terminated crystals. That was the beginning of his collection.
He was interested, however, not only in the surface of the minerals that can be seen with the naked eye, but also in the small worlds of crystals that can be seen only through the microscope and open up access to a quite different world. From his home in Cologne, the quarries and dumps in the Bergisches Land and in the Sauerland were his preferred collecting grounds. But he was also diligent in collecting abroad, for example in Norway and Turkey.
A large part of the more than 6,800 specimens was found by him himself. But he was also active at swap days and fairs, to expand the collection and to keep up contacts with friends and like-minded people.
In the spring of 2019, at the age of 87, he had to part with his collection. He bequeathed it as a generous donation to the Munich Micromounters, so that it lives on as part of the Lithothek, at least in representative portions.