It’s an understatement to say that Dudu follows her impulses. She decided to marry Hubertus after knowing him for two days. They met at a wedding in 1967 when both were seeing other people. After one date at a nightclub, he popped the question. "Here was this businessman, 10 years older, asking to marry me," Dudu says now. "I thought about it exactly two minutes. We’ve been together 40 years now, traveling the world."

The newlyweds drove in a Volkswagen from Munich to Beirut, where Hubertus was assigned by Hoechst, stopping in Istanbul along the way. The bazaars of Turkey were Dudu’s initiation into collecting. "It was the first time I entered a world I did not know," she says. "I realized I must have been a gypsy in 1500. You can leave me in a bazaar for days."

Once settled in Beirut, the couple took trips to Dubai, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. In all these countries, she bought hand-painted silks, which today are draped across the backs of chairs and stuffed in drawers in her apartment. "I would see these Bedouin women, and we started trading things," says Dudu. "I would bring something European, and they were keen on that."

Beirut began a pattern of horrible timing. Invariably, the country where Hoechst sent them was either faltering economically, on the verge of civil war, under a repressive regime or all three. But such circumstances are good for buying beautiful things cheaply, and Dudu has never spent much money on her acquisitions, mostly made for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars or considerably less.

Istanbul was the couple’s next home, from 1971 until 1978. "Nobody collected," says Dudu. "The Turks were just trying to survive. I didn’t have the money to buy much, but the people in the bazaars were delighted with my eye. Sometimes they said, ‘Don’t pay. Just choose something.’ " Her constellation of 100-odd silver boxes, arranged on an end table, was largely acquired this way.

After Istanbul, they moved to Tehran, arriving in May 1978, during the last days of the Shah. As Iran’s political situation deteriorated, Hubertus and Dudu had the good sense to send their two sons to Germany in the care of their Turkish nanny. ("One of them is now a collector, but he won’t admit it," Dudu says.) Shortly afterward, Hubertus was taken into custody — Dudu uses the term "kidnapped" — for a month. "But they released him," she says. "This was in the beginning, before the time when they would just shoot you."

The authorities also confiscated some of Dudu’s art objects, including several tiny clay animals. "They’re now in the Tehran museum," she says — but she had a kind of collector’s revenge. "They were only copies. The people who took them thought they were real artifacts from 3000 B.C."

Having barely escaped alive from Iran, an exasperated Dudu begged Hubertus’s boss at Hoechst for a posting in a less-strife-torn locale. "Maybe could we live in Europe for once?" she recalls asking. The executive looked at them and said, "I have a place that will be paradise for you: Argentina."

They didn’t want to go. Argentina was hardly a break from their previous pattern: The country was heading into the Falklands War; its authoritarian military government was soon to fall; and various economic crises, including crippling inflation, lay ahead. But they went. And Buenos Aires, indeed South America generally, suited them, especially Dudu. She soon got a job at Sotheby’s, where she worked for five years in the department of Latin American art.

Up until the early 1990s, Hubertus continued to travel the world for his job. But Dudu began staying home more. When she visited her husband, she would, of course, seek out local artworks. She trekked to Brazil’s Bahia province to buy painted ceramic figurines, 30 of which grace a shelf in her kitchen, and to Montevideo, Uruguay, to pick up folk-art canvases for $200 a piece.

In the Philippines, she stumbled onto an abandoned chest containing 30 santos — carved, wooden religious figures jointed like marionettes — from the early 16th to the late 19th centuries, when the Spanish ruled the country. These now populate a tabletop in Hubertus’s half of their home.