Georg Karo

Georg Heinrich Karo was born in the Palazzo Barbaro, Venice. His father, Moritz, the son of a rabbi from Königsberg,[1] had built up a substantial fortune as a merchant in Berlin and served as honorary consul to Austria-Hungary, before moving to Florence, where Karo spent his childhood.[2] His mother, Helene Kuh, was Moritz's second wife and a native of Vienna.[1] Although both of Karo's parents were Jewish, he was baptised as an Evangelical Protestant Christian, and remained a practising Protestant throughout his life.[3] Until 1885, Karo was educated by private tutors in Florence; thereafter, he attended the Berthold-Gymnasium in Freiburg, from which he graduated on 30 July 1890.[1]

In the same year, he began studying history, philosophy and archaeology at the University of Munich, under the philologist Wilhelm von Christ and the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin.[4] He initially specialised in philology, later writing in his memoirs that he found archaeology "completely foreign" and that he "only embarrassed himself" when attempting it.[5] At the beginning of the 1892 winter term, he moved to the University of Bonn, where he transferred his studies to archaeology under Georg Loeschcke.[6] Loeschcke held that the tradition of classical art should be traced into the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the second millennium BCE: Karo received his doctorate under him in 1896, with a thesis entitled De arte vascularia antiquissima quaestiones ('Questions on the Art of Most Ancient Vase Painting').[5]

Following graduation in 1896, he moved to Rome, and spent the next six years on an extended study trip to the Mediterranean region, funded by his family wealth. In the winter of 1899–1900, he travelled along the Nile with his university friend, the Egyptologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing. On the return journey, he visited Heraklion in Crete and met the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, the discoverer and excavator of the Minoan palace of Knossos.[5] Karo later took part in Evans's excavations at Knossos, and the two became lifelong friends.[7] He made his first visit to mainland Greece in 1900–1901.[8] In Rome, he studied under the archaeologist Wolfgang Helbig and developed an interest in the culture of the Etruscans.[9] During this period, Karo worked with the theologian Hans Lietzmann to produce the first catalogue of the known biblical catenae (commentaries composed entirely of excerpts from earlier commentaries), which was published in 1902.[10] Most of Karo's early work, however, focused on Etruscan culture, particularly the connections between the Etruscans and classical Greece.[11]

Grave Circle A at Mycenae, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis in 1876–77: Karo published the finds from the site between 1912 and 1933.

In 1902, Karo was awarded his habilitation at Bonn, and moved there to teach as a Privatdozent (a "private lecturer" without the rights or status of a full professor). He moved in 1905 to Athens to take up a post, at Loeschcke's recommendation, as second secretary of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens (generally known as the "DAI", an abbreviation of its name in German), deputising for the archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld.[12] In 1910 he succeeded Dörpfeld as director, though was generally acknowledged as the institute's main figure from 1909.[13] In Greece, he conducted archaeological excavations at Tiryns (from 1910) and of the Temple of Artemis on Corfu.[14] He also became closely connected with the German court of Wilhelm II, who became interested in Karo's work at Tiryns and Corfu and whom Karo frequently visited at the Achilleion, the Kaiser's summer palace on Corfu.[15] In 1911, Karo secured 10,000 marks[lower-alpha 1] from Wilhelm towards the DAI's budget, which he justified to the Kaiser as an essential means of ensuring German "national prestige" through establishing parity with Greece's other foreign archaeological schools.[17] Karo also took part in a tradition at the British School at Athens, under the 1900–1906 directorate of Robert Carr Bosanquet, of comic lectures delivered on winter evenings: he attended in drag, while other members of the DAI came dressed as statues.[18]

Between 1912 and 1933,[19] Karo worked on the publication of the results of the excavation of Grave Circle A at Mycenae, carried out by Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis between 1876 and 1877: this publication was later described as Karo's greatest contribution to scholarship.[20] Karo's work established the chronological relationships of the finds from Grave Circle A, and therefore allowed the beginning of the systematic study of Mycenaean material culture.[11] During the First World War, Karo remained in Athens and worked to oppose the strong anti-German sentiment prevalent in the Greek press and popular opinion. He edited a pro-German magazine and argued against the so-called "atrocity propaganda" spread by the Allies about Germany and its Turkish allies.[21] Shortly before Christmas 1915, excavators at Tiryns uncovered a cauldron filled with precious items, including a fifteenth-century BCE Minoan signet ring, deposited in the foundations of a house in the site's "Lower Town" during the LH IIIC period (c. 1180 BCE, after the destruction of the site in the late Bronze Age). Karo was not present for the discovery (known as the "Tiryns Treasure"), which was initially excavated by the Greek archaeologist Apostolos Arvanitopoulos, who was stationed in the region as a reserve officer of the Hellenic Army and who invited Karo to return and study the finds with him.[22] Karo further excavated the find-spot in September 1916:[23] he interpreted the discovery as loot piled up by tomb-robbers, a view which was immediately and almost universally accepted in the archaeological community, though further study in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has suggested that the deposition was either a deliberate attempt by a family to conceal their valuable goods or a ritual deposition of them.[24]

In late 1916, the DAI's Athens branch was taken under the control of the Greek Ministry for Education, following pressure from France and from anti-monarchist Venizelist elements within Greece. Karo was removed from his post as director, despite the objections of the German-born Queen Sophia, though most of his subordinates remained in their roles.[25] In May 1917, Karo travelled to the Ottoman Empire to assist the archaeologist Martin Schede in preserving ancient monuments, though he was widely believed to be involved in attempting to secure ancient artefacts for illicit export to Germany.[26] He complained that the rapid development of infrastructure by the Ottoman army frequently destroyed ancient sites, and that neither he nor the army itself could prevail upon the soldiers to preserve archaeological remains.[27] In July, he was connected to a plan by the German embassy in Constantinople to establish a Kulturgeschichtliches Institut ('Institute of Cultural History') to take over the administration of Turkish archaeology and remove the legal barriers to the acquisition of antiquities from Turkey by German museums.[26] Karo was rebuked by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, considered among the most respected of Germany's classicists, and forced to leave Turkey; he departed for a holiday in Switzerland.[28]

Byzantine remains at Sardis, photographed in 2015

Towards the end of the war, amid growing tensions between Greece and the Ottoman Empire over the status of western Anatolia, Karo was asked by Halil Edhem, the Turkish director of the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, to visit the ancient site of Sardis along with another archaeologist, Hubert Knackfuss, and to assess the veracity of reports that Ottoman forces had vandalised the ruins and excavations there. The two arrived on 21 June 1918, and reported that the site was largely undamaged: they did however pack several trunks of archaeological finds and the personal property of the site's American excavators, and had them transported away from the site for safekeeping. This proved prescient, as the site would be severely damaged during the war between Greece and Turkey, which began the following year.[29] Karo was widely suspected of being in Turkey to spy on the situation of the Greek-speaking population of the eastern Aegean region.[30] The art historian Wilhelm von Bode proposed to Karo that he steal the fifth-century BCE Sarcophagus of Sidon and take it back to the Berlin museums as recompense for Turkey's unpaid war debts: however, Theodor Wiegand, director of the museums' antiquities department, heard about the plan and ensured that it was not carried out.[31] In the summer of 1920, Karo visited the excavations of Mycenae as a guest of the British archaeologist Alan Wace.[32]

The Greek state retained possession of the DAI's premises in Athens after the end of the war in November 1918: part of the building had been turned into a girls' school. In 1920, it was suggested that Karo should not return, at least at first, as director, given his pro-German wartime activities:[33] France had overthrown the Greek government of Constantine I in June 1917, and the government of the new king Alexander was considered a puppet of the Entente powers.[34] In the winter term of 1920,[5] Karo took up the role of professor of archaeology at the University of Halle, succeeding Carl Robert and also taking Robert's place in the central directorate of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin.[35] From 1922, Karo contributed articles on Minoan and Mycenaean archaeology to the Pauly–Wissowa encyclopaedia of classical scholarship.[9] However, his publications in his early years at Halle were dominated by political tracts, arguing against the Treaty of Versailles and denying claims of Germany's guilt for the start of the First World War.[36][lower-alpha 2] Around 1924, he was a member of the acquisition committee of Athens's National Archaeological Museum, in which capacity he successfully argued against their acquisition of the so-called "Ring of Nestor", a purportedly Minoan artefact that Karo believed to be a forgery.[37] He remained at Halle until 1930,[38] when he returned to Athens as director of the DAI.[39] During this period he served as editor of the Archäologischen Anzeiger ('Archaeological Gazette'), the DAI's bulletin of research and excavation.[40]

Exile in the United States

The Arts and Sciences Hall (formerly McMicken Hall) of the University of Cincinnati, where Karo taught following his arrival in the US in 1939

The Nazi Party, which gained power in Germany in 1933, made an early priority of excluding those it deemed racially undesirable, including Jews and those married to or associated with them, from academic posts. Karo was one of several figures in German classical archaeology, including Ludwig Curtius, the head of the German Archaeological Institute at Rome, to be removed from office under Nazi racial laws.[41] In 1936, he was relieved of his position at the DAI because of his Jewish ancestry. For a few years, he worked as a writer in Munich,[42] but returned in 1938 to Athens in the hope of being able to pass from there to the United States as a refugee. His return to Greece was facilitated by the Greek royal family, which allowed him to bypass the general refusal of the Greek government to issue visas to Austrian and German Jews.[43]

Karo maintained close connections with archaeologists, particularly from Britain and the United States, throughout his career.[43] He made a particular impression upon Ida Hill, the wife of Bert Hodge Hill, the director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). Ida wrote in 1900 that Kero was "more like an Englishman" than a German and was "a great ladies' man".[44] Most archaeologists from the Entente powers in Athens had cut off their association with their German colleagues during the First World War – Zillah Dinsmoor, the wife of the architectural William Bell Dinsmoor, refused Karo's invitation to dinner shortly after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1917, ending the friendship between Karo and her husband. However, Karo's friends Carl Blegen and Hill continued to associate with him and to attend lectures at the DAI, often as the only non-Germans in the audience.[45] In January 1936, Blegen, Hill and the "Quartet"[lower-alpha 3] hosted a birthday party for Karo at their house at 9 Ploutarchou Street, intended as a gesture of support in the light of Karo's imminent dismissal:[47] the guests included the American ambassador to Greece, Lincoln MacVeigh, as well as the Anglo-Dutch artist Piet de Jong, who gave Karo a caricature of him holding a Mycenaean kylix.[48] On 12 July, Karo attended Wace's sixtieth birthday party at Mycenae, alongside several noted Greek and American archaeologists.[49] Later in 1936, Karo emigrated to the United States, having obtained a visa thorough the support of friends at the ASCSA, particularly Blegen and Hill. He first took up a visiting professorship at the University of Cincinnati, which he obtained through the assistance of Blegen, a professor at the same institution.[50] Karo's arrival in Cincinnati was welcomed by the university faculty: friends there provided money to help him with living costs.[51]

Karo married Helene Wenke, the daughter of the historian Karl Wenck, in 1940; she had previously been his private secretary at the DAI.[52] In the samw year, he applied for US citizenship.[53] After leaving Cincinnati in 1940, Karo taught as a visiting professor at Oberlin and Claremont Colleges.[54] Once again, his friends at Cincinnati sent money to help with his expenses; the Blegens contributed most of his first year's salary.[51] At Oberlin, he taught a course on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome, in which he devoted the majority of his focus to Greece: this included reading from the Iliad to his students in the original Homeric Greek, out of the belief that the poetry could never be fully appreciated in translation.[55] He delivered the 1941 and 1942 Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin, the first series of which were published as his monograph Greek Personality in Archaic Sculpture in 1948.[9][56] In this work, Karo attempted to chart a movement in Greek statuary, beginning in the seventh century BCE, towards what he defined as a "Dorian" artistic style culminating in the fifth-century works of Polykleitos – a line of argument popular in European scholarship of the early twentieth century, which sought to discriminate between so-called "occidental", "Dorian" characteristics and putatively "oriental", "Ionian" features, and to argue that the "Dorians" were more strongly associated with the Indo-European culture believed to be the root of northern European races.[57] The archaeologist Jack Davis has judged that Karo's presence ultimately had little impact upon his primary field of Aegean prehistory in the United States.[58]

Accusations of espionage

Edward Capps, photographed in military uniform in 1920

From his arrival in the United States, Karo was accused of working or spying for the Nazi government. During Karo's year at Cincinnati, the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, who had been his student at Halle, undertook a lecture tour of the US: Marinatos was unable to speak at Cincinnati due to a bout of pneumonia, which left him hospitalised for a week. Unable to meet Marinatos in person, Karo sent him a letter containing eleven postcards, all showing an image of the Penn Museum and inscribed with a short greeting, signed pseudonymously "George Barbour". Karo asked Marinatos to send these from Greece to eight addresses in Germany and three in Prague, which had recently been annexed by Nazi Germany. Unsure of Karo's intentions, Marinatos gave the letters to his benefactor Elizabeth Humlin Hunt, in whose home he had been staying, to dispose of: she handed them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,[59] and further claimed to have been told by Harry A. Hill, director of the American Express office in Athens, that Karo had received money from the Nazi government while in the city. Hill's father-in-law, the philologist Edward Capps, was a personal enemy of Karo's friends Hill and Blegen: Capps denounced Karo to the Federal Bureau of Investigations as "dangerous to the security of the United States". Meanwhile, T. Leslie Shear, the director of the ASCSA's excavations in the Athenian agora, accused him of having been an agent for Germany during the First World War,[51] an accusation repeated by the classicist Daniel Lewis.[60] The classicist John Franklin Daniel accused Karo of being a sleeper agent for Germany in the US.[53]

An Ohio district attorney sought to arrest Karo: his warrant was refused by the US Attorney General,[53] but Karo was subpoenaed to testify in court in 1941.[61] No evidence was found to connect him with the Nazi regime, and the record of the trial categorised the case against him as "fairly flimsy".[53] He was nevertheless placed under parole, denied US citizenship, and labelled a "Nazi" in the official records of the affair. He was also required to testify before an Enemy Alien Hearing Board to avoid internment, something that he wrote would be "a death sentence" at his advanced age.[60] His parole was lifted on 15 November 1945, but he remained ineligible for American citizenship. The affair caused him to abandon his planned return to Cincinnati, on the advice of William Semple, head of the university's classics department.[53]

In addition to his native German and Italian, Karo spoke English, French and Modern Greek.[62] In 1952, he was awarded the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.[63] Dissatisfied with life in America,[39] he returned in 1953 to Germany as an honorary professor at the University of Freiburg.[64] He died on 12 November 1963.[40]

Karo held strong German nationalist views.[65] In September 1919, Karo contributed an article to the Süddeutsche Monatshefte magazine demanding the revision of the Treaty of Versailles. In May 1921, he wrote again in the Monatshefte, including a suggestion that Germany's "most dangerous enemies" were "not outside, but inside" the country: a claim which the historian Michael Brenner has connected with the growth in the antisemitic stab-in-the-back myth and in hostility towards Jewish academics in Germany.[65] In 1921, Karo wrote a book criticising the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, denying claims of Germany's guilt for the start of the war, and attacking British imperialism.[66]

During a visit to Athens in September 1933, the German archaeologist Rudolf Herzog recorded in his diary that Karo, along with his colleagues at the DAI, approved of the recent rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany.[67] The DAI became known for its support of the Nazi state, and Karo hoped that the new regime would bring about renewed excavations at Olympia, which indeed began in 1936.[68] In his memoirs, Karo condemned Hitler and described the Second World War as a "meaningless enterprise".[69]

• Karo, Georg (1908). "Die tyrsenische Stele von Lemnos" [The Etruscan Stele from Lemnos]. Mittheilungen des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung (in German). 33: 48–74.
• — (1915). Die Schachtgräber von Mykenai [The Shaft Graves of Mycenae] (in German). Munich: F. Bruckmann.
• — (1915). Führer durch die Ruinen von Tiryns [Primer to the Ruins of Tiryns] (in German). Athens: German Archaeological Institute.
• — (1925). Religion des ägäischen Kreises [Religion of the Aegean Region] (in German). Leipzig: Scholl.
• — (1943). An Attic Cemetery: Excavations in the Kerameikos at Athens under Gustav Oberlaender and the Oberlaender Trust. Philadelphia: Oberlaender Trust.
• — (1948). Greek Personality in Archaic Sculpture. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• — (1954). Zwei etruskische Wundervögel aus dem 8./7. Jahrhundert [Two Etruscan Wundervögel of the 8th/7th Century] (in German). Baden-Baden: Bruno Grimm.
• — (1959). Greifen am Thron; Erinnerungen an Knossos [Attaining the Throne: Recollections of Knossos] (in German). Baden-Baden: Grimm.

• Works by and about Georg Karo, compiled by Astrid Lindenlauf in 2013