Early career and first period in Athens

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 Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, its name in German), deputising for the archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld.^[15] He became editor of Athenische Mitteilungen ('News from Athens'), an archaeological journal published by the DAI, and held the position until 1924. From 1909, Dörpfeld, who had reached the pensionable age of fifty-five, abdicated most of his duties as director in order to focus on his own research into the works of Homer;^[16] Karo was generally acknowledged as the institute's main figure and de facto director from this point onwards.^[17] He turned down a post at the University of Giessen during this period. In response, the DAI submitted a request to Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the chancellor of Germany, that Karo be granted the title of professor; this was approved. Karo was given the director's title after Dörpfeld formally retired on 31 December 1911. He was made an officer of the Austrian Order of Franz Joseph shortly afterwards.^[16]

In Greece, Karo conducted archaeological excavations at Tiryns (from 1910) and of the Temple of Artemis on Corfu.^[18] 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.^[19] 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.^[21] Karo maintained close relations with the directors of these institutes, particularly Maurice Holleaux, the director of the French School at Athens, Alan Wace of the British School at Athens and Bert Hodge Hill of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.^[22] He also took part in a tradition at the BSA, 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.^[23]

Karo became a favourite of Sophia of Prussia, Wilhelm II's sister, who married Constantine I to become Queen of Greece in 1913. During the First Balkan War of 1912–1913, Karo offered the unused first floor of the DAI's building as a hospital for wounded Greek officers; this service was recognised with the appointment as a Commander of the Order of the Redeemer, Greece's highest order of merit, in 1915.^[24] Between 1912 and 1933,^[25] he 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.^[26] 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.^[14]

First World War and aftermath

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 Ottoman allies.^[27] Between 1914 and 1916, the German Foreign Office's newly created Office for Propaganda occupied rooms in the DAI, and Karo provided them with assistance, particularly working as a translator.^[24] 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"); it 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.^[28] Karo further excavated the find-spot in September 1916:^[29] 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 an attempt to conceal valuable goods or a ritual deposition of them.^[30]

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 Queen Sophia, though most of his subordinates remained in their roles.^[31] The institute's administration was taken over by the Greek archaeologist Konstantinos Kourouniotis.^[32] 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.^[33] 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.^[34] In July, he was connected to a plan by the German embassy in Constantinople, led by the ambassador Richard von Kühlmann,^[35] 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 the Ottoman Empire by German museums.^[33] 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.^[36]

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 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 Greco-Turkish War, which began the following year.^[37] Karo was widely suspected of being in Turkey to spy on the situation of the Greek-speaking population of the eastern Aegean region.^[38] 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 the Ottoman Empire'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.^[39] In the summer of 1920, Karo visited the excavations of Mycenae as a guest of the British archaeologist Alan Wace.^[40]

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.^[41] During a meeting with the Greek royal family and other Greek political figures in Switzerland in 1920, Karo had been informed that he would be expected to remain politically neutral on his return to the DAI.^[42] It was also suggested that Karo should not return, at least at first, as director, given his pro-German wartime activities:^[41] 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.^[43] Accordingly, in July 1920, Karo formally wrote to the directors of the DAI in Berlin, requesting to be dismissed from his post in Athens and complaining about the Greek government's treatment of him there.^[42]

In the winter term of 1920,^[7] 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.^[44] In 1922, Karo met Helene Wenck, the daughter of the historian Karl Wenck, and a great-niece of Heinrich Schliemann. She was then working as a secretary at Halle, and like Karo published articles in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, a conservative magazine opposed to the Weimar government then ruling in Germany.^[45] From 1922, Karo contributed articles on Minoan and Mycenaean archaeology to the Pauly–Wissowa encyclopaedia of classical scholarship.^[12] 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.^{[46][lower-alpha 2]}

Around 1924, Karo 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.^[47] In 1926, he travelled to western Crete with his former student Spyridon Marinatos, following a promise of 100,000 marks from the German-American businessman Gustav Oberlaender for renewed German excavations in Greece; however, the money was eventually exhausted on excavations in the Kerameikos cemetery of Athens.^[48] Karo remained at Halle until 1930,^[49] when he returned to Athens as director of the DAI.^[50] Helene Wenck moved with him as his secretary.^[51] During this period, Karo served as editor of the Archäologischen Anzeiger ('Archaeological Gazette'), the DAI's bulletin of research and excavation.^[52]

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

In September 1932, Karo was mooted as a potential candidate for the presidency of the DAI. The outgoing president, Gerhart Rodenwaldt, urged against his appointment on the grounds that a Jewish president could be a political liability if the Nazi Party were to gain power, and Karo declined to stand.^[53] When the Nazis acquired control of Germany in 1933, they 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.^[54] Karo resigned as chair of the DAI's board in 1933, fearing that his Jewish ancestry would be used against the institute. He offered his resignation as director, but the DAI's Berlin president, Theodor Wiegand, refused it.^[53]

In the spring of 1934, Karo acted as a guide to Hermann Göring, his future wife Emma Sonneman and other high-ranking Nazi officials during their visit to Greece: Karo had only planned to accompany them for the first day, but Göring insisted that he remain with them for the whole week of the visit. In 1935, he again met Göring on the latter's honeymoon in Greece, and he went on to meet and entertain several other Nazi ministers during 1935–1936.^[55] In a letter of 1935 to his superiors in Berlin, Karo wrote that the DAI was working effectively, and that he was trying to "get rid of" his Jewish colleagues, whom he wrote were damaging the "uniform, clean atmosphere" of the institute.^[56] He was ordered to leave the directorship in November 1935, though the order was quickly amended to allow him to serve until 31 March 1936.^[57] After extensive political wrangling between Karo, the DAI's officials in Athens and Berlin and the German government, Karo left office in October 1936.^[58]

Karo moved to Munich, where he lived with his step-sister. Wenck moved into the same house, but lived in a separate apartment. He remained in contact with the DAI, both in Athens and Berlin, and was consulted in 1937 by the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture about the salaries of DAI employees in Athens.^[59] From 22 May until 4 June, he worked with Carl Blegen, his long-time friend from the ASCSA, on the latter's excavations at Troy, and his former colleague Kurt Bittel arranged for Karo to be accommodated at the DAI to give a lecture on the finds from the site.^[60] During this period, Karo applied unsuccessfully, with support from the DAI, for the status of Reichsbürger ('Reich citizen').^[61] He was also made an honorary doctor of the University of Athens in 1937, as part of its centenary celebrations.^[62] He worked as a writer in Munich,^[63] but returned to Athens for study in 1938. Shortly after Karo's arrival in Athens, Wenck was denied access to an archive of Schliemann's papers by the researcher Ernst Meyer, and was subsequently forced to resign a contract to write a biography of Schliemann; she alleged that Meyer had discriminated against her because she was in a relationship with the Jewish-born Karo.^{[64][lower-alpha 3]} By the end of 1938, the publication of several of Karo's works had been cancelled, in line with German law prohibiting the publication of works by Jews.^[65]

Karo maintained close connections with archaeologists, particularly from Britain and the United States, throughout his career.^[66] He made a particular impression upon Ida Hill, the wife of Bert Hodge Hill. Ida wrote in 1900 that Karo was "more like an Englishman" than a German and was "a great ladies' man".^[67] 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 historian 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 Blegen and Hill continued to associate with him and to attend lectures at the DAI, often as the only non-Germans in the audience.^[68] In January 1936, Blegen, Hill and the "Quartet"^{[lower-alpha 4]} 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:^[70] 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.^[71]

From 1938, Karo planned to leave Germany permanently: he later stated that he had intended to leave in September, but was required to remain to care for his elderly step-sister. She died on 19 December; Karo applied for a Greek visa early in 1939 in the hope of being able to pass from there to the United States as a refugee. He was supported by the Greek royal family, who allowed him to bypass the general refusal of the Greek government to issue visas to Austrian and German Jews.^[66] He left Germany for Greece on 30 June, and was briefly detained by the Gestapo at the Italian border; he was in Florence by 1 July, where he met King George of Greece as well as Wenck, who had emigrated separately.^[72] On 12 July, Karo attended Wace's sixtieth birthday party at Mycenae, alongside several noted Greek and American archaeologists.^[73] On 27 September, he and Wenck sailed from Greece, and arrived on 11 October in New York.^[74] Karo obtained his American visa through 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.^[75] Karo's arrival in Cincinnati was welcomed by the university faculty: friends there provided money to help him with living costs.^[76]

Karo married Helene Wenck on 24 April 1940.^[77] That same month, he applied for US citizenship.^[78] Karo left Cincinnati in 1940 and taught as a visiting professor at Oberlin.^[79] Once again, his friends at Cincinnati sent money to help with his expenses; the Blegens contributed most of his first year's salary.^[76] 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.^[80] He delivered the eight 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.^[12][81] 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.^[82] 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.^[83]

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 (FBI),^[84] 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. Harry A. Hill's father-in-law, the philologist Edward Capps, was a personal enemy of Karo's friends Blegen and Bert Hodge Hill: Capps denounced Karo to the FBI 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 Karo of having been an agent for Germany during the First World War,^[76] an accusation repeated by the classicist Daniel Lewis.^[85] The classicist John Franklin Daniel accused Karo of being a sleeper agent for Germany in the US.^[86]

An Ohio district attorney sought to arrest Karo: his warrant was refused by the US Attorney General,^[86] but Karo was subpoenaed to testify in court in 1941.^[87] 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".^[86] 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 in Cleveland on 18 April 1942 to avoid internment, something that he wrote would be "a death sentence" at his advanced age.^[88] His parole was lifted on 15 November 1945, but he remained ineligible for American citizenship and retained the official status of "Enemy Alien" until the end of 1946.^[89] The affair caused him to abandon his planned return to Cincinnati, on the advice of William Semple, head of the university's classics department.^[86]

Return to Germany and death

After the end of his contract at Oberlin, Karo lived until 1945 largely on support from the Oberlaender Foundation, which funded the expenses of several German academics living as refugees in the United States.^[90] He received a scholarship from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1944–1945, and was also supported by donations from friends. However, the Karo family's wealth declined considerably over their time in the US. Karo took a visiting lectureship at the University of Kansas City in 1945, after the end of the Second World War in September, but generally lived in Oberlin until the summer of 1947.^[91] During the 1947–1948 academic year, he taught at the University of Iowa; in 1948, he took a one-year post at Claremont Colleges in California.^[92] His salary at Claremont was $40 per month, less than that paid to a typical lecturer, and barely enough to meet his living costs. His contract was extended each year until 1952, thanks to pressure on the college's president exerted by Karo's students; Karo also served as head of Claremont's classics department. His wife Helene acted as his research and teaching assistant.^[93]

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in January 1952, he received congratulations from Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of West Germany.^[94] He applied to be recognised as a victim of Nazi persecution, which would entitle him to government support as well as a resumption of his pension as an employee of the DAI: his application was accepted late in 1952 after Adenauer's personal intervention.^[95] Dissatisfied with life in America,^[50] Karo returned to Germany on 9 July 1952.^[96] Shortly afterwards, he was awarded the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.^[97] In 1954, he was made an honorary professor at the University of Freiburg,^[98] probably at the instigation of Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt, a professor at the university and the son of Karo's childhood teacher.^[96]

In addition to his native German and Italian, Karo spoke English, French and Modern Greek.^[99] In his memoirs, which he published in 1959, Karo chose only to discuss his life until the early 1930s, leaving out any mention of his relationship with the Nazi government, of his persecution in Germany, or of subsequent events.^[100] He died in Freiburg im Breisgau on 12 November 1963.^[52]

Explanatory notes

References