Douglas Grant and Rudolf Marcuse: Wartime encounters at the edge of art

ABSTRACT

In 1918, in a German POW camp, German Jewish sculptor Rudolf Marcuse modelled a bronze bust of Australian Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant. We discuss these two men’s life-histories, the political impetus for creating racialized images of POWs, the early twentieth-century globalization of colonial power structures, and the capacity of a personal, arbitrary encounter to resist simple, deterministic imperatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Douglas Grant
• Rudolf Marcuse
• Wünsdorf
• Australian Indigenous military service
• First World War
• POWs
• history of race
• wartime encounters

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with various aspects of our research: Andrea Baumgartner; Inka Bertz, Head of Collections / Curator for Art, Jüdisches Museum Berlin; Claire Brenard, Curator, Art, Department of Collections, Imperial War Museum London; Machteld Dumon, Galerij Victor Werner, Antwerp; Beate Ebelt-Borchert, Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Silvio Fischer, Museum des Teltow, Wünsdorf; Tony Griffiths; Daniel Kester, ‘thekesters.net’ website owner, Williamsville, NY; Clemens Klöckner, Collections, LETTER Stiftung, Cologne; Richard Lane, former Director, Natural History Museum, London; Rupert O’Flynn, London; Johannes Pommeranz, Head of Department, Library, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; Mamu-Ngadjon Elder Ernie Raymont; Wiebke Witzel, Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin; and two anonymous reviewers for History and Anthropology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from German are by Hilary Howes.

2 In addition to the Wünsdorf camp, discussed in more detail below, other POW camps utilized for anthropological research included the Sielow camp near Cottbus, south-east of Berlin (utilized by Marcuse, as discussed below); the Theresienstadt and Reichenberg camps, both located in the present-day Czech Republic, and the Hart bei Amstetten camp in Lower Austria (utilized by Rudolf Pöch); and the Darmstadt, Erfurt, Groß-Breesen and Ohrdruf camps, all in present-day Germany (utilized by Egon von Eickstedt) (Lange 2010).

3 An ‘Alice Fraenkel’, presumably the same woman, is listed immediately above Marcuse on the Europa’s passenger list of 30 October 1936 (Wesling 2017). Possibly the two met on board ship; alternatively, they may have emigrated as unmarried partners (though both were listed as ‘married’) or as spouses whose marriage was not recognized under British law.

4 Grant’s typewritten doctor’s reports from Callan Park Medical Records are annotated with handwritten comments from nursing staff such as ‘should not have leave – ALCOHOLIC’ and ‘no more leave ever’. Record Series 4998: Medical journals [Callan Park Mental Hospital], (State Archives and Records NSW. n.d). Western Sydney Records Centre, Kingswood.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under DECRA [grant number DE140100878].