Georg Heinrich Karo (11 January 1872 – 12 November 1963) was a German archaeologist who specialised in Mycenaean and Etruscan civilisation. He was twice director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens (DAI), in which capacity he excavated the Mycenaean site of Tiryns. A colleague of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who had worked with Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, Karo published the findings from Schliemann's excavations of Grave Circle A at Mycenae. The work was considered Karo's greatest contribution to scholarship.
Karo was born into a prosperous merchant family; both of his parents were non-practising Jews, who raised him as a Protestant Christian. Initially inclined towards classical philology, he became interested in archaeology as a student of Georg Loeschcke at the University of Bonn. After earning his doctorate from Bonn in 1896, Karo travelled widely in the Mediterranean region, developing interests in Minoan civilisation, the Etruscans and ancient biblical commentaries. He taught at Bonn between 1902 and 1905, before moving to the DAI in Athens as Dörpfeld's deputy. Known for his urbane manner and fluency in several languages, he became well connected in the international circles of Greek archaeology, and maintained the favour of both the Greek and the German royal families. His outspoken German nationalism led to his dismissal from the DAI in 1916: he spent some time in the Ottoman Empire, where he worked to conserve cultural heritage and was linked with various efforts to appropriate ancient artefacts and bring them to Germany.
Karo's views made him unpopular with the Entente-backed government that ruled in Greece after the First World War, and he took an academic post in Germany at the University of Halle, which he held until 1930. That year, he returned to Athens as director of the DAI. Although an early supporter of the Nazi government of Germany, Karo was forced from his post in 1936 by antisemitism against his Jewish ancestry. In 1939, he fled to the United States, supported by American associates including Carl Blegen and Bert Hodge Hill, and obtained a series of visiting professorships at the University of Cincinnati, Oberlin College and Claremont Colleges. He was accused of collaborating with the Nazi regime: though no evidence for this allegation was found, he was denied US citizenship and listed as an "Enemy Alien". He returned to Germany in 1952, and became an honorary professor at the University of Freiburg.
Early life
Georg Heinrich Karo was born in the Palazzo Barbaro, Venice. His father, Moritz, the son of a rabbi from Königsberg in der Neumark (now Chojna, Poland) in Western Pomerania, had built up a substantial fortune as a merchant in Berlin and served as honorary consul to Austria-Hungary. His mother, Helene Kuh, was Moritz's second wife and came from a Viennese family. Both of Karo's parents were non-practising Jews, and baptised their children as Protestant Christians; Karo remained a practising Protestant throughout his life. Karo lived in Berlin until the age of six, when his father, having lost his job through illness, moved the family to Florence, where Karo spent the remainder of his childhood. Until 1885, he was educated by private tutors, including Carl Schuchhardt, later known as a pioneer of prehistoric archaeology in Germany. He then attended the Berthold-Gymnasium in Freiburg, from which he graduated on 30 July 1890.
In the same year, Karo began studying classical philology and archaeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München under the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and the philologists Wilhelm von Christ and Ludwig Traube. He initially specialised in classical philology, later writing in his memoirs that he found archaeology "completely foreign" and that he "only embarrassed himself" when attempting it. At the beginning of the 1892 winter term, he moved to the University of Bonn, where he studied under the classicist Franz Bücheler and the philologist Hermann Usener, but focused his studies in archaeology under Georg Loeschcke. Loeschcke held that the tradition of classical art should be traced to the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the second millenniumBCE. Karo received his doctorate under him in 1896, with a thesis entitled ("Inquiries into the Most Ancient Art of Vase Painting").
Following graduation in 1896, Karo moved to Rome, and spent the next six years on an extended study trip to Britain, France and 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. Karo later took part in Evans's excavations at Knossos, and the two became lifelong friends. He made his first visit to mainland Greece in 1900–1901. In Rome, he studied under the archaeologist Wolfgang Helbig and developed an interest in the culture of the Etruscans. 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. Most of Karo's early work, however, focused on Etruscan culture, particularly the connections between the Etruscans and classical Greece.
Archaeological career Early career and first period in Athens In 1902, Karo was awarded his habilitation at Bonn, and moved there to teach as a (a "private lecturer" without the rights or status of a full professor). While in Bonn, he became acquainted with the family of the economic historian Eberhard Gothein and his wife Marie-Luise: Karo tutored their son, , towards his (secondary-school final examinations). Through the Gothein family, he was introduced to the poet Stefan George. Karo 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 Wilhelm Dörpfeld. He became editor of ('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; Karo was generally acknowledged as the institute's main figure and director from this point onwards. 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.
In Greece, Karo conducted archaeological excavations at Tiryns (from 1910, resuming earlier work by Schliemann). He also became closely connected with the German court of Wilhelm II, who became interested in Karo's work at Tiryns and whom Karo frequently visited at the Achilleion, the Kaiser's summer palace on Corfu. He was summoned there, along with Dörpfeld, to meet the Kaiser in June 1911. On his arrival on the island, Karo went straight to the excavation site of the Temple of Artemis, where he received an invitation to dinner at the palace: having dressed hurriedly in the car, he was seated next to the Kaiser. He was later present at excavations in the grounds of Mon Repos, a summer residence of the Greek royal family, in 1912: Wilhelm took part in those excavations, and Karo conducted research upon a relief slab unearthed by the Kaiser there in 1914.
In 1911, Karo secured 10,000 marks 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. Karo maintained close relations with the directors of these institutes, particularly Maurice Holleaux of the French School, Bert Hodge Hill of the American School, and Alan Wace of the British School at Athens (BSA). 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.
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. Around 1912, Loeschcke arranged for Karo to take on the publication of the results of the excavation of Grave Circle A at Mycenae – the excavations had been carried out by Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis between 1876 and 1877, but only partial publications of them had thus far been made. Karo's work was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but he prepared part of his preliminary survey for the 1915 volume of , and sent proof-sheets of it to the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in the same year. The project would not be fully published until 1933, and was later described as Karo's greatest contribution to scholarship. 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.
First World War 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. In a chance meeting with Wace on Christmas Day (25 December) 1914, Karo avowed that he would remain a member of the BSA and continue the honorary memberships of Britons at the DAI, but that the DAI's official relationship with the BSA, as well as his personal relations with Wace and other British archaeologists, would be "in abeyance" until the end of the war. He similarly ended his friendly correspondence with Holleaux of the French School: after 1914, the next documented contact between the DAI and the French School was in 1974, after Karo's death. 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.
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 (, 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 , 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. Karo further excavated the find-spot in September 1916: he interpreted the discovery as loot piled up by tomb-robbers. This view 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 assemblage was created as either an attempt to conceal valuable goods or a ritual deposition of them.