Chopin, Polish national culture and the question of “racial Purity”: Zofia Lissa’s voice in the debate over racial issues in the 1930s

The question of racial “purity” or “identity” was part of the fashionable discussion on human races in the 1930s. In 1938 a debate over Chopin’s “racial identity” took place in the Warsaw press, triggered by the publication a book entitled Polacy-chrześcijanie pochodzenia żydowskiego (Poles — Christians of Jewish Origin) by Mateusz Mieses, an outstanding Judaist and representative of one of Poland’s Jewish communities. Mieses’ aim was to familiarise the Polish reader with the very little-known scale on which the ethnically Jewish element had penetrated over the many centuries into the families of the Polish landed gentry, intelligentsia and even aristocracy. As a result, Mieses claimed, many eminent Poles known in Polish history had some Jewish blood in their veins. In addition to the more or less convincing examples of such assimilation, Mieses also quotes some rather dubious ones, including the genealogy of Chopin. On the basis of unconfirmed rumours and the composer’s facial features in some unidentified portrait he claims that Chopin was half Jewish through his mother Justyna Krzyżanowska. Mieses’ conclusions — as well as his entire methodology — were sharply criticised by the reviewer of Wiadomości Literackie as well as by Zofia Lissa, at that time a young scholar at the threshold of a brilliant musicological career. Lissa pointed out that establishing Chopin’s “racial affiliation” is difficult for a lack of reliable and objective sources. For a long time all images of Chopin available to researchers had been either portraits or sculptures, which — as artistic creations — used to deform his face. However, Lissa argued that most of his portraits point to his Dinaric characteristics, which were also confirmed by the two surviving real-life likenesses of the composer (referred to by the author as “racially unprejudiced” sources) — namely, his death mask and the only surviving daguerreotype. Taking into account the findings of contemporary (mainly German) anthropology, Lissa concluded that Chopin was a typical Dinaric with some Nordic features, and it was from his mother that Fryderyk inherited his few physical traits characteristic of that type. On the other hand, Lissa denied that there was any connection between Chopin’s music and his “racial identity”. It seems a paradoxical that Lissa — a scholar of Jewish descent — drew on Nazi theories formulated by German anthropologists to show that Chopin had no demonstrable Jewish ancestors. But if we place this debate in the context of its time, and of one specific period in the ideological and scholarly evolution of Zofia Lissa herself — things do not look so simple any more. Her emphasis on the role of the social environment and her rejection of Einchenauer’s theses concerning the impact of “race” on the character of music testify to Lissa’s intensifying links to the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which she most likely began to absorb in that very period.

INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS AND GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE ERA OF ‘DECOLONIZATION’

Decolonizing history and anthropology is often presented as a theoretical enterprise, through which a more rigorous and inclusive framing of historical precepts will deliver a clearer and less Eurocentric understanding of the past. Yet it is arguably necessary to decouple decolonization from the broader practices of anti-Eurocentric historiography. Via an empirical assessment of the legacy of Hermann Klaatsch, a German anthropologist working on the colonial frontier, this article examines the possibilities and limitations of a decolonizing approach to settler colonial history. The article reflects upon its own study of colonial anthropology and the historical complexity of the repatriation of Indigenous human remains, and suggests that not all anti-Eurocentric interrogations of the colonial past are synonymous with decolonization.

The Eickstedt Archive: German Anthropology in Colonial India

The Eickstedt archive is an inventory of a German anthropologist’s perception of India of the 1920s through photographs and written accounts. His understanding forms the leitmotif of this reading of the archive, which as such is a reading along the grain. This article attempts to locate the archive’s rationale, which vacillates between expectations of the ‘primitive other’ and a rising racial anthropology. Exploring the relationship between the archive’s content and the context allows one to trace the intentions and preoccupations that influenced the archive, without neglecting the agency of the photographic subjects. Juxtaposing the archive and the published accounts as well as the related artefact collection further substantiates that the archive is constituted by the multiple influences of German anthropology of the 1920s, a conventional nationalism, and European orientalism.

Globalising German Anthropology: Erhard Eylmann in Australia

The German presence in nineteenth-century South Australia is associated primarily with the immigration of Prussian Lutherans escaping religious persecution in their homeland. Their settlement in the fledgling British colony aided its early, stuttering development; in the longer term it also fitted neatly South Australia's perception of itself as a “paradise of dissent.” These Germans took their religion seriously, none more so than the Lutheran missionaries who committed themselves to bringing the Gospel to the indigenous people of the Adelaide plains and, eventually, much further afield as well. In reality, however, the story of the German contribution to the history of this British colony extended far beyond these pious Lutherans. Among those who followed in their wake, whether as settlers or travellers, were Germans of many different backgrounds, who made their way to the Antipodes for a multitude of reasons. In South Australia as much as anywhere, globalising Germany was a multi-facetted project.The intellectual gamut of Germans in South Australia is nowhere more evident than in the realm of anthropology. The missionaries were not alone in displaying a keen interest in the Australian Aborigines. Anthropologists steeped in the empirical tradition that came to dominate the nascent discipline at the end of the nineteenth century also turned their attention to Australia. Indeed, in Germany and elsewhere, Australia occupied a special position in international discourse. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan had observed in 1880 that Australian aboriginal societies “now represent the condition of mankind in savagery better than it is elsewhere represented on the earth—a condition now rapidly passing away.”