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Hugo A.
by Florian Stifel

Who Was
Bernatzik? (1897-1953)
FIG. 1: Unloading The Austrian anthropologist and photographer
Bernatzik’s converted Hugo A. Bernatzik was and still is a controversial fig-
truck on the Nile River,
ure, not only among German scholars, but also in the
Sudan, 1927.
wider field of anthropology. Who was this man and
why is he and his work still viewed by many through
the narrow prism of the past?
Both inside and outside academic anthropology,
Bernatzik’s brilliant photographic work is unques-
tioned. His photographs from West Africa, the Sudan,
Melanesia, and Southeast Asia are impressive exam-
ples of a new style in visual anthropology that
emerged in the 1920s and ‘30s. Bernatzik did not
show other people and cultures as oddities, but
instead captured images that revealed a very special
FIG. 2: Bernatzik with
Dancers, Owa Riki
respect for his subjects. His photographs shaped
(Santa Catalina), 1932. impressions of other cultures all over Europe, in part
because his popular books were translated into many
languages. His richly illustrated articles for German,
Austrian, and Swiss magazines were also published in
the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Romania, Italy,
France, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. He
gave popular slide lectures in many countries and his
photos appeared in scientific handbooks and mono-
graphs written by many other authors.

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Visitors to the recent exhibition From Another
Perspective, Photographs of the South Seas by Hugo
A. Bernatzik (1897–1953) at the Linden-Museum in
Stuttgart had the chance to examine the power, sen-
sibility, and vividness of this body of photographic
work. Despite this, Bernatzik remains a problematic
historical figure. Scientific colleagues accused
Bernatzik, an academic outsider, of not being a thor-
ough researcher. Many of his contemporaries saw in
him a successful and talented journalist, but not the
anthropologist that he aimed to be. But whatever his
academic shortcomings may have been, today it is
clear that his writings are valuable ethnographic
accounts and remain, in many cases, important pri-
mary sources.
More difficult, however, is that Bernatzik is ques-
tioned for his outlook between 1933 and 1945. He
published many of his books during this period and
became a professor at the University of Graz in 1939.
During World War II, he worked for the Office of
Colonial Politics of the Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), a situation that
spared him and many other colleagues involved in
anthropology and ethnography from being sent to
war. As a well-known author and public figure of his
time, he had personal contacts with certain high-
ranking officials of the government, who sometimes
helped him to keep his position secure and to finance
and maintain his ongoing projects.
From our present perspective, it is easily justifiable
to blame him, like many others, for his cooperation
with institutions in the Third Reich. But it is impos-
sible to understand why Bernatzik needed to engage
in such cooperation if the full story of his life is not
taken into account.
Born in Vienna, Bernatzik grew up in the liberal
upper class of an empirical, multicultural intellectual
center. After graduating from school in 1915, he went
to the First World War like a generation of men and
women all over Europe. He served at the Alpenfront
until 1917, received a medal of honor for bravery in
FIG. 3: Trekking battle, and was then sent to Albania where he saw the
through the hill tribes end of hostilities. With the defeat of the Austro-
region of Southeast Hungarian monarchy, the world of his youth and his
Asia, 1936–37.
social surroundings came to an end. Like most coun-
FIG. 4: A group of men tries in Europe, Austria suffered hard from the eco-
looking through nomic crisis that followed WWI and young Bernatzik
Bernatzik’s camera at gave up his medical studies at the University of
Owa Riki (Santa
Catalina), 1932.
Vienna to start a commercial business. When his first
wife Margarete died in 1924 and his economic activ-
FIG. 5: Bernatzik inter- ities failed to be successful, Bernatzik became
viewing a Bayot man in
depressed. He tried to escape this situation by travel-
Portuguese Guinea,
1930–31. ling to a number of Mediterranean and African coun-
tries, including Spain, Spanish-Morocco, Egypt,
Somalia, the Sudan, Albania and Romania. He
became a dedicated traveler and he turned this pas-
sion into a profession when he realized that there was
an increasing demand for photographs and stories
from foreign countries. He began to work with lead-
ing manufacturers of photographic equipment such
as Voigtlaender in Vienna, Leica in Wetzlar, and
William Nesbit in London. In 1927, he published his
first book, Typen und Tiere im Sudan.
This was the starting point for his future career.
Bernatzik began organizing and undertaking jour-
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TRIBALpeople
neys to different parts of the world and he made a liv-
ing out of these travels by writing books and selling
his photographic images. His interests changed more
and more from nature photography to anthropology,
because he was deeply impressed by the people he
met. In 1930, he enrolled at the University of Vienna
and after only two years he received his Ph.D. with a
dissertation on the Kassanga in Portuguese Guinea.
He had collected data for this work on a research trip
accompanied by his second wife Emmy and the
Africanist Bernhard Struck. With the material from
his South Seas expedition in 1932/33, he was able to
write a postdoctoral thesis in 1936 about the small
island of “Owa Raha” (Santa Anna) in the Solomon
FIG. 6: Bernatzik
travelling on a Lakatoi
Islands. But despite his fast progress in the academic
vessel, Papua New field, he did not obtain an established university posi-
Guinea, 1933. tion. He and his family lived on royalties from his
FIG. 7 (OPPOSITE): popular books and articles for the illustrated press.
The study at After 1933, it became difficult, if not impossible,
Bernatzik’s home, built
for writers to publish books in Germany without the
by Hoffmann.
permission of governmental institutions. But
FIG. 8: A group of
Bijogo spoons collect- Germany at this early point in his career was the most
ed by Bernatzik in important market for Bernatzik’s books. One expla-
Portuguese Guinea, nation, although not an excuse, for his cooperation
1930–31.
with officials of the Third Reich can be found in his
FIG. 9: A Solomon
economic needs at that time. Also, as an Austrian cit-
Islands feast bowl,
acquired by Bernatzik izen, Bernatzik had no political need to leave his
from Henry Kuper on native country. Another reason for Bernatzik and
Owa Raha (Santa many other German anthropologists not to oppose
Anna), 1932.
the Nazi Party, would have been the hope that a pow-
FIG. 10: A Solomon
erful Germany, on the level of Great Britain, could
Islands shell pendant,
collected by Bernatzik regain its colonies that were lost in 1918. They
in 1932–33. thought that without these colonies, job opportunities
110 tribalarts
for them were very scarce and they hoped, like so
many Germans, for a better future after the misery of
the 1920s.
When Austria became part of the Reich in 1938,
things became even more difficult for Bernatzik,
because he was utterly unable to undertake new jour-
neys, which, as a freelance anthropologist, he needed
in order to finance his life. In this year, the criticism
of some colleagues and influential party members
became stronger, and Bernatzik was denounced
anonymously, (and falsely as has since been proven)
as a plagiarist and fraud. Much more dangerous for
him, his wife, and their children, were rumors that he
had Jewish relatives. In this paranoid climate, no
Austrian citizen could feel safe, as spies of the
Gestapo were everywhere. In this situation, Bernatzik
felt he had no option but to join the party. He never-
theless kept up his correspondence with foreign col-
leagues, like Malinowski in London and Speiser in
Basel and continued to employ his “half Jewish” sec-
retary Christel Arnold and his archivist Ernst Reisner,
who lost his official job after being denounced as
“half Jew.” A few months later, Bernatzik intervened
when one of his former teachers at the university, the
famous developmental psychologist Karl Bühler, was
arrested by the Gestapo. With his official contacts in
Vienna, he was able to free Bühler, and helped him
leave the country for Oslo.
After the start of WWII, which Bernatzik
declaimed, he was in serious danger of being called
up for active military service. He avoided involve-
ment through cooperation with the Office of Colonial
Politics, in which he participated in ethnographic
documentation on the Akha and Meau in Indochina,
and worked on a handbook on colonial policy in
Africa. Both books were considered important for the
future of colonial policy and, for the handbook,
Bernatzik worked together with French colleagues
from the Museé de l’Homme in Paris. The French
authorities could not find any fascist leanings in
Bernatzik’s writings and both books were printed
after the war in the French occupied zone in Austria,
since the French authorities believed that both works
were important for their own colonial programs in
Africa and Indochina. Akha and Meau was later
translated into English and published in 1970 by the
Human Relation Area Files in New Haven. All his
other commercially viable books were reprinted sev-
eral times after the war in many languages, without
any textual changes. Nonetheless, his contacts with
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the Office of Colonial Politics delayed his rejoining

civilian life, and his denazification process took a few
years. In 1948, he obtained a university teaching
position and he started travelling again. His last trip
took him back to Morocco, where he became serious-
ly ill after only seven months. He returned to Vienna
where he died in 1953 at the age of fifty-five.
Bernatzik left an impressive life work that should
not be forgotten. Despite the political affiliation he
felt he was obligated to adopt for his own survival, he
was never an active Nazi and his images are a clear
testament to his disagreement with the racist con-
cepts that were dominating and destroying his coun-
try late in his career. The objects he collected and the
photographs he took demonstrate an appreciation of
a world that was disappearing. In a time of change,
we are fortunate that he and others like him chose to
record these things for history.
For further reading and a complete bibliography of
Bernatzik’s works, see: Doris Byer, Der Fall Hugo A.
Bernatzik – Ein Leben zwischen Ethnologie und
Öffentlichkeit 1897–1953. Böhlau Verlag, Köln,
Weimar, Wien, 1999.

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