Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (26 March 1897 – 9 March 1953, born and died in the city of Vienna), was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer.
Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Overland with the nomad Lapps,
- 1.2 Geheimnisvolle Inseln Tropen-Afrikas : Frauenstaat Und Mutterrecht Der Bidyogo : Ein Forschungsbericht / Von Hugo Adolf Bernatzik
- 1.3 Fremde Frauen: Photographien des Ethnographen Hugo A. Bernatzik (German Edition)
- 1.4 ""Die herrlichen Schwarzen Menschen"" Hugo Bernatziks
- 1.5 En El Reino de Los Bidyogo (Spanish Edition)
- 1.6 Gari - Gari - Expedicion Etnologica Al Alto Nilo (Spanish Edition)
- 1.7 Akha and Miao;: Problems of applied ethnography in farther India
- 1.8 Südsee
- 1.9 Gari-Gari;: The call of the African wilderness,
- 1.10 Lapp Land
Biography
Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was a son of the Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna and member of the House of Peers, Edmund Bernatzik (1854–1919). After researcher in 1915, he volunteered to member the Austro–Hungarian Army and was deployed among extra places in Albania. In 1920, he lonesome his medical studies for financial reasons and became a businessman. After the to come death of his first wife Margarete Ast (1904–1924), he embarked upon extensive travels and expeditions taking photographs, which became his profession and passion: Spain and north–west Africa in 1924; Egypt and Somalia in 1925; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1927; Romania and Albania amongst 1926 and 1930; Portuguese Guinea in 1930–1931 (with Bernhard Struck, Museum of Ethnology, Dresden); British Solomon Islands, British New Guinea, as capably as Bali in Indonesia in 1932–1933; Swedish Lapland in 1934; Burma, Thailand and French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) in 1936–1937; and, French–Morocco in 1949–1950.
Bernatzik financed his research and living expenses as a travel writer and freelance scientist, by publishing photo coverages, giving public slide lectures and purchasing collections for ethnological museums in Germany and Switzerland. His journalistic bustle and his exceptional photographs of foreign people made him quite prominent. He prepared a worldwide photo archive of cold tribal people considered as threatened. With regard to colonial policies, Bernatzik argued that colonial administrators should accept the customs, way of liveliness and the tribal vibes into account. In 1927, he married Emmy Winkler (1904–1977), a psychology student in Vienna, who became his partner and travel companion. From 1930 on, he studied ethnology, anthropology and geography at the University of Vienna and completed a PhD doctorate in 1932 later than a “monograph of the Kassanga”. In June 1935, he applied for his postdoctoral habilitation to the University of Graz to be a professor based on the work he had over and done with on “The take forward of the child on the Solomon Island of Owa Raha”. He established confirmation from the Austrian Federal Ministry in May 1936 in Rangoon. Finally, at the coming on of 1939, he was appointed at the University of Graz to the Institute of Geography. Plans for other expedition to the Chinese province of Yunnan were clip short by Hitler’s attack on Poland in September 1939.
Persistent speculation and rumours were aired on the subject of Bernatzik’s role during the Third Reich and the Second World War. At the dawn of the war, Bernatzik was recruited into the Armed Forces and was stationed in Wiener Neustadt as a training superintendent for Air Defense. However, in explicit opposition to this war, he attempted all possible to be released from this service, in order to pronounce a handbook on Africa. This project was designed to have the funds for colonial officers and European settlers a basic knowledge more or less the countries and their people. It was commissioned the NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy whose leader, Franz Ritter von Epp had been a general in Africa during the First World War. Impressed by Bernatzik’s work, Ritter von Epp provided him like several recommendations during the war, which classified the Handbook of Africa as “war strategic material”, despite the fact that the authorities in Berlin had quickly lost combination in the “colonial question”. The guidance of the general allowed Bernatzik, as with ease as many of his collaborators, to survive the suit without too much loss.
However, none of Bernatzik’s expeditions were in association with any German colonial claim. The destinations, the data and his research interests make this evident. During the war, Bernatzik in addition to worked on the finishing of his most important publication, a monograph of Akha and Miao. Between 1940 and 1942, he travelled repeatedly to occupied Paris to cooperate later French ethnologists and to permission various colonial chronicles for his work. He tried as in the distance as viable to encourage persecuted colleagues at the Musee de l’Homme and to prevent the vandalism of records and collections. Both completed manuscripts, the Africa Handbook and the monograph of Akha and Miao, were destroyed by a bomb anger damaging the Bibliographisches Institut of Leipzig in December 1943; moreover, all negatives of his photo history burned in 1944, after a bombing of a railway station. Nevertheless, Bernatzik managed to herald without any textual modify the “Handbook of Afrika” as skillfully as “Akha and Miao” in 1947. The term “colonial ethnology” had already been replaced in 1944 with “applied ethnology”.
Contrary to occasional assertions that Bernatzik had been an early aficionado of the NSDAP, forbidden in Austria until the Anschluss in March 1938, his correspondence and documents from 1923 to 1944, which are accessible in the Vienna Library, prove that he united the NSDAP upon May 1, 1938. At the time, however, Austrians on fire to link the party were restricted to other membership. Therefore, Bernatzik used a manipulated certificate referring to his alleged services provided for the party previously 1933. This letter was attested to by a former educational colleague, who had become a party official. Nonetheless Bernatzik’s work, his research and point of view manifest no affinity whatsoever to Nazi Party ideology. Regardless of how one may adjudicate his be active today, at no epoch did it declare NS propaganda. He never took any certified position in the NS regime nor was he acknowledged to pull off so. Despite this, from a current perspective, his deficiency of dissociation and some of his connections can be legitimately criticized. But from his lessening of view during that epoch, he obviously considered his actions as inevitable, as a means to feat with his pretend and to defend himself against various denunciations, to which he was certainly exposed. As a freelance ethnologist, photographer and travel journalist the deserted possibility for him to run off the constraints of the regime would have been exile.
Hugo Bernatzik lived afterward his intimates in Heiligenstadt, Vienna in a villa commissioned by his dad in 1911, built by the architect Josef Hoffmann and furnished by artists from the Wiener Werkstätte. He died in 1953 after many years of a tropical sickness at the age of 56 years. He left important photographic work, accessible in Vienna at the Photographic Institute Bonartes (bonartes.org), as well as numerous publications translated into many languages and re-edited until the 1960s. The past list of main works are itemized according to the date of their first edition and their English edition.
Last update 2021-08-06