Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introduction

After World War II, the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (S.P.S.L., renamed the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) in 1998) asked Professor Paul Jacobsthal to provide a synopsis of his contribution to Britain since his arrival as a refugee. He declined to contribute, however, saying that he had achieved only two things—he had been interned, and he had published Early Celtic Art (S.P.S.L. 182/1-7). Early Celtic Art was published in 1944 by Oxford University Press, and is still the seminal work on the subject. Jacobsthal’s report on his internment (hereafter “the Report”) was not published until 1992 (Jacobsthal 1992), although it was widely circulated amongst Jacobsthal’s friends.

The Report has always been described as a “diary” (Jacobsthal 1992), and this was how Jacobsthal himself described it to his colleagues and editor (OUP Archive: Letter of 31.12.1940). Recent work on his archives deposited at the University of Oxford, however, has shown that Jacobsthal based his internment Report on a previously unrecorded diary. This original, personal, diary (hereafter “the Diary”) came to light during research on an uncataloged box of Jacobsthal’s papers held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary). The Diary was written during Jacobsthal’s internment. A comparison of this contemporary Diary and the later Report makes it possible to explore how Jacobsthal perceived his internment experiences at the time, and to analyze what he chose to include and exclude from his later “official” account.

The Diary and Report make it clear that, for Jacobsthal, internment was a difficult but also important experience, and an isolating one in which he found himself facing personal questions about his own identity as an academic refugee in Britain, about loyalty, nationality, and religious identity, and about his past. The internment camps also brought Jacobsthal into contact, for the first time, with the truth about the Holocaust in which he himself was to lose members of his own family. So who was Jacobsthal, and what impelled him to record his experiences?

Personal Background

Paul Jacobsthal was born in Berlin in 1880. Though baptized, he came from a well-to-do German Jewish family (Losemann 2004; Schefold 1977). His father was a doctor, and his mother’s relations were merchants at Hamburg, with offices in Dundee, Scotland (Jacobsthal et al. in preparation). Jacobsthal considered following his father into medicine, or going into partnership with his Hamburg cousins, but found himself instead drawn into art history and Classical archaeology (Jacobsthal et al. 2011). By 1912, he was a Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Marburg, Germany. During World War I, Jacobsthal’s family background in medicine seems to have led to him becoming an orderly at a camp for Greek prisoners of war (Losemann 2004:503), though surviving letters indicate that he had a more significant function as a translator (Militaerdolmetscher der Kommandantur) (Bod. Spec. Coll.: Envelope dated 2.8.1918), with the inevitable likelihood that he was also gathering information from the Greek prisoners.

As a Classical archaeologist, Jacobsthal became a good friend of John and Maria Beazley at Oxford. Warm letters survive between Jacobsthal and John Beazley, largely in English, and between Maria and Jacobsthal, largely in German (Beazley Archive).

In addition to Classical archaeology, Jacobsthal had a great interest in the developing discipline of prehistoric archaeology, and he was instrumental in setting up the first German Chair in Prehistory in 1927 (Frey 2007:7; Ulmschneider and Crawford 2011:233). This brought him into conflict with the growing influence of the Nazi party and its ideology (Losemann 2004). Further signs of impending disaster were brought home to Jacobsthal. By the early 30s, he found his academic reputation under personal attack, and he found himself discriminated against when he considered moving to a more prestigious post (Beazley Archive: for example, letter dated 22.6.1931). At about this time, he began to develop his interest in the relationship between Greek and Celtic art—a move which would ultimately allow him to relocate to Oxford. When Jacobsthal asked John Beazley’s opinion on his new “barbarian” art project, Beazley voted against it (Beazley Archive: Letters 13.5.1930; 3.6.1930), but Jacobsthal persisted with the plan. It was an auspicious decision—it would have been hard for Oxford to have pleaded a need for another Classical Archaeologist, given Beazley was in post, but Oxford could, and did, argue that a post could be given to a Reader in Celtic Archaeology when Jacobsthal sought refuge from an increasingly dangerous Nazi Germany (Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1
figure 1

Jacobsthal at his desk in Oxford (Courtesy of the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford)

Full size image

Jacobsthal was forced to resign his position at Marburg in 1935. He also had to give up his large art and archaeology negative collection and photographic equipment (Ulmschneider and Crawford 2011:234), but his plans for moving to Oxford were already in place, and he was able to inform the S.P.S.L. that he did not need their financial support (S.P.S.L. 182/1-7). After a period as a Visiting Professor, Jacobsthal finally took up a post as a Fellow of Christ Church in 1936, and became a Reader in Celtic Archaeology in 1937 (Christ Church Oxf. Archive).

Jacobsthal’s Report and His Newly Discovered Diary

In Jacobsthal’s words: “on Friday July 5th 1940 in the morning when I was peacefully writing on Celtic Geometric Ornament a knock came at my door in Christ Church and a plain clothes Police Office entered producing a warrant of arrest” (Report:1). These opening lines of Jacobsthal’s internment Report are followed by a detailed account of the rounding up of academics and others from Oxford, to be interned first at Warth Mills (Lancashire), and later on the Isle of Man.

The original version of the Report was, according to Jacobsthal, decorated with vignettes drawn by Hellmuth Weissenborn (Report:15). This may have been the version in the possession of Lady Simon in 1992 when she passed it to Ray Cooper for inclusion in his book (Cooper 1992:11). Lady Simon and her husband, Sir Francis, were close neighbors and good friends of the Jacobsthals. The present location of the Report with the vignettes is unknown. The Oxford archives at Christ Church and The Institute of Archaeology only hold copies. The original is not included in the Jacobsthal material donated to the Bodleian by Lady Simon.

Jacobsthal’s Report as we have it now starts without any introduction as to what the text is about or why Jacobsthal chose to write it. Did he write it as an historical document or did he have a political purpose? Did he mean it to become well known, or was it written as a personal, cathartic exercise, as he suggested in a letter to Kenneth Sisam in 1940 (OUP Archive: Letter of 31.12.1940)? The fact that Jacobsthal went to the trouble of preparing an extended written account of his internment is also at odds with his laconic dismissal of the experience in his subsequent writings. In a report to the British Academy, for example, he talks about a loss of 4 months “due to circumstances beyond my control” (Jope/Jacobsthal Archive: Box 3, Letter 159, 20.1.1941). On the other hand, Jacobsthal described writing about his internment as “pleasurable” (OUP Archive: Letter to Kenneth Sisam, 31.12.1940). If the experience of internment was indeed so unimportant, why did Jacobsthal go to the trouble of writing about it? If he was so little interested in talking about it to others, why did he make sure that the manuscript was seen by so many? There are many apparently conflicting issues.

The original Diary Jacobsthal kept during his internment may provide answers to some of these questions. The Diary was discovered in spring 2011 among uncataloged manuscripts in the Bodleian Special Collections (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary). The Diary is written in a lined school exercise book. The front cover is marked “DIARY INTERNMENT 1940.” A section at the center of the book has been cut out, leaving 66 pages, with an additional interleaved page from Warth Mills with Hebrew exercises on it. The Diary begins on the last page of the exercise book. It is written mostly in English, in pencil, and continues from the back, interspersed with Greek quotations, Hebrew, Latin, German poetry, and music.

The Diary starts in much the same way as the Report, though it is mostly written in the form of short notes in tiny handwriting. This was perhaps a result of the severe lack of paper at Warth Mills, mentioned several times: “writing paper was confiscated”; “we were without writing paper”; “the greatest demand was for writing paper” (Report:4;8). There was also uncertainty as to how long this internment would last. Despite the lack of paper, Jacobsthal seems to have hung on to his Diary, and already was writing at Warth Mills. In his Report, he writes about these early Diary entries: “when later on, in the Isle of Man, I went through my notes, I realized that I had seen all through a mist. These figures moved and talked in an atmosphere of haunted reality, vision and sound were distorted, the men were hardly themselves, nor was I myself” (Report:10).

That the Diary was with Jacobsthal from the start is also corroborated by another passage in his Report: “There I sat and began to learn Hebrew with [Richard] Walzer: we had no Bible, but he knew the first chapter of Genesis by heart and penciled the words down for me on the note-paper of the bankrupt Cotton-Mill” (Report:9), and “I still keep some sheets filled with my copy of the first lines of Genesis” (Report:8). Just such a piece of paper, bearing the heading of the cotton mill, is found in Jacobsthal’s Diary. The Hebrew text, not in Jacobsthal’s handwriting, indeed consists of the opening lines of Genesis. The pencil it is written with may have been the one given to him by Beazley (along with an eraser, and a copy of Homer’s Odyssey) when they said goodbye at Oxford when Jacobsthal was collected for internment (Report:2).

It was, Jacobsthal writes in his Report, “during all these days that I picked up many details of people, situations, and talk…” (Report:10). But when did Jacobsthal first think about publishing his text? The passage in his Report, quoted above, suggests that he already was re-reading his Diary notes during his stay at Hutchinson Camp and found them wanting. As an academic this must have jarred with Jacobsthal. At an early stage in the Report he set out his aim: “I have not to criticize or to accuse, but to describe” (Report:5). This is the clearest indication we have that even at this stage of drafting his Report Jacobsthal was writing for an audience and thinking of publishing it. At the same time, it also explains why more libelous passages would have been edited from the original Diary.

But when did the idea of broader circulation first come to Jacobsthal? Further passages from the original Diary suggest that the conflict and confusion about publishing the Diary was already in his mind at the camp:

If I should ever be out as I hope I shall have to make up my mind whether I … jump at once into my work or spend 1 month on an essay of 25 pages on the different aspects of internment: my insider-perspective could teach something to homines bones voluntatis. It is impossible to give an idea of this life, which unlike the existence at W.M.C. [Warth Mill Camp] is [illegible] hardship, only completely aimless; people prevented from carrying on their more or less useful jobs, idling about, the plebs playing bridge or talking, others playing Beethoven or Bach, lecturing on Philosophy, history, … (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary: unnumbered page).

At this point, Jacobsthal seemed merely interested in reporting his experiences as an insider and reporting on the waste of time, energy, and unnecessary idleness imposed on people. In another passage, however, we learn that there may have been even more compelling reasons for him to write. As an academic he acknowledges the importance of an “unprejudiced” account, and most importantly one that is not overly emotional or spun to political ends. What was needed, he believed, was a neutral observer, but one writing from the inside of the experience, not the outside:

These lines, an excerpt of my diary, … do not pretend to contribute to the rather lavish political discussions of the internment process in the papers …. I have found that even the letters of internees published in the New Statesman or the M.[G?]. are far from giving an adequate picture of the conditions: … suicides of people with bad nerves do always happen when they are subject to tensions or hardship. What matters is an unprejudiced report on every-day-life (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary: unnumbered page).

Censoring the Diary

If the experience was meant to be published as suggested here, a comparison of the internment Diary and the Report allows us to see how Jacobsthal was censoring his own text. What he chose to leave out is especially interesting. Comparing the two texts, it becomes apparent that Jacobsthal edited his original Diary text carefully, deliberately censoring names, such as “L.A., a flabby Viennese of 45–50 years, professional conjurer, chiromancer and bogus mystagogue” (Report:9), whose full name, with an additional comment in Greek, is written in the Diary. Omissions included not just names, but also politically highly sensitive and inflammatory matters. One example is an entry in his Diary on sanitation and the hospital facilities:

Prof. Isaac who was in charge of military hospitals in Poland in 1914–1918 said that he had never seen any camp of such … neglect of elementary precautions. People who had been interned in Nazi Camps said that apart from the crude treatment and danger of life, food, comfort, accommodation there was much better. I am far from believing that all this was [illegible], but a symptom of unpreparedness, lack of organisation, efficiency. There was much grumbling and stupid criticism. I always tried to calm the people and said: this alien-business is uninteresting: I trust that matters of importance are handled differently! (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:9).

By comparison, the same passage in his later Report reads:

A friend of mine of the German Foreign Office, interned with me … had never seen a place less fit for accommodation of human beings and I was told the same by Professor S. Isaac of the University of Frankfurt who in 1914–1918 was in charge of hospitals on the Russian front and saw much of poor emergency quarters. The commandant of the Camp was well aware of the scandal and had in vain protested to the War Ministry: it is in the public interest to find out with whom the fault lies and to call him to account (Report:4–5).

The disorganized and therefore unpleasant ways in which the camps were run led to these, with hindsight, surprising comparisons with German concentration camps. That the internment camps were woefully inadequate for the job they were called upon to do, and that they caused distress and discomfort to the people who were interned, is undeniable, and at this early date, German concentration camps were not fully fledged annihilation camps (Cooper 1992:43–44; Grenville 2010:29–31; Dawidowicz 1975:170). By the time Jacobsthal came to think about publishing the Report, however, such a comparison was untenable.

Other passages which were deliberately omitted are those which showed a severe lack of sensitivity or judgment by the British. In one example, Jacobsthal described an explosive mix of people: “In the same room 10 Nazi sailors taken for a prize off Iceland. [Gerhard] Bersu cleverly mediating between the groups and the Jews” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:7). In another incident omitted from the final Report, Jacobsthal described what was intended as a reassuring visit which nonetheless provoked suspicion:

On the 27th and 28th a certain Mr Israel, grandson of the Berlin “Selfridge” N. Israel, British subject inspected the camps as comissaire of and go-between of Bloomsbury House and Home Office … Many of them distrusted him and wrongly thought he was the organ of English Jewry, disliking an increase of the number of Jews and afraid of coming anti-semitism. It was again a wise measure of “native policy” reminding one of the treatment of … Indian natives. One sends a distinguished native educated at Eton and ChCh [Christ Church, Oxford] to deal with them (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:15–16).

In the Report Jacobsthal noted that: “I have not met a single man liable to the faintest suspicion” (Report:28), but he omitted the scathing observation in the Diary on the effect of internment on the loyalty of the innocent people who had been locked up: “Among the thousand people I have talked to 1,000 men during these weeks, there was not one who was a ‘fifth columnist’; but on the other hand England had deprived herself of the sympathy … of 90 % of the internees: … How could these good boys, farmhands, cow-milkers, [illegible]-grinders, welders understand that they were arrested to the obvious disadvantage of the country for which they drudged with devotion” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:13). Jacobsthal’s assessment of the impact of the “psychological blow of being unjustly imprisoned” was, however, accurate: for some refugees, it led to a lasting sense of grievance against Britain (Grenville 2010:33).

Jacobsthal also chose to omit some humorous scenes from the Report, such as the lecture by Olden, an anti-Nazi German lawyer and journalist: “Meeting on the lawn … Eisler lecturing on ‘old testament’; Olden on Hitler—but pouring rain interrupted him when he had just come to 1813/35 and Kleist…” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:14). He may have felt that such anecdotes did not have a place in a “neutral” Report.

Identity

The Diary is much more outspoken than the Report on the relationship between different Jewish groups as Jacobsthal saw them. Jacobsthal rarely mentioned his Jewish identity. The Megaws have drawn attention to the way in which Jacobsthal apparently distanced himself from his fellow Jewish internees (Megaw and Megaw 1998:124). However, a letter received by Jacobsthal during World War I indicates that his Jewish identity was an accepted matter between some of his friends. This correspondence, from “H. Koch,” enclosed a newspaper cutting from the Görlitzer Volkszeitung of July 31, 1918, which had printed an anti-semitic letter by the mayor of Görlitz. Jacobsthal’s friend wrote: “Auch seine Stunde wird schlagen—also lassen wir ihn sich arisch verbluten [At some point his bell will toll as well—let us leave him to bleed his arian blood]” (Bod. Spec. Coll.: Letter of 2.8.18).

Jacobsthal’s a priori identity in the camp was as an academic, but consciousness of other identities did surface. The first mention in the Report occurred when Jacobsthal added names to his list of Oxford internees: these are younger scholars who had attached themselves to the ‘Oxford Group’. They included Carston, Grave, Stein, Leyser, Blumenthal, Marcus, and: “the best of all Gotfried Huelsmann: he was the son of an ‘Aryan’ father and a Jewish mother, he had been brought up in his father’s religion, but, under the impression of the Hitler years, decided for the other way; he was proud to have a Jewish passport with ‘Israel Gotfried Huelsmann’—Israel, to this other people a senseless stigma, was a very positive symbol to him” (Report:6). Jacobsthal’s language was careful in the extreme—“the other way”; “this other people”—and there was no explanation of why Gotfried was “best of all”; was it because he was Jewish, had escaped from Germany, and had worked on a farm in Oxford, and so epitomized the pointlessness of the internment process?

A surprising admission for a man so proud of his linguistic abilities was that Jacobsthal did not know Hebrew—a mark of how distanced his own childhood had been from Judaism. At Warth Mill, Jacobsthal settled down to learn Hebrew with Walzer. Jacobsthal noted that the only other people who were doing “any serious work at all” were orthodox Jews, studying Talmud, who were disappointed that Jacobsthal could not speak in modern Hebrew. Jacobsthal estimated that, “eighty percent of the inhabitants of the camp—about 1,200 men—were Jews, of whom only 150 were orthodox, and housed separately in kosher houses” (Report:25). For Jacobsthal, these orthodox Jews, who dressed differently, were “other.” Few were recent refugees from Germany, and many did not speak German. Some he found dignified, but others seemed vulgar in speech and behavior. Jacobsthal did not feel that he belonged to this group of Jews at all: “Jews are highly unsociable and utterly lacking the virtue of military discipline: at the roll-call they always had their hands in their pockets, and went on talking while the officers counted them … it must be no easy job to govern Palestine” (Report:27).

Jacobsthal, though forceful in his Report, at this point again felt he had to make amendments compared to his Diary; a passage in the Diary reads: “A less pleasant side was that this majority of orthodox and especially nonorthodox Jews suspected all Non-Jews as ‘Nazis’ and always tried to push their candidates into the more important camp-jobs” (Report:27). For Gerhard Bersu, an archaeologist who had been dismissed from his position as First Director of the Römisch-Germanische Kommission in Frankfurt, the consequence of mediating between the camp inmates and German prisoners was that he was suspected of being a Nazi, and: “they managed to remove Bersu from his office as ‘General Postmaster’” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:15). This information was omitted from the Report.

Also omitted was another passage from his Diary which showed Jacobsthal’s distaste towards some of the other Jewish refugees: “I had an interesting lesson in the morale of London refugees. It was a common practice [gang und gäbe] to cheat the underground and the phones pennywise with shrewd tricks. And I learnt: ‘wenn man dir gibt, nemmes. Wenn man dir nemmet, schrei’ [if you are offered something, take it. When something is taken from you, shout]” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:18).

Jacobsthal thus carefully distanced himself from religion and particular aspects of Jewish culture. He several times mentioned that he avoided the “very popular” performances of the “cabaret Stacheldraht,” which had, he was told, “the character of Jewish Varieties in certain quarters of Vienna” (Report:23). It is not clear why he had such a distaste for these popular performances—perhaps it was because they were low-brow. Jacobsthal was firmly against tasteless culture for “hoi polloi.”

Jacobsthal’s primary identity at all times in the account was neither religious nor national, but professional. At Hutchinson Camp he found his house was divided into: “two distinct groups, one consisting of academic people the other of Jewish business-men” (Report:12). The business men were Jewish, but academics, for Jacobsthal, had no religious affiliation. It is at the camp, though, that Jacobsthal found out what had been going on in Germany since he was last there in 1937. He cited the case of Richard Cohn, 56, of Breslau; “the strongest and most interesting personality.” Cohn: “through the Nazis… had lost all, had escaped the Gestapo and wandered with his wife in Czecho-Slovakia and Poland and in No-man’s land, had been in Nazi prisons, ill-treated and beaten” (Report:16). Hearing from men like Cohn was “a great lesson to me” (Report:17).

Personal Experience of Internment

On internment, Jacobsthal wrote in his Report: “Confinement means a break in the continuity of existence, an interruption of the normal flux of life, it causes trauma: the natural relation and proportional importance of present, past and future become distorted. Suddenly, through the repression of the present the past creeps up, assuming gigantic dimensions and occupying an unproportionally large field of conscious life” (Report:28–29). The sentiments expressed in this passage were more fully explored in his Diary:

Internment means interruption of the normal flux of life: the thread is cut off, one lives on one’s past which suddenly occupies an unproportionally large part of the total field of conscious life. People more than under normal conditions talk autobiography and memoirs. The two other topics were: the dark depressing uncertain future and legal, human, practical aspects of internment (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:13).

Equally poignant is a slightly later passage of the Diary:

Life gradually becomes timeless, the more as we are cut off from outside. Today on the 29th I am still without letters from home. Zauberberg. Living a life with its own law, the trivial ?tasks/facts of food (1), health (2), digestion (3), sleep (4), furniture (5), W.C. (6), bathroom (7), discussed and discussed, the world outside far, forgotten, distorted… People still unknown to each other a fortnight before, now living closer to each other than married, sharing beds and rooms… (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:14–15).

The passage highlights the “loss of contact with the outside world” (Report:29), the physical discomfort and, perhaps most pressingly, the fear of forgetting the ­outside world and of being forgotten by it. Jacobsthal summed up in the Diary the dichotomy between submitting to the flow of camp life or remaining an outsider and observer: “Problem: one could either try to continue one’s academic existence, to form groups of decent people … or … to accept the ‘common fate’, to live with one’s ‘brothers’—I went the former way, but tried to study conditions and mentality” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:8).

Despite the hardship, the internment process was not entirely unhelpful to Jacobsthal in terms of self-discovery. It certainly helped him to re-assert old ideas of himself as a likeable man, able to cross class boundaries. When the tired and hungry new internees arrived at their house in Hutchinson Camp, there was a stand-off between the academics and the others, and the atmosphere, according to Jacobsthal, “was dangerously electric” (Report:12). In these circumstances, Jacobsthal records that he took control, drawing on his World War I experiences which stood him in good stead as he: “exercised my authority and gift as mediator, bullying and soothing” (Report:12). There is no doubt that his attitude towards the businessmen was sometimes condescending: “they had their bridge-parties, read their cheap books, had their sort of talk” (Report:16)—but he had genuine admiration and affection for some of the nonacademic members of the house (Megaw and Megaw 1998:125).

We do not have to rely only on Jacobsthal’s account to assess his behavior: his perception of himself as likeable and friendly is corroborated by Fred Uhlmann’s diary (Brinson et al. 2009). Uhlmann recorded that Jacobsthal and his fellow Oxford colleague, Egon Wellesz, worked hard to draw the young artist out of his darkest depressions. After the war, Uhlmann met up once with Wellesz and Jacobsthal at Oxford, but felt then that he was outside their sphere (Brinson et al. 2009:109).

Why was Jacobsthal apparently less traumatized by internment than some of his contemporaries, such as Uhlmann? Anthony Grenville suggested that it was because he was “an optimist by nature” (Grenville 2010:30), but his Diary gives a different perspective. In it, he stated that it was: “… the report of a man mentally and bodily fit enough and trained by traveling and war to go through this Camp-life as an observer.” He also claimed that he had the benefit of: “age and manifold experiences” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary: unnumbered page). In other words, Jacobsthal felt able to cope because he had been through similar experiences before. Interesting in this context is the recent discovery of a previously unknown autobiography, written during World War I by Jacobsthal when he was about 36 years old. Parts of this autobiography, dated to about 1916, have recently been published in an English translation (Jacobsthal et al. 2011), while the full German text is currently being prepared for publication (Jacobsthal et al. in preparation).

The autobiography demonstrates that Jacobsthal was no stranger to writing reports of a personal nature. Indeed, in this autobiography he refers to an even earlier attempt to write his life story when he was in his twenties. He had abandoned that attempt when he realized that he had appeared like the “hero in a novel.” So Jacobsthal had considerable experience in the writing of personal accounts in which he “tried to give an unprejudiced record of facts” (Report:28). His personal writing was critical and self-aware.

The 1916 autobiography also provides another potentially important clue to Jacobsthal’s pragmatic response to internment. In it, Jacobsthal assessed his own character and his relationship with others. He identified himself as a naturally secretive and private person, possessing the ability to keep uncomfortable circumstances separate from his internal world:

I must possess an abnormal ability to only absorb knowledge and experiences outwardly, keeping it away from my inner self, perhaps a lucky safeguard against an abundance of impressions and absorbed contents. In earlier years I was often troubled by this phenomenon, and I berated myself for being superficial and smug. But after I realized in later life that I was indeed able to absorb deeply and to retain what I learned and experienced, I developed the notion of my “forgetfulness” … It is not surprising, that, with such a disposition, I have more imprecise memories of certain impressions and experiences … than other people (Jacobsthal et al. in preparation).

This description may go some way to explain why, during his later internment: “I personally have never suffered from the barbed wire as others did and Uhlmann’s visions of death, barbed wire and crucifixion, admirable as they were, expressed a feeling strange to me. I was quite content to sit in the sun on the lawn and to read Homer, and every second day I took part in one of the walks across the beautiful country…” (Report:28).

For Jacobsthal, the internment episode seemed more like a farce: “I was a victim of a very stupid measure, of no avail to the country” (Report:11). On his release, Jacobsthal commented of the Intelligence Officer and camp Commandant that: “they were very polite and, it seemed to me, quite aware of the absurdity of my internment though neither of us spoke of it” (Report:20). What Jacobsthal did not include in this passage was a final absurd little episode recorded in the Diary: “Friday 28th: release order arrived. … Search of personal belongings. Talk with Capt. … on impounded property: ‘ring up the Prime Minister’” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary:34).

The Report in Context

Seen in the context of his other writings, Jacobsthal’s Report was neither naive, nor without art. Its deliberately dramatic opening was designed to contrast the innocuous work of a peaceful, unworldly academic with the intrusive and unnecessary “outside” world. He was being somewhat disingenuous, too, to portray himself as a harmless academic with no connection to the wider world. Letters from the Jacobsthal Archive housed at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, show that Jacobsthal remained in contact with German colleagues until the outbreak of war (Ulmschneider and Crawford 2011). He was aware that his former friend and student, Alexander Langsdorff, with whom he had traveled and coauthored a number of works until the late 1920s, was now a high-ranking Nazi officer (Crawford and Ulmschneider 2011). Nor can Jacobsthal have been ignorant of the links between the study of Celtic archaeology and the Nazis. Only 3 years earlier, he had stayed at the house of Adolf Mahr, the German head of Ireland’s National Museum, a man who had founded the Irish Nazi party and had styled himself “Dublin’s Nazi Number 1” (Mullins 2007).

A survey of recently-released Home Office records suggests that Jacobsthal’s presence in Britain was not without concern to the Home Office and MI5 (TNA:PRO HO 405/24418). His letters, and letters about him, were under surveillance. Thanks to his contacts at Christ Church, Jacobsthal had high-ranking friends and supporters in England who put pressure on the Home Office before, during, and after his internment. Jacobsthal used his British contacts to the best of his advantage to make sure that his name was not on the “enemy alien” list, though in the end his influence was not enough to override British suspicion about him. His plea that an academic doctor should have the same exemption as a medical doctor did not cut any ice with the authorities (TNA:PRO HO 405/24418).

Despite his questionable archaeological contacts in Germany and Ireland, it did not seem to have crossed Jacobsthal’s mind that these same contacts would have made him quite rightly suspect. The basis for the suspicions is well illustrated in one of the Home Office letters about Jacobsthal. Robin Dundas, Master of Christ Church, wrote on Jacobsthal’s behalf to have travel restrictions lifted. The Home Office responded on March 20, 1944: “The next three months or so is, I fear, a period during which very little sympathy is likely to be forthcoming for persons desiring to travel round in the interests of Celtic archaeology, and as you probably know it has a bad name because the Germans have used it, particularly in Eire, as a cover for their interest in other matters” (TNA:PRO HO 405/24418). It seems to have been taken as a fact that the Germans were using Celtic archaeology as a cover for spying. Was the “knock on the door” such a surprise after all?

After internment, Jacobsthal continued to express the same dogged opinion exemplified in his Report, that an eminent scholar and academic should be given exemption from the petty rules of wartime. Jacobsthal had loyal supporters in Britain, but some archaeologists were much less enthusiastic about him. O.G.S. Crawford wrote such inflammatory things about him to the Council for the Assistance of Academic Refugees (who considered Jacobsthal a great man, and were delighted at the prospect of being able to help him) that the letter had to be destroyed (S.P.S.L.: uncatalogued letter). Jacobsthal’s relationship with Crawford’s very good friend, fellow internee Gerhard Bersu, is also difficult to fathom. There is little to suggest that they were on more than cordial terms. Letters between Bersu and Jacobsthal in the Institute’s Jacobsthal Archive are rare, whereas Jacobsthal engaged in regular and frequent correspondence with friends. However Bersu, though not in Jacobsthal’s house at Hutchinson Camp, was a “permanent guest” at the evening meetings of the house, where he once held a “Children’s Class” in prehistory. In addition, according to his Diary, Bersu was Jacobsthal’s only person from outside the house to spend the last afternoon on the Isle of Man with him: “Solemn tea with Bersu as only guest” (Bod. Spec. Coll. Diary: unnumbered page).

Conclusion

Notwithstanding the sections he chose to leave out, Jacobsthal felt that his Report was too inflammatory for publication though several people, most notably his Oxford University Press editor Kenneth Sisam, were keen to see it in print (OUP Archive). As he went to the trouble of writing out the Report and amending it from the Diary, why did he not make it publishable? And so we reach a typical Jacobsthal obfuscation; he wrote an inflammatory text which he did not intend to print, but which he intended to be read by as many people as possible, knowing that it would be passed around and copied. Indeed, the version of it in the Institute of Archaeology archives is witness to that process: our copy is in the Stuart Piggott archive, and it was photocopied for Professor Piggott from a copy held by Michael Vickers (pers. comm.). There is, however, a comparable text to the Internment Report, one which Jacobsthal also circulated amongst his friends but never published, even though he was pressed to have it printed in American Antiquity (Jacobsthal Archive: Box 49 Letter 182, 19.7.1949). “Leopold Bloom” was written for John Beazley, and was sent to him on September 13, 1943. It is an academic paper presenting the case for the transmission of Celtic art in the British Isles through immigrant artists from France, Switzerland, and Hungary. It ends, however, with a satirical, fictional portrayal of the transmitter of this art as a Jewish smith who was obliged to leave Hungary in 251 bc and traveled through the continent, though: “on his journey he declined tempting offers from Bohemian and Rhenish chieftains to enter their services: his prophetic mind foresaw trouble on the Continent.” The tale ends with Bloom settled in Lincoln, where, retired, he: “devoted the rest of his days to study of Talmud and debauches: ‘on revient toujours…’ he used to say to Mrs Bloom” (Jacobsthal/Jope Archive: Box 2a).

Explaining his wish not to see “Leopold Bloom” in print, Jacobsthal informed Hugh Hencken that: “I do not bother much about what people think of me and my papers, but I really feel that this paper is dangerous stuff, should be marked with a skull and two bones crossed and kept in a special cupboard in my shop and shown to the very, very few of which you are one!” (Jacobsthal Archive: Box 49, letter 184, 18.8.1949). This exemplifies Jacobsthal’s attitude to his Report, too; he knew that even though it was an edited version of the Diary it still contained too much “dangerous stuff”: “if one cut out the libellous and tactless passages, it would become dull and uninteresting. And: cui bono?” (OUP Archive: Letter of 31.12.1940). To have made it into a more palatable internee account, so that internment became “sanitized into a jolly jape,” was not something Jacobsthal was prepared to do (Grenville 2010:33; Kushner and Cesarani 1993:7).