Oscar Cahén
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<strong>Oscar</strong> <strong>Cahén</strong><br />
Life & Work by Jaleen Grove<br />
Child of Many Nations<br />
There exists a photograph of a grinning, teenaged <strong>Oscar</strong> Maximilian <strong>Cahén</strong> and two<br />
unidentified companions taken at the Zwinger Palace in Dresden, Germany. Young<br />
<strong>Cahén</strong> had used a fake birth date in order to gain acceptance into Dresden’s State<br />
Academy for Applied Arts in March 1932, at the age of sixteen. The photo, with a<br />
corner now ripped away, bears the scars of the upheaval soon to come: Nazi aggression<br />
precipitated his family’s departure from Germany, then his separation from his parents,<br />
and his eventual arrival in Canada as an interned refugee.<br />
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<strong>Oscar</strong> <strong>Cahén</strong>, right, and an unidentified couple visiting Zwinger Palace in Dresden, c. 1932. The Zwinger Palace was mostly destroyed by carpet-bombing raids in<br />
February 1945 and was reconstructed in the decades following the war<br />
<strong>Oscar</strong> was born to Fritz Max and Eugenie <strong>Cahén</strong> on February 8, 1916, in<br />
Copenhagen; his Jewish father was first a professor of art history and then a prominent<br />
Copenhagen correspondent for the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. Fritz Max<br />
<strong>Cahén</strong> also translated the works of Apollinaire for the Expressionist periodical Der Sturm<br />
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and published art criticism. By 1916 he was a confidant of and assistant to Count<br />
Brockdorff-Rantzau, who represented Germany during the negotiation of the Treaty of<br />
Versailles. Fritz Max also became involved in espionage during the war.<br />
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