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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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