“I never understood his hate”: Arthur Traube’s Uvachrome in Europe and Beyond
A talk by Dr. Hanin Hannouch (Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna), dedicated to the memory of the late Mark Jacobs.
In one of his letters to his colleague German photochemist and would-be Nazi historian Erich Stenger (1878-1957), German Jewish photochemist Arthur Traube (1852-1956) describes his relationship to his teacher Adolf Miethe (1862-1927) saying “I never understood his hate”. Known for having co-patented panchromatic sensitization in 1902 together with Miethe, Traube seems to have all but swiftly disappeared from the history of color photography.
Relying on extant primary sources and photography collections scattered across Europe, my new research project not only centers on Traube’s oeuvre, positioning him as a photochemist and entrepreneur in his own right, but also on his life as Jewish scientist who only survived thanks to his hurried exile to the USA. My talk starts by elucidating Traube’s life and studies in Berlin, seeing them also through the prism of his Jewishness and the hate he faced as a result. I will also explicate his use of dye mordanting in two of his photographic processes, Diachromie as of 1906 and Uvachrome as of 1922, focusing on the three Uvachrome companies he was involved in to various degrees (in Munich, Vienna, and Biel). Then, I will reveal what happened to Uvachrome, both the technology and the brand, after Traube was forced to move to the other side of the Atlantic.