KAULS OF GERMANY

                                         

                        ( Barbara and Donald Kaul ) 

Kauls of Germany

I was surprised to read the name Barbara Bluhm Kaul in the list of the donators of 10 million and above to The Art Institute of Chicago. The name stood out immediately because in my mind Kaul has always been a Kashmiri Pandit surname, carried by the families from the Valley of Kashmir who trace their lineage to the ancient Rishis and who for centuries have been regarded as the  scholarly class among the Saraswat Brahmins. To see it listed among the great Chicago patrons in the highest bracket of giving, alongside the Pritzkers and the Duchossois family, made me pause and look closer. On further research, I came to know that Kaul is a popular surname in Germany as well, with a completely separate history and etymology, and that the Kauls of Germany have made their own distinct mark in the fields of law, politics, science, sport and culture.

The German etymology is well documented. In German onomastics , Kaul is classified as a topographic and habitational surname. It derives from Middle High German kule and Middle Low German kule meaning the pit, the hollow, the depression in the ground or the pond. In Westphalia and the Rhineland , there are still hamlets and field names called Kaule, Kaul and Kuhle. A person who lived by such a hollow or who came from a place called Kaule would be called Kaul. A second explanation traces it to Middle High German kugele, contracted to kule, meaning the ball or the sphere, used as a nickname for a round headed or stout person, or to early New High German Kaul meaning the cudgel, a nickname for a rough or coarse man. The Dictionary of American Family Names summarises it as the North German habitational name from any of the three places in the Rhineland so named or the topographic name from Kaul meaning the pit or the pond, while noting the separate Indian entry from Sanskrit Kaula meaning well born from Kula meaning the family. The two names therefore sound identical today but arose on the opposite sides of the world, one from the geography of the Rhineland and one from the Sanskrit cosmology of Kashmir.

Once this is understood, the list of the prominent German Kauls becomes quite extensive and interesting. The name appears continuously from the seventeenth century in the church registers around Nieder Mockstadt and Isenburg Budingen, and in modern Germany,  it is the most common in North Rhine Westphalia, Hesse, Bavaria and Berlin.

In law and public life, the most famous bearer was Friedrich Karl Kaul who lived from 1906 to 1981. He was an East German attorney who became a national figure in the German Democratic Republic. He acted as the co plaintiff counsel for the victims in the West German trials of the Nazi officials, he wrote some sixty screenplays and detective novels, often under pseudonyms, and he hosted the popular television programme Fragen Sie Professor Kaul where he answered the everyday legal questions. He was decorated with the National Prize of the GDR and the Karl Marx Order. In a very different legal tradition, Hans Peter Kaul who lived from 1943 to 2014 was a distinguished German diplomat and the international lawyer, a long serving legal adviser to the Foreign Office and later a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he helped shape the early jurisprudence on the war crimes and the crimes against humanity. In politics , Henning Kaul born in 1940 , served for decades as a Christian Social Union member of the Bavarian Landtag, focusing on the environmental policy and water power, receiving the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Bavarian Constitutional Medal in gold. Earlier figures include Georg Kaul who lived from 1873 to 1933, a journalist and the Social Democratic politician in Silesia, and Felix Kaul who lived from 1920 to 2013, a German jurist who served as the Federal Prosecutor at the Federal Court of Justice.

In sport the contemporary face of the name is Niklas Kaul born in 1998 in Mainz, the decathlete and javelin specialist who became the world champion in the decathlon in Doha in 2019, the youngest ever to do so, and who remains one of the most visible Olympic athletes in Germany. His athletic lineage continues a broader German Kaul presence in athletics that includes Michael Kaul the track and field athlete and Emma Kaul the young middle distance runner. Football too has its Michael Kaul born in 1963 who played and coached in the German leagues.

In culture and scholarship the name recurs. August Kaul who lived from 1873 to 1949 was a landscape painter of the Dusseldorf School, known for his Lower Rhine views. Oskar Kaul who lived from 1885 to 1968 was a musicologist at Wurzburg. Matthias Kaul who lived from 1949 to 2020 was a percussionist and composer noted for his experimental music theatre. Anja Beatrice Kaul born in 1965 is a German actress active in television and theatre. Martin Kaul born in 1981 is an investigative journalist with Taz and Die Zeit known for reporting on security and the far right. Inge Kaul who lived from 1944 to 2023 was a political scientist and economist who directed the Human Development Report Office at the United Nations Development Programme and pioneered the concept of the global public goods.                                                    

Returning to Chicago, Barbara Bluhm Kaul belongs to this German American branch. She is part of the Bluhm family, long associated with Chicago real estate and art collecting, and she is listed with her husband Donald Kaul. Her hyphenated name reflects that union. Her family foundation, the Barbara Bluhm Kaul Foundation formerly the Mayfair Foundation, established in 2005, is registered in Chicago and reported assets and distributions that place it among the significant regional philanthropies. Its giving has consistently favoured the arts institutions. The foundation's presence in the Art Institute's donor circles at the ten million and above level is therefore consistent with a pattern of sustained cultural philanthropy rather than a single one off gift. It represents the way the German origin families who settled in the American Midwest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have become the pillars of the civic culture in the cities like Chicago.

It is instructive to place her alongside another Indian origin family that has also entered the Art Institute's philanthropy record at a major level. The Sinha family, Anita and Prabha Kant Sinha, appear in the Art Institute's annual reports and the benefactor listings in the donations amounting to more than one million dollars. Their contribution is documented among the gifts of money and objects of art in the museum's published donor rolls. While the Sinhas are more recently associated with the engineering and data science philanthropy in the United States, including the later multi million dollar gifts to the universities in Texas for the departments of data science and the innovation labs, their early support for the Art Institute marks a parallel story of the Indian American families joining the traditional German American and Jewish American patronage that built Chicago's cultural institutions. The presence of both a Kaul and a Sinha in the million plus tiers illustrates how Chicago's museum has been sustained by the successive waves of immigration, each bringing its own surname history and its own understanding of the public duty.

                                             

                     (Anita and Prabha Kant Sinha) 

In the end the surprise that began with seeing Barbara Bluhm Kaul in the ten million and above list resolves into a larger lesson about the surnames and the migration. Kaul in Kashmir means well born from kula, a claim of the spiritual lineage linked to Shiva and to the Kaula tradition of Shaivism. Kaul in Germany means dwelling by the pit or the hollow, a claim of the physical place in the Rhineland landscape. Both meanings speak of belonging, one to a family of learning and one to a piece of land. That the same four letters should come to rest in the donor gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago, carried by a German American philanthropist whose generosity now sits alongside that of the Indian American families like the Sinhas, is a reminder that the American cultural institutions are themselves the archives of such converging histories.

( Avtar Mota )

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