Heinrich von Srbik

Heinrich Ritter von Srbik (legally Heinrich Srbik in Austria after 1919; 10 November 1878 – 16 February 1951) was an Austrian historian who became involved on the fringes of politics before and during the Hitler years.

Life and works Family provenance Heinrich von Srbik was born in Vienna. He was a twin. His father, Dr. Franz Joseph von Srbik (1841–1910), was a lawyer by training who was employed in the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Finance. Franz Joseph von Srbik was also an expert on art history and a noted collector of old copper-plate engravings. Heinrich's mother, Walpurga Graurt (1847–1898), was a daughter of the Catholic historian and classical philologist from the north of Germany, Heinrich Wilhelm Grauert, who had died young. His twin was the army officer turned glaciologist Robert Srbik (1878–1948). There were two older siblings.

In 1897 he enrolled at the University of Vienna. Between 1898 and 1901 he studied at the university's Institute for Austrian Historical Research. The nature of the historical identity of Austria, subsumed as it was for many purposes in the ethnically and culturally disparate Habsburg empire, was much debated among scholars in Vienna during this period, and the theme was one which would become central in von Srbik's later researches. As a newly qualified historian he would become an enthusiastic supporter of closer economic integration within the Austrian empire as a means whereby the entire construct might be prevented from total disintegration during an age of intensifying nationalism. Student contemporaries at the institute included Wilhelm Bauer (1877–1953) and Hans Hirsch (1878–1940) both of whom became friends and, later, professional colleagues. As a student, during 1898/99 Srbik joined the "Verein Deutscher Hochschüler", a student fraternity better remembered by its subsequent name as the "Burschenschaft Gothia".

In 1901 Heinrich von Srbik received his doctorate in return for a study on Frederick III, Burgrave of Nuremberg. His supervisor for this work was Oswald Redlich. Other historians by whom he was particularly influenced during his student years included Alfons Dopsch and Engelbert Mühlbacher. The focus of his studies as a university student was on medieval history. After Mühlbacher's death in 1903 it was the medievalist Dopsch who, aware of the academic currents of the times, encouraged him to turn his attentions more towards social and economic history. The habilitation qualification opened the way for a teaching career in the universities sector and gave him authorisation to lecture on Austrian history. He now accepted a position as a "Privatdozent" (tutor). Three years later he obtained the far less restrictive "venia docendi" (authorisation ) permitting him to lecture and teach "general history" at the university, on the basis of a treatise he produced on the seventeenth century mercantilist-cameralist, Wilhelm von Schröder. After that he turned away from economic history and, with "Wallensteins End" published in 1920, switched to the history of political ideas.

Vienna Srbik returned to Vienna in 1922, taking over the university teaching chair in Modern History.

Soon after his return to Vienna he was invited, by Erich Marcks (1861–1938) to produce an essay on Metternich for a compilation volume that Marcks was producing on "Masters of Politics". The essay proved the launch pad for a more substantial project. Heinrich Srbik's two volume biography of Metternich was published in 1925 and is still considered by admirers, almost a century later, a standard work on the man whom many lauded or blamed for having created a political road map that was followed across much of Europe for more than a generation after 1815. Srbik is credited by some with having coined the concept of the "Metternich System", though a consensus has emerged among commentators more recently that Metternich himself had rejected belief in anything so prescriptive as a "system", and would indeed have taken issue with a number of Srbik's other conclusions about his political methods and achievements. Srbik saw Metternich as a conservative, whose world view had been formed before the French Revolution, who stood for defending the monarchist state against the destructive impulses created by revolutionary and egalitarian precepts. Even if he backed "pure monarchy", unconstrained by and constitutional limitations, Srbik insisted that Metternich was the enemy, equally, of monarchical despotism. For Metternich it was less the will of a monarch and more the rule of law that should preserve good order within the state and the balance of power between states.

Ministerial appointment The 1927 July uprising was followed by a period of intensifying political instability, amidst indications that the post-imperial republican democracy imposed in 1919 had never entirely taken root in Austria within the political class; nor, indeed, among voters. Srbik himself made no secret of his belief that the truncated version of Austria that had emerged after the war was simply too small to be viable as a stand-alone state. Srbik would not have been seen as part of the political establishment. However, when yet another new government took power in September 1929, Heinrich Srbick was a member of it. The new chancellor, Johannes Schober, was not a new face in politics, having already served as chancellor (albeit relatively briefly) as early as 1921/22. Unusually, there is no indication that Schober had ever been a member of any political party. Even more unusually, in the broader context of European political developments during the first half of the twentieth century, approximately 50% of the ministers in the Schober government in office between September 1929 and September 1930 had no party political affiliation. One of these independent members of the government, managing the Department for Training and Education between 16 October 1929 and 25 September 1930, was Heinrich Srbik. In the context of the wider political and economic crisis, there was little time for developing or implementing any changes in respect of training and education, however. It became known that Srbik had been offered and accepted the job only after the chancellor's preferred choice, the well-regarded neurosurgeon Anton Eiselsberg, had turned it down. Srbik's 1929 incursion into the world of government is reported in sources, if at all, as a brief and inconsequential "intermezzo" during what was, in the wider context, an exceptionally eventful year.

Career peak Meanwhile Srbik's reputation and career as an historian had been transformed by the timely appearance of his Metternich biography and the positive reaction to it in academic circles. During the later 1920s and early 1930s he received offers of professorships from the universities of Cologne, Bonn, Munich and even Berlin. He turned them all down.

Bears' Cave During the 1920s, as the European economies remained precarious and politics became increasingly polarised, a shadowy network of traditionalist university professors came into existence at the University of Vienna. Known as the "Bears' Cave" group, they saw themselves as representing Christian-Socialism and German nationalism. They feared and fought against communism and socialism. And they were antisemitic. There are believed to have been at least eighteen of them at the university, many in positions of significant influence in respect of university politics. Heinrich Srbik was one of these. One reason for the secrecy surrounding the group was that their advocacy of a limit of perhaps 10% on the proportion of academic posts that might be filled by Jews was in direct contravention of the principles of equality of opportunity that were enshrined in Austria's post-imperial constitution. Behind the scenes "Bears' Cave" members quietly used their connections across the Philosophy Faculty (which at that time covered the arts and humanities along with the natural sciences) to make it difficult for left-wing scholars and those identified as Jewish to obtain academic appointments at the university, or even habilitation degrees, the higher post-doctoral qualifications that might secure a life-long career teaching in the universities sector. The group's activities seem to have gone largely unremarked at the time, but after 1945, as newsreels of the Nazi death camps created popular awareness across Europe of the nature and extent of the Holocaust, Srbnik's involvement as a member of as the "Bears' Cave" would leave him isolated and, in the judgment of many post-war commentators disgraced, during his final years.

Beyond "small Germany" vs. "greater Germany" Through the nineteenth century there had been debates in nationalist circles as to whether a future unified Germany should consist of a "small Germany", ruled from Berlin and excluding the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire, or a "greater Germany", consisting of German speaking lands across northern Germany, together with Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and (at least the German-speaking parts of) the Austrian empire. Both "solutions" presented a string of follow-on questions, among which one of the most pressing concerned what might become of those parts of the Austrian empire where German was not the principal language of the inhabitants if they were to be excluded from a new "greater Germany". The reality of German unification, defined by force of arms in 1871, looked like a victory on the ground for the "small Germany" solution, and over the next few years Chancellor Bismarck set about creating a relatively centralised German state, inspired by the Anglo-French example, and controlled from Berlin. But among Austrian nationalists the arguments were far from settled. In Vienna there remained those who called for a "greater Germany", ruled from Vienna but administered on a more decentralised basis, drawing inspiration from the administrative structures that had evolved and operated over many centuries until 1806 in the Holy Roman Empire. Srbik moved beyond this binary debate with his belief that the better solution would be not a "small" or "greater" Germany but a "complete Germany" ("Gesamtdeutschland"). By focusing only on two alternative nation-state structures, the traditionally mainstream debate had overlooked the more important focus on the ethnic group, defined by elements of shared language, cultural consciousness and history. The short-hand term for this ethnicity-based classification – subsequently distorted, especially in anglophone historiographies, by baggage deriving from Hiltlerite associations - was "Volk". Srbik's "complete Germany" vision sought to address the challenge represented by a large number of Germans living in what had been before 1919, the Austrian Empire, and who now found themselves members of increasingly self-aware ethnic minorities in a series of relatively small and militarily vulnerable states positioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, in the region known at the time as "Mitteleuropa".

There were good historical reasons why the Mitteleuropa challenge was more visible from Vienna than from Berlin. The post-1919 political structure of the region represented an imposed solution to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire, based around Anglo-American statist conceptions of nationalism which, it could be argued, took no account of more nuanced "on the ground" realities. Like many Viennese, Srbik's own genealogical provenance reflected the ethnic diversity fostered by government structures before and during the German Confederation years. His mother's familial provenance was centred most recently on Westphalia, while his maternal grandfather had been born even further away from Vienna, in Amsterdam. His family name, "Srbik", indicated Serbian connections on his father's side, and there were also Czechoslovak family links from not too far back. Yet Heinrich Srbik had been born into a German family with German as his first language in a German-speaking imperial capital. Many of his fellow Viennese would have known that, had they bothered to research their ancestries, they would have found similarly diverse family trees in terms of ethnic identities and provenance. And in Vienna before 1914 – even more before 1871 – there would have been very little pressure to perceive any significant contradiction between a German self-identity and the constantly proliferating ethnic diversity that had developed through more than six centuries of "Mitteleuropa" under the Habsburg monarchy . It is reasonable to conclude that Srbik will have been developing his "complete Germany" vision of history from childhood. It is certainly apparent, from his surviving written work, and after 1922 from his commercially successful published work, that as it appeared in and after 1929, Srbik's "complete Germany" historical prism was the product of a lengthy, detailed and meticulously source-based gestation. Meanwhile, the Austrian president had been persuaded to appoint a replacement chancellor. The Czechoslovak-born lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart was an enthusiastic supporter of Austrian incorporation into Hitler's new Germany and, in 1938, a close Hitler ally at the heart of the political establishment in Vienna. Chancellor Seyss-Inquart remained in office for only two days. As the result of a last-minute change of plan it was decided that the annexation of Austria into an enlarged version of Germany should be completed at once, meaning that there could be only one chancellor. Seyss-Inquart nevertheless played an important role in the integration process over the next few weeks and months: he nominated 86 trusted Austrians to membership of the Reichstag (parliament). They represented the "Land Österreich" electoral district between the 10 April 1938 "election" and the end of the Nazi regime in May 1945. The Reichstag featured little in the historiography of the Hitler years because it did very little worth recording after 1933, though it continued to convene occasionally until 1942. It is significant in terms of Srbik's own career and his relationship with the régime that in 1938 he was one of the 814 Nazi Party members elected to the 814 seat parliament in Berlin. Correspondence from this period survives between Srbik and Seyss-Inquart. In November 1938 Seyss-Inquart joined with others in public celebration of Srbik's birthday. Party membership numbers were issued chronologically according to the date of joining the party. Several sources assert that allocating Srbik a lower party membership number than those allocated to other party members joining at the same time was intended to demonstrate the party's appreciation for his long-standing support for party policy. From other sources it becomes clear that the university authorities in Vienna did everything possible to prevent Srbik from leaving at such a difficult time: the university rector and dean even teamed up to send a letter to the Austrian Ministry of Education insisting that for them he would be irreplaceable and urging the minister to try and find some tempting career-related or for that matter personal inducement to persuade him to stay.

Meanwhile, the Vienna "Gauschulungsamt", which had direct oversight responsibilities for education on behalf of the regional governor, reported that Srbik never participated actively in local party group meetings and rejected the recommendation that he produce an evaluation of racial driving forces in history.

President of the Austrian Academy Between 1938 and 1945 Srbik served as president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The appointment took effect on 1 April 1938. Unlike university professors, academicians were not classified as civil servants by virtue of their academy memberships, and many were already retired (or "released") from any university posts they might previously have held: these were therefore not formally subject to various bizarre and oppressive legal provisions by which the government sought to regulate daily life. The times were nevertheless far from normal. Almost immediately following the annexation of 1938 the academy found it necessary to abolish the 1921 constitution by which it was administrated. This was replaced by a new "provisional constitution" which received the ministerial approval which had become necessary on 24 July 1938 and which, presumably, was viewed as temporary until a more permanent constitution could be agreed. That never happened, however, and the academy's provisional constitution remained in place between 1938 and 1945. Srbik's appointment to the presidency suggests that academicians saw in him a man who could effectively represent the learned body in dealings with government institutions. His re-election in July 1941, after the end of his three year term, endorsed that earlier evaluation. From the perspective of the government, Srbik was – or was at least intended to be – "their man" at the top of the academy and it is unthinkable that he would not have followed party precepts on critical matters such as admissions and appointments. He did not prevent a purge of the academy's Jewish members. There were nevertheless some minor victories. He held out successfully against the government press office objections to the naming of the academy's new "Archive for Austrian History".

Other memberships of learned institutions included Srbik's acceptance by the Berlin-based Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities as a corresponding member in 1936. Between 1937 and 1946 he served on the senate (executive council) of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. He served, in addition, as president of the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HiKo) between 1942 and 1945. The HiKo position might have become an important job under more normal circumstances, but under the intensifying wartime pressures of the time it never became more than a sinecure ) He stayed away from Vienna out of a concern – probably well founded – that in Vienna he risked being disappeared by Soviet military authorities. Following a three day illness he died in Ehrwald on 16 February 1951. He was formally rehabilitated by the university in 1958 on what would have been his eightieth birthday. 1922: Cross of Merit 1926: Corresponding membership of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities 1935: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Prize from the Goethe Foundation 1936: Honorary Doctorate in political matters ("... rerum politicarum") from Heidelberg University 1938: "Honorary Citizen" at the University of Cologne 1943: Goethe Medal for Arts and Sciences The residential lane, "Dr.-Heinrich-Srbik-Weg", which runs to the east of the village centre in Ehrwald, is named in Srbik's honour .