The Jew of Linz [antikvár]

Introduction Once I knew a brave and intelligent man - a Jew - one of the numberless bits of human flotsam cast out of Europe by Adolf Hitler. With his own eyes and dressed in the blue and white uniform of a Jewish youth organization, he had seen the Führer drive past him in cavalcade into his native Czechoslovakia. He had escaped from Czechoslovakia and fought honourably in the British Army while his family was consumed in the Holocaust. On returning to his native land, full of hope, he saw Stalin's writing on the wall and had to run yet again. Along with many Holocaust survivors, he found sanctuary in Australia. His experiences, as he later related, had turned him into an intensely political creature and the study of politics became his obsession. His experiences had immunized him against totalitarianism on both sides of politics. In Australia, he reacted to the prevailing intellectual political ambience. Having escaped Czechoslovakia, he found the universities to be suffering from a profound unconcern with the dangers of the totalitarian Left. The Nazis had been crushed with the Soviet Union as ally and there was a legacy of trust that endured in the universities longer than elsewhere. He felt that Australian academics generally were blindly sympathetic to the policies of the Soviet Union and the person of Joseph Stalin. He thought this sympathy to be neither entirely innocent nor harmless, so he began to write in defence of liberty and thereby became controversial. He was invited to teach at the University of Sydney by David Armstrong, but, in a nationally notorious and shameful scandal, a politically organized faculty strike forced him out to take up another appointment at the University of Melbourne. Here he shepherded a generation of students through the arcana of political argument. He was a wit and as fabulous a raconteur as Australia has ever seen. He was a great force for good. His name was Frank Knopfelmacher and he deserves to be remembered. I was never his student but I benefited greatly from his conversation. Among the very many things he said that gave me cause to ponder was an off-hand remark he made to me about the origins of Nazism. He said that