Background
Heinrich Ritter von Srbik was born in Vienna on 10 November 1874. The son of an Austnan civil servant and a Westphalian mother, von Srbik was raised in a Catholic home.
Heinrich Ritter von Srbik was born in Vienna on 10 November 1874. The son of an Austnan civil servant and a Westphalian mother, von Srbik was raised in a Catholic home.
Educated at the Theresian Academy.
After studying at the University of Vienna, he was assistant at the Institute of Austrian History from 1904 to 1912. From 1907 to 1912 he also lectured at the University of Vienna and was then appointed Professor in Graz. In 1922 he returned to Vienna where he was Professor of History until the fall of the Third Reich.
From 1929 to 1930 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik was Minister of Education in the Schober cabinet. He established his reputation as a historian with a two-volume biography, Metternich, der Staatsman und der Mensch, published in 1925 (the third volume appeared posthumously in 1954), and edited Quellen zur Deutschen Politik Oesterreichs 1859-1866, a five-volume sourcebook, published between 1934 and 1938.
Much publicized in the Nazi press, von Srbik proved an eager fellow¬traveller, putting himself at the disposal of the Nazi régime as a member of the Reichstag in 1938. In the same year he became President of the German Historical Commission and from 1938 to 1945 he was President of the Academy of Science in Vienna. In 1943 he was rewarded with the Goethe Medal for his services to German historiography and continued to produce historical works until the end of the Third Reich.
After 1945 he retired to the Tyrol, where he died at Ehrwald on 16 February 1951.
In his historical works, von Srbik was preoccupied with the failure of the Germans to achieve a harmonious unity between the concepts of nation, State, empire and territorial sovereignty. His world-view- was too rooted in the universal- ism of the Habsburg Empire to make him a fully-fledged National Socialist, but he nonetheless regarded the Anschluss as the fulfilment of all his hopes.