Friedrich Engel-Janosi

Friedrich Engel-Janosi was born on 18 February 1893 in Oberdöbling, the son of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish industrialist Moritz Engel de Jánosi, and grew up in prosperous Viennese circumstances. After the Döbling Gymnasium, in 1912 he began studying law, economics, art history, and history in Vienna and Heidelberg, interrupted by military service from 1914 to 1918. He earned his doctorate in law in 1919 as an assistant to Hans Kelsen, and his doctorate in history in 1921 under Alfred Francis Pribram, with a study of the constitutional question in German-speaking Austria between the Congress of Vienna and the Revolution of 1848. After a short period in banking, Engel-Janosi took over his father's timber factory in 1924 and at first pursued scholarship alongside the family business. In 1929 he qualified as a university lecturer at the University of Vienna in modern general history with the study "Graf Rechberg. Vier Kapitel zu seiner und Österreichs Geschichte" (Count Rechberg: Four Chapters on His Life and Austria's History); in 1935 he received the title of associate professor. In the 1920s he belonged to that circle of non-economist social scientists who regularly sat in on the Mises private seminar, and in its first decade he also joined the Geistkreis, founded in 1921 by Hayek and Furth, where he acted as the chronicler of the lecture topics. After a research stay in Rome from 1936 to 1938, during which he converted to Catholicism, his teaching licence was revoked on racial grounds on 22 April 1938. In 1939 he fled via France and Great Britain to the United States, taught briefly at the University of Cambridge, was a research associate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 1940 to 1942, and from 1945 professor of European history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In 1959 he returned as honorary professor to the University of Vienna, presided over the International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1965, and concluded his teaching in 1969. His work concentrates on the diplomatic and church-political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular the relations between the Habsburg monarchy, the republic, and the Holy See. "Österreich und der Vatikan 1846–1918" (Austria and the Vatican, 1846–1918) (1958 to 1960), "Geschichte auf dem Ballhausplatz" (History on the Ballhausplatz) (1963), and "Vom Chaos zur Katastrophe" (From Chaos to Catastrophe) (1971) are regarded as standard works. The autobiography "… aber ein stolzer Bettler" (… but a Proud Beggar) (1974) is at the same time a key source on the culture of Vienna's intellectual circles in the interwar period. Engel-Janosi died on 7 March 1978 in Vienna and is buried in the Döbling Cemetery.