SRBIK, HEINRICH von. - Austrian historian, b. 10 Nov. 1878 in Vienna, d. 16 Feb. 1951 in Ehrwald (Tyrol).
A student of the Austrian Historical Institute, he began his career as a historian with a study on the relations between State and Church in medieval Austria (Die Beziehungen von Staat und Kirche während des Mittelalters, Innsbruck 1904), in which he investigated the then much-debated question of clerical immunity in Austria under the Babenbergs and Habsburgs, demonstrating that it did not correspond to reality.
Professor at the University of Graz in 1912 (in the meantime he had curated the collection of treaties concluded between 1526 and 1722 between Austria and the Netherlands), he moved in 1922 to that of Vienna, publishing Metternich. Der Staatsmann und der Mensch (2 vols., 1925); he saw in the chancellor the diligent defender of Central Europe against the centripetal tendencies of France and Russia, and the guardian of the balance and continental peace.
Political and economic instability after the war convinced him of the necessity of a German-Austrian union; he thus became a promoter of a unitary conception of German history (Gesamtdetache Geschichtsauffassung), which would re-evaluate the positive contributions of Austria, Prussia, and the smaller German states to German unity, as it developed over the centuries; in the four volumes of Deutsche Einheit (Munich 1935-42) he himself reconstructed the history of the German people, in its various branches, from the High Middle Ages to the fratricidal war of 1866. During the Nazi occupation of Austria (1938) he was a supporter of the Third Reich, for which reason, after the restoration of the Austrian Republic in 1945, he was deprived of his professorship. He then set to work, in the solitude of Ehrwald, on a history of German historiography from humanism onwards (Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, Munich-Salzburg 1950-51), the second volume of which appeared posthumously.