SRBIK, HEINRICH von. - Austrian historian, b. 10 Nov. 1878 in Vienna, d. 16 Feb. 1951 at Ehrwald (Tyrol).

A pupil of the Austrian Historical Institute, he began his activity 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 question, then much debated, of the immunity of the clergy in the Austria of the Babenbergs and the Habsburgs, demonstrating that it did not correspond to the truth.

A professor at the University of Graz in 1912 (in the meantime he had edited the collection of the treaties concluded between 1526 and 1722 by Austria with 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 prudent guardian of continental equilibrium and peace.

The political and economic instability of the postwar period convinced him of the necessity of a German-Austrian union; he therefore became a promoter of a unitary conception of German history (Gesamtdeutsche Geschichtsauffassung), which would reassess the individual positive contribution of Austria, of Prussia and of the minor German states to German unity, as it came to be formed through the centuries; and in the four volumes of the Deutsche Einheit (Munich 1935-42) he himself reconstructed the vicissitudes of the German people, in its various branches, from the early Middle Ages to the fratricidal war of 1866. During the Hitlerian occupation of Austria (1938) he was a supporter of the Third Reich, for which, after the restoration of the Austrian Republic in 1945, he was deprived of his chair. He then set his hand, in the solitude of Ehrwald, to a history of German historiography from humanism onward (Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, Munich-Salzburg 1950-51), whose vol. II appeared posthumously.

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: C. Antoni, H. von S. e l'unità della stor. tedesca, in Studi germanici, 2 (1937), pp. 46-75; F. Valsecchi, H. von S. e la sua concez. unitaria della stor. ted., in Riv. stor. ital., 3ª serie, 2 (1937), pp. 45-69; M. Petrocchi, Situazione di von S., in L'uomo e la stor., Bologna 1944, pp. 123-27; S. Furlani, H. von S., in Nuova rivista storica, 35 (1951), pp. 166-72; W. Näf, H. von S., in Hist. Zeitschrift, 173 (1952), pp. 95-101.

Silvio Furlani

@incollection{ec11_srbik_heinrich_von, author = {Furlani, Silvio}, title = {Srbik, heinrich von}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {XI}, pages = {1181--1182}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1953}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/srbik-heinrich-von} }

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Srbik, Heinrich von

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