SRBIK, HEINRICH von. — Austrian historian, born on 10 November 1878 in Vienna, died on 16 February 1951 at Ehrwald (Tyrol).
A student of the Austrian Historical Institute, he began his career as a historian with a study of 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 highly debated question of the immunity of the clergy in the Austria of the Babenbergers and Habsburgs, demonstrating that it did not correspond to the truth.
Professor at the University of Graz in 1912 (in the meantime he had edited the collection of treaties concluded between 1526 and 1722 by Austria with the Netherlands), he moved in 1922 to the University 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.
Postwar political and economic instability convinced him of the necessity of a German-Austrian union; he therefore became an advocate of a unitary conception of German history (Gesamtdeutsche Geschichtsauffassung), which would reassess the individual positive contributions of Austria, Prussia, and the minor German states to German unity, as it took shape through the centuries; and 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 early Middle Ages to the fratricidal war of 1866. During the Hitlerian occupation of Austria (1938), he supported the Third Reich and, after the restoration of the Austrian Republic in 1945, was deprived of his chair. He then began, in the solitude of Ehrwald, a history of German historiography from Humanism onward (Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, Munich–Salzburg 1950–51), whose second volume appeared posthumously.