In
his obituary of Frank Knopfelmacher in The Australian headed 'Cold War
Combatant of the Right' Warren Osmond tells us that "permanent debate
and polemics was his lifestyle of choice". Other writers refer to his
life as a war, a crusade or a fight. He was, throughout over 30 years
at the University of Melbourne, one of its best known and most controversial
figures.
Frank Knopfelmacher was born in Vienna and brought up in Czechoslovakia.
Virtually all his family died in the Holocaust. Having fled to Palestine
and subsequently served in a Czech Legion of the British Army, Knopfelmacher
returned home in 1948 only to flee once again, this time from the repression
of the communist takeover of his country.
He went to Britain, taking his PhD from London University. In 1955,
he was appointed to the Melbourne University Department of Psychology,
where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He reached a wider audience
through his lectures on social theory at the Council for Adult Education.
He revisited Czechoslovakia only once, in 1990. Knopfelmacher is remembered
by many as a great teacher, whose lectures on complex theoretical issues
were models of lucidity. He published extensively, although he produced
no single sustained philosophical or sociological work. His output was
in journalism and essays addressing the central concern of his life
- the view that Nazism and communism were morally indistinguishable
and equally evil.
His vehement anti-communism, often expressed in provocative language,
won him many enemies and, he believed, cost him an appointment as senior
lecturer at the University of Sydney.
His support of Australian involvement in the Vietnam war further added
to his controversial status. Knopfelmacher attacked what he saw as a
failure of Australian academia to develop a specifically Australian
understanding of society. His formal and informal teaching brought a
new cosmopolitanism to the Australian political debate, even if his
polemic was unacceptable to many.
