Frank Knopfelmacher
Encyclopedia
Frank Knopfelmacher Australia
n-domiciled political philosopher and psychologist
, the subject of nationally famous controversies during the 1960s and 1970s.
A youthful card-carrying Communist while working on a Palestine
kibbutz
, Knopfelmacher - often nicknamed "Franta" throughout his life - spent World War II
as a member of the Free Czech Forces attached to the British Army. The Nazis rounded up and slew every last one of his relatives. Once Prague
(to which he had returned in 1945) had been taken over by those Communists on whom reading Arthur Koestler
's Darkness at Noon
had soured him, he used money from his family estate to bribe officials into letting him flee to England. He thereafter detested the Soviet Empire while continuing to revere Marx
the man (whom as late as July 1983 he defended in a Quadrant article).
At the University of Bristol
Knopfelmacher completed his doctorate in philosophy and psychology. In 1955 he moved to Melbourne, and took up a lectureship at Melbourne University's Psychology Department.
Few outside professional circles had heard of him until 1965, when he applied and was approved for a post in Political Philosophy at Sydney University, but had his appointment blocked - in what became a front-page cause célèbre - by the University Senate.
The Senate considered Knopfelmacher's published criticisms of Moscow and its apologists to be unduly strong meat. He had written of Melbourne leftists that "like rats, they wish to operate in the dark" (Twentieth Century magazine, Volume 18, 1964). Those firmly supporting him included Sydney philosopher David Malet Armstrong
, who called Knopfelmacher "a man fatally ahead of his time by a few years. A short time afterwards academic rebels were saying pretty much anything they liked, how they liked, about their opponents. If anyone tried to censure them or impede their careers as a result of this, the shouts that their academic freedom had been violated were deafening. To Knopfelmacher, however ... Saki
's saying applied: it is the first Christian martyr who gets the hungriest lion."
A more controversial view of Knopfelmacher came from another champion of his, B. A. Santamaria
, who stated (in his 1969 book Point of View) that compared with Knopfelmacher's opponents, "Pontius Pilate
was an amateur!".
During the late 1960s Knopfelmacher (still lecturing at Melbourne University) became de facto academic leader of those - usually associated with the Santamaria-controlled Peace With Freedom group - who favoured continuing Australian military involvement in the Vietnam War
. His courage could not be denied; more contentious was his automatic equation of the need for combat against the Vietcong with the need for Australian conscription, especially given the abuses to which conscription by lottery lent itself. (Fellow political philosopher and anti-Communist Rafe Champion
deplored this equation in the June 1988 Quadrant.) In any case, when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, Peace With Freedom's raison d'être (already weakened when the last Australian troops came home in 1972) ceased to exist.
With that cessation, Knopfelmacher's own long-standing intellectual unpredictability became more pronounced. He turned vehemently against Santamaria; in The Age
on 7 April 1984, he likened Santamaria's treatment of trade-union opponents to Joseph Stalin
's treatment of Trotskyists. The previous year (Quadrant, October 1983) he had directed some of his most sarcastic prose against Santamaria's supporters among conservative Catholic activists.
Nor did his self-contradictions end there. In 1977 he had proclaimed (via an article in the short-lived Sydney magazine Nation Review) that "Australia is a deeply racist nation", and lauded Indo-Chinese refugee arrivals, viewing their acceptance by the immigration authorities as a debt of honour which Australia owed to its defeated allies. Within five years he executed a complete volte-face: condemning multiculturalism in sharp terms, calling it an "ethnic cauldron" (The Bulletin, 24 March 1981) and "a banana republic of squabbling and mutually resentful expatriated mini-cultures, each with its own special bunch of ethnic ... führers" (Robert Manne
[ed.], The New Conservatism in Australia, St Lucia, Queensland, 1982). From 1979 he denounced (notably in letters to Britain's Encounter magazine) John Bennett, secretary of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, for disseminating Holocaust denial literature. Yet by 1989 he was exchanging vituperation with those Jews in public life who publicly advocated a national war crimes statute (see W. D. Rubinstein
, The Jews in Australia [Melbourne, 1991].)
For all his admiration of Koestler and George Orwell
, Knopfelmacher wrote far less than either man: his hardcover bibliography amounted to one 1968 reflection, Intellectuals and Politics. (A promised full-length memoir remains in manuscript, though a brief account of his political education appeared in the 1981 anthology Twenty-Five Years of 'Quadrant.) His protracted, usually free-wheeling, invariably slanderous late-night telephone monologues - visited alike upon associates and, more often, antagonists - retained a mythic status for decades among Australian intellectuals, not least by their superabundant four-letter words, which evoked the heyday of Kenneth Tynan
and Berkeley
's Filthy Speech Movement
. (These monologues, if attempted today, would now be actionable under the State of Victoria's anti-stalking
laws.)
Having in his old age revived his long-defunct friendship with Santamaria (who from the early 1990s deliberately sought reconciliations with ex-Cabinet Minister Clyde Cameron
and other erstwhile foes), Knopfelmacher died after incurring severe injuries in a road accident following a meeting with Václav Havel
. Obituarists likened him to Primo Levi
and to Dr. Johnson
.
His first wife - fellow refugee Jarmila "Jacka" Pick, whom he had married in 1944 - succumbed in 1968 to an especially cruel and protracted form of multiple sclerosis. In 1970 Knopfelmacher wed Australian teacher Susan Robinson; the couple had two children.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n-domiciled political philosopher and psychologist
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, the subject of nationally famous controversies during the 1960s and 1970s.
A youthful card-carrying Communist while working on a Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
kibbutz
Kibbutz
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...
, Knopfelmacher - often nicknamed "Franta" throughout his life - spent World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
as a member of the Free Czech Forces attached to the British Army. The Nazis rounded up and slew every last one of his relatives. Once Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
(to which he had returned in 1945) had been taken over by those Communists on whom reading Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
's Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940...
had soured him, he used money from his family estate to bribe officials into letting him flee to England. He thereafter detested the Soviet Empire while continuing to revere Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
the man (whom as late as July 1983 he defended in a Quadrant article).
At the University of Bristol
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a public research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. One of the so-called "red brick" universities, it received its Royal Charter in 1909, although its predecessor institution, University College, Bristol, had been in existence since 1876.The University is...
Knopfelmacher completed his doctorate in philosophy and psychology. In 1955 he moved to Melbourne, and took up a lectureship at Melbourne University's Psychology Department.
Few outside professional circles had heard of him until 1965, when he applied and was approved for a post in Political Philosophy at Sydney University, but had his appointment blocked - in what became a front-page cause célèbre - by the University Senate.
The Senate considered Knopfelmacher's published criticisms of Moscow and its apologists to be unduly strong meat. He had written of Melbourne leftists that "like rats, they wish to operate in the dark" (Twentieth Century magazine, Volume 18, 1964). Those firmly supporting him included Sydney philosopher David Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the...
, who called Knopfelmacher "a man fatally ahead of his time by a few years. A short time afterwards academic rebels were saying pretty much anything they liked, how they liked, about their opponents. If anyone tried to censure them or impede their careers as a result of this, the shouts that their academic freedom had been violated were deafening. To Knopfelmacher, however ... Saki
Saki
Hector Hugh Munro , better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirised Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy...
's saying applied: it is the first Christian martyr who gets the hungriest lion."
A more controversial view of Knopfelmacher came from another champion of his, B. A. Santamaria
B. A. Santamaria
Bartholomew Augustine "B. A." Santamaria, otherwise 'Bob' , was an Australian political activist and journalist and one of the most influential political figures in 20th century Australian history...
, who stated (in his 1969 book Point of View) that compared with Knopfelmacher's opponents, "Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilatus , known in the English-speaking world as Pontius Pilate , was the fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, from AD 26–36. He is best known as the judge at Jesus' trial and the man who authorized the crucifixion of Jesus...
was an amateur!".
During the late 1960s Knopfelmacher (still lecturing at Melbourne University) became de facto academic leader of those - usually associated with the Santamaria-controlled Peace With Freedom group - who favoured continuing Australian military involvement in the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. His courage could not be denied; more contentious was his automatic equation of the need for combat against the Vietcong with the need for Australian conscription, especially given the abuses to which conscription by lottery lent itself. (Fellow political philosopher and anti-Communist Rafe Champion
Rafe Champion
Rafe Champion is an Australian writer. He was born in the Australian state of Tasmania, and grew up on a farm in the northern part of that state, near Irishtown...
deplored this equation in the June 1988 Quadrant.) In any case, when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, Peace With Freedom's raison d'être (already weakened when the last Australian troops came home in 1972) ceased to exist.
With that cessation, Knopfelmacher's own long-standing intellectual unpredictability became more pronounced. He turned vehemently against Santamaria; in The Age
The Age
The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...
on 7 April 1984, he likened Santamaria's treatment of trade-union opponents to Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's treatment of Trotskyists. The previous year (Quadrant, October 1983) he had directed some of his most sarcastic prose against Santamaria's supporters among conservative Catholic activists.
Nor did his self-contradictions end there. In 1977 he had proclaimed (via an article in the short-lived Sydney magazine Nation Review) that "Australia is a deeply racist nation", and lauded Indo-Chinese refugee arrivals, viewing their acceptance by the immigration authorities as a debt of honour which Australia owed to its defeated allies. Within five years he executed a complete volte-face: condemning multiculturalism in sharp terms, calling it an "ethnic cauldron" (The Bulletin, 24 March 1981) and "a banana republic of squabbling and mutually resentful expatriated mini-cultures, each with its own special bunch of ethnic ... führers" (Robert Manne
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
[ed.], The New Conservatism in Australia, St Lucia, Queensland, 1982). From 1979 he denounced (notably in letters to Britain's Encounter magazine) John Bennett, secretary of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, for disseminating Holocaust denial literature. Yet by 1989 he was exchanging vituperation with those Jews in public life who publicly advocated a national war crimes statute (see W. D. Rubinstein
W. D. Rubinstein
William D. Rubinstein is a historian and author. His best-known work, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, charts the rise of the 'super rich', a class he sees as expanding exponentially....
, The Jews in Australia [Melbourne, 1991].)
For all his admiration of Koestler and George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
, Knopfelmacher wrote far less than either man: his hardcover bibliography amounted to one 1968 reflection, Intellectuals and Politics. (A promised full-length memoir remains in manuscript, though a brief account of his political education appeared in the 1981 anthology Twenty-Five Years of 'Quadrant.) His protracted, usually free-wheeling, invariably slanderous late-night telephone monologues - visited alike upon associates and, more often, antagonists - retained a mythic status for decades among Australian intellectuals, not least by their superabundant four-letter words, which evoked the heyday of Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
and Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
's Filthy Speech Movement
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...
. (These monologues, if attempted today, would now be actionable under the State of Victoria's anti-stalking
Stalking
Stalking is a term commonly used to refer to unwanted and obsessive attention by an individual or group to another person. Stalking behaviors are related to harassment and intimidation and may include following the victim in person and/or monitoring them via the internet...
laws.)
Having in his old age revived his long-defunct friendship with Santamaria (who from the early 1990s deliberately sought reconciliations with ex-Cabinet Minister Clyde Cameron
Clyde Cameron
Clyde Robert Cameron, AO , Australian politician, was a member of the Australian House of Representatives for 31 years from 1949 to 1980, a Cabinet minister in the Whitlam government and a leading figure in the Australian labour movement for forty years.-Biography:Cameron was born in Murray Bridge,...
and other erstwhile foes), Knopfelmacher died after incurring severe injuries in a road accident following a meeting with Václav Havel
Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
. Obituarists likened him to Primo Levi
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...
and to Dr. Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
.
His first wife - fellow refugee Jarmila "Jacka" Pick, whom he had married in 1944 - succumbed in 1968 to an especially cruel and protracted form of multiple sclerosis. In 1970 Knopfelmacher wed Australian teacher Susan Robinson; the couple had two children.
Further reading
- Frank Knopfelmacher, (1968), Intellectuals and Politics: And Other Essays Nelson, Sydney
- James Franklin, (2003) Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia Macleay PressMacleay PressMacleay Press is a small press Australian publishing company founded in 1993 by Keith Windschuttle.Authors published include Leonie Kramer, Michael Connor and Windschuttle.-Publications:Publications include:...
, Sydney