REMEMBERING FRANK KNOPFELMACHER

With the launch of Frank Knopfelmacher – Selected Writings, the life and work of one of Australia’s leading anti-communists was celebrated in Melbourne and Sydney. In 1965, Frank Knopfelmacher, Czech born sociologist and psychologist, was the centre of a heated academic controversy when a unanimous recommendation by an academic selection committee to appoint him to a post in political philosophy at Sydney University was overruled in an unprecedented manner by the University’s Professorial Board.  An incisive critic of political parties and social institutions, Knopfelmacher went on to a post at the University of Melbourne and took a prominent part in the Vietnam controversy, supporting Australia’s commitment. To remember some of Frank Knopfelmacher’s achievements and unique personality, The Sydney Institute held a discussion on Tuesday 7 May 2024. The discussion was lead by Michael Easson, author, businessman and former vice-president of the ACTU and Gerard Henderson. Executive director of The Sydney Institute.

REMEMBERING FRANK KNOPFELMACHER

GERARD HENDERSON

Thanks to Andrew Knopfelmacher for putting together this fine volume of his father’s selected writings between 1958 and 1993.  And to Sue Knopfelmacher, Andrew’s mother and Frank’s widow (whom he married in 1970 after the death of his first wife Jarmila Pick) for supporting the work.  And to Anthony Cappello, at his publishing outfit Connor Court. Without Connor Court many successful authors would be “cancelled” by the leftist orthodoxy which pervades much of the publishing profession.

I first met Dr Frank Knopfelmacher at the University of Melbourne in the mid-1960s.  I was not one of his students.  I studied Arts (majoring in what was called political science) and Law.  And Franta (as we called him – it was the English translation of his first name) was a lecturer in the Department of Psychology.  However, as Andrew points out in the Preface, Franta regarded philosophy and social theory as being the great intellectual loves of his life – rather than being an academic psychologist.

Dr Knopfelmacher described his family as Czech-German-Jewish-bourgeoisie.  In 1974, he wrote: “I believe, with the Pope, that man lives in a vale of tears and with Max Weber that to engage in politics effectively presupposes, inevitably, to compromise with evil forces”.  The first reference to this Valley of Tears embraced the teaching of the Catholic Church about The Fall and the consequential imperfectability of mankind.  The second is to the German sociologist Max Weber’s support for an ethic of responsibility rather than an ethic of ultimate ends.  The former stressed the need to coalition – the latter embraced ideology.

Like all of us, Franta was affected by The Fall.  At times he was obsessive and grumpy – but always clever.  A man of high intelligence, he had a biting wit and a great sense of irony and was learned across several disciplines.  Sure, he had many disagreements with his friends and associates.  Not all of them were mended – but not all of them were his own fault.  However, on occasions, he did have a problem finding the correct “tone” in public debate – which made him all the more interesting.

I’m pleased to report that I never fell out with Knopfelmacher – and I always admired him.  Even though, as a young student and later academic, it was difficult at times to handle all his late-night phone calls. We disagreed on some issues.  What was particularly attractive about Knopfelmacher was his intellectual courage and his emphatic opposition to totalitarianism of the Nazi, fascist and communist varieties.

Knopfelmacher fled Czechoslovakia twice. The first time in 1939 when he fled shortly before Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany’s occupation.  Sadly, all of Franta’s family were murdered in the Holocaust. The second time was in 1948 just after the nation fell to communism under the direction of the communist dictator Josef Stalin in Moscow.  Knopfelmacher, who predicted the Holocaust, wrote in 1957 that, from two decades earlier he was “saddled with the awareness of violence and death which has never left me”.  He added:

Risking boastfulness….I regard this intuitive understanding of the totalitarian mentality as one of my intellectual assets:  I think I have never been wrong on anything connected with totalitarianism.

As mentioned earlier, I never studied under Knopfelmacher.  However, during my time at Melbourne University, he had a significant influence on my intellectual upbringing.  I attended – and, later with Anne, organised – many of his packed-out campus lunchtime talks which were put on by the campus Democratic Labor Party Club. Along with attending, with Anne, his various popular classes at the Council of Adult Education in the Melbourne CBD.  The other important influence was the academic Hugo Wolfsohn, a Berlin Jew who fled Germany shortly before the Second World War commenced.  The extra-university influence was Bob Santamaria, the Catholic anti-communist activist. Knopfelmacher knew both men well.

What this trio had in common was their anti-communism as a manifestation of their anti-totalitarianism. Like Knopfelmacher, Santamaria had the occasional problem with tone – but he, too, was interesting. Knopfelmacher had flirted with communism as a young man – this made his assessment of the extreme left all the more authoritative in later life.

Not long after I met Knopfelmacher, he was involved in a controversy following the publication of his essay “The Situation at the University of Melbourne” in the Autumn 1964 issue of the quarterly review 20^th Century.  It’s Chapter 6 in this collection.   This was preceded by his essay “The Threat to Academic Freedom”, published by Quadrant magazine in Autumn 1958.

Knopfelmacher arrived in Melbourne in 1955 to take up an academic position in the Psychology Department at Melbourne University. Both essays focused on the influence of the Communist Party of Australia on Melbourne University.  We now know that there were communist cells there.  Knopfelmacher tackled the matter with his devastating prose –  writing in 20^th Century: “For an Australian academic to have sympathised with such a [Stalinist] movement…must surely seem either a symptom of intellectual incompetence or moral depravity.”  That was correct.  Towards the end of his essay, he declared: “Like rats, they [the pro-communist university left] wish to operate in the dark.” That was the wrong tone – but the communists did operate underground, so to speak.

As it so happened, Knopfelmacher applied for a senior lectureship in political philosophy at the University of Sydney in late 1964.  In early 1965 his appointment was recommended by the selection committee in a vote of three to none with one abstention (by a left-wing academic).  However, in an improper intervention, the appointment was overturned by the Professorial Board and this decision was upheld by the University Senate.  This despite the fact that Knopfelmacher had included as his referees Professor David Armstrong (Sydney), Professor Boyce Gibson (Melbourne), Professor Stephan Korner (Bristol), and Professor Sidney Hook (New York University)  – all highly regarded philosophers.

Knopfelmacher had been rejected on account of his political views.  His appointment was attacked in the Professorial Board by Professor Wilbur Christiansen, an electrical engineer, who cited Franta’s 20^th Century article as a reason why he should not be appointed to an academic position.  Thus proving Knopfelmacher’s point that the real opponents of academic freedom in Australia were the left.  By the way, writing in The Bulletin on 24 April 1965, Sam Lipski reported that Christiansen had “recently returned from communist China where he was an official guest of the government and is a brother-in-law of Mr E.F. (Ted) Hill, leader of Australia’s Peking Communists”.

However, to be fair, a few left-wing intellectuals spoke out against the Sydney University’s de-platforming (in modern parlance) of Knopfelmacher. For example, Stephen Murray-Smith, the editor of Overland magazine.

Writing in Quadrant magazine in June 1965, Donald Horne conceded that the 20^th Century article was “highly cantankerous”.  But maintained that Knopfelmacher was entitled to be so and added that the ban made him “blush for the provincialism of some of the Sydney professors”.

From 1955 until his retirement in 1989 at age 65, Knopfelmacher engaged the Australian left in debate. He published only one book, Intellectuals and Politics. But he wrote numerous high-quality essays in journals and articles in such newspapers as The Age, Sydney Morning and The Australian – along with many a letter-to-the-editor – and Nation Review under the editorship of Richard Walsh.  And he appeared on television and radio.

But above all, Frank Knopfelmacher was a brilliant teacher and an accomplished polemicist – the latter gift was something of a rarity in essentially Anglo-Celtic Australia at the time.

In his 1967 Quadrant essay “My Political Education” (published in Chapter 1), Knopfelmacher reflected that he was “brought up in a place permeated with Catholicism – and Catholic imagery, architecture and ways are part of my personality make-up”.  He added that: “Today, most of my best friends are Catholics”. And he wrote that he “found very soon” [after arriving in Australia] that the people “who understood what I was talking about – Bob Santamaria, Jim McAuley, Vincent Buckley – and who sympathized with my political position here [in Australia] – were not left-wingers and liberals…but Catholics.”

However, Knopfelmacher wrote that he was nauseated by “so-called Catholic progressives in the university”.  He had in mind the likes of Max Charlesworth – adding:

Catholic progressives and Catholic fellow-travellers [with communists] give me the creeps.  I prefer the [William] McMahon Balls of this world without incense.

Professor McMahon Ball was a left-of-centre academic of a secular disposition.

For his part, Santamaria commented that he “learnt to understand the essence of totalitarianism…by speaking to – and reading – Frank” (the quote is on the back of this book).

When a young man, Santamaria’s anti-communism was influenced by Pope Pius XI’s 1937 papal encyclical Divini Redemptoris – which translated as On Atheistic Communism.  I remember well an early conversation with Franta when he said that this was the wrong approach to communism.  The problem with communism was not that it was atheistic but, rather, that it was totalitarian.  This message had an impact on Santamaria and many other anti-communist Catholics.  Also, Knopfelmacher influenced Australian anti-communists to read Arthur Koestler and George Orwell – two writers who had profoundly influenced him, as is made clear in Chapter 1 of this book.

Knopfelmacher also had an impact on left-wing Jewish students by talking about the Slansky Trial in communist Czechoslovakia in 1952 and Stalin’s Doctors’ Plot in the Soviet Union in 1953 to make the point that communism was not only totalitarian but also anti-semitic.

In the early to mid-1960s, Knopfelmacher’s anti-communism was intellectually unfashionable – it was a time when many preached the need for dialogue and détente with Moscow.  This changed somewhat when the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.  Knopfelmacher predicted that Brezhnev’s regime would do precisely this – an unfashionable position at the time.  A year earlier, in 1967, the Six-Day War had ensured his support for the state of Israel to exist within secure borders.

It’s important to remember that your man Franta was a life-long academic – but one who did not try hard to win academic friends on campus.  He had this to say about some of his colleagues.

• Knopfelmacher described the professional intellectual as not one who “knows more about an academic subject than an amateur, but one who is familiar with the daily chores, swindles, arm-twisting and gimmicks on the low and middle levels of an academic workplace”.
• And he had this to say about the psychology, sociology and political science departments (he put the word “science” in quotation marks). Franta said they were “not arenas of titanic intellectual struggles” – “but strange bazaars without real trade, in which incessant haggling for carpets, secretaries, gadgets, trips, leaves…is taking place”. He added, “they call it ‘research’ which is supposed to be impeded by ‘teaching’”. This reminds me of my three years in the Political Science Department at La Trobe when Colin Rubenstein and myself supported Professor Hugo Wolfsohn and Professor Joan Rydon as they attempted to resist the carpet hagglers whose incessant demand was for minutes to be kept at the senseless staff meetings they insisted on having.
• Frank Knopfelmacher enjoyed reacting to criticism and abuse from fellow academics with a combination of irreverence and defiance. He wrote this in his “My Political Education” essay about the threat of totalitarian regimes to Australia – in view of the nation’s “peculiar geographical situation”:

A gentleman in the academic world here has recently written an article where he calls me and the people like me threat experts.  I am rather proud of this description. I am quite happy to be called a threat expert.  In fact, I am a threat expert.

The entry on Knopfelmacher in in The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) states towards the end:

Although his conceptual framework might have allowed him to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European “satellites”- time and again he argued, presciently, that the Soviet system was unreformable and entirely lacked legitimacy – almost until the end he clung to the conviction that the Soviet Union would win the Cold War and Australia was doomed. When the Soviet empire collapsed between 1989 and 1991, it afforded him little joy.

This was published online in 2020.  In mid-2024, some four years later, Franta’s pessimism does not seem so misplaced – as a glance at contemporary Russia and China, under the respective leadership of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, attests.

It is the practice of the Australian Dictionary of Biography to put the names of authors at the end of their entries. So that readers learn about the dead before discovering the identity of the author.  When the online edition of Volume 19 came out in 2020, I noted that the penultimate paragraph of the somewhat critical entry on Frank Knopfelmacher read as follows:

Among those influenced [by Knopfelmacher] were the politician Michael Danby, the publicist Gerard Henderson, the journalist Greg Sheridan, the ideology-maker Ray Evans, the legal academic Martin Krygier, the philosopher Raimond Gaita, and the political historian and public intellectual Robert Manne.

I was delighted to be named. Sure, I do not have the status of a “public intellectual”.  But the fact that an ageing anti-communist scribbler bloke like me had been hailed as a “publicist” – along the lines of the sassy Sydney socialite-publicist Roxy Jacenko –  was a morale booster.  Not bad, I thought, to even get on the same list as the “public intellectual Robert Manne” and his besties Martin Krygier and Rai Gaita.

After reading the final paragraph, I checked out the name of the ADB author at the bottom.  It was – wait for it – the self-identifying public intellectual Robert Manne.  This was the kind of academic self-regard of the left-intelligentsia which Franta delighted in mocking.

For the record, in his obituary in The Australian on 19 May 1993, the writer Gideon Haigh mentioned those who had been “brushed” with Knopfelmacher’s teaching as including Gerard Henderson, Peter Costello, B.A. Santamaria, Robert Manne, Patrick Morgan, Sam Lipski and Isi Leibler.  He added that Knopfelmacher later brushed off some of them.

In conclusion, I repeat an earlier comment.  What stands out in Frank Knopfelmacher: Selected Writings is Franta’s intellectual courage in supporting unfashionable – but just – causes. From opposition to communism (including of the Ho Chi Minh kind in Vietnam) to support for Israel.  This entailed that he stood against many of his academic superiors (he was never made a professor) and many university vice-chancellors who – like today – he regarded as exhibiting weakness in failing to stand up against left-wing academics and students who opposed debate.

Andrew Knopfelmacher’s collection provides another reason why Franta will be remembered when most of his antagonists are long forgotten – and his admirers remain admirers whether living or in their accounts of his time.

* * * *