Franz Borkenau (December 15, 1900 – May 22, 1957) was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. Borkenau is known as one of the pioneers of the totalitarianism theory.
Youth
Borkenau was born in Vienna, the son of Judge Rudolf Pollack and Melanie Fürth. Borkenau's father was born Jewish, but had converted to Roman Catholicism to improve his career prospects while his mother was Protestant. Borkenau was raised as a Catholic. Vienna was the capital of the vast multicultural and multiethnic Austrian empire that covered much of Eastern Europe, and Borkenau grew up in a cosmopolitan city that was full of various peoples. As a teenager, he became part of an youth subculture that was greatly influenced by the theories of psychoanalysis as promoted by Sigmund Freud and Freud's protégé Siegfried Bernfeld. After graduating from the Schottengymnasium in 1918, Borkenau was conscripted into the Austrian army. Borkenau was still in training at the time that the Austrian empire was defeated and the ancient House of Habsburg was deposed in October 1918.
As a student at the University of Vienna, he studied the law, history, economics and philosophy. As a student, he convinced that the cause of the war that ended the Austrian empire was capitalism, which led to became active in Communist groups. Borkenau was typical of the Austrian middle class who had enjoyed what the novelist Stefan Zweig called the "golden age of security" before 1914 and found the world that came about after 1918 to be as disorientating as it was disturbing, leading to a search for a new "anchor" ideology to provide certainty in a dangerous and uncertain world. Both of his parents disallowed him for embracing Communism. As a university student, he rose up to become chairman of the German Communist Students' League. Borkenau ended up transferring over to the University of Leipzig, where he was awarded a PhD in 1924. Borkenau's PhD thesis was on the Universal History, an 18th-century British universal history. Borkenau was always interested in devising grand theories that could explain everything that had happened in history, and believed that he had found such a theory in Marxism.
Communist
In 1921, Borkenau joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and was active as a Comintern agent until 1929. After graduating from the University of Leipzig in 1924, Borkenau moved to Berlin. From 1925 to 1929, Borkenau worked as a research assistant for Jürgen Kuczynski at the Forschungsstelle für internationale Politik in Berlin, a think-tank that was sponsored by the German Communist Party. Both Borkenau and Kuczynski worked for the Hungarian Communist Eugen Varga, whose office at the Soviet embassy in Berlin was a conduit for the Comintern. In the 1920s, Borkenau was described by his friend Richard Löwenthal as a "sincere Marxist" who very much wanted a world revolution. Like other Marxists in Germany, Borkenau was disturbed by the failure as he saw it of the November Revolution of 1918, which had toppled the monarchy, but failed to replace capitalism with socialism. A major interest for Borkenau was in discovering the reasons why the November Revolution had failed to develop along Marxist lines, which led him to become involved in the Frankfurt School. At the end of 1929, Borkenau was expelled from both the Comintern and the KPD, owing to his personal repulsion and disgust about how the Communists operated, combined with an increasing horror about Stalinism. Borkenau then joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which he remained a member of until 1931 when he resigned.
In 1930, he began work on his Habilitationsschrift, a book entitled Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (The Transition from the Feudal to Bourgeois Interpretation of the World). Focusing on 17th-century Europe, Borkenau argued against the claims of Wilhelm Dilthey who maintained that the emergence of modern Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities) as university subjects was a process of transcending feudal ways of viewing the world. Taking a materialist line, Borkenau sought to link intellectual trends with the level of economic growth as he argued that no philosophy could be ahead of the levels of productive forces in a society.