His emigration from what had become, by 1939, part of Nazi Germany, appears to have been undertaken as a result of his (hitherto, to most people, unknown) Jewish provenance.
[1][2][3][4] Emerich Klaus Franzis was born at Gablonz (as Jablonec nad Nisou was known before 1945), a midsized trading and manufacturing town northeast of Prague, in the mountain foothills of northern Bohemia, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
[7][4] Prague University during the 1920s and 1930s was the focus of intensifying nationalist polarisation: as a student there Francis joined the "Hochschulbund des Staffelstein", an elite Catholic-Nationalist "Volksdeutsche" association that opposed Czechoslovak nationalism.
[7] During 1933, which was his final year in Münster, he worked as an assistant to Georg Schreiber, a church historian and (since 1905) ordained priest who, till the National Socialist take-over, combined his career as a university professor with an active role as a (Catholic) Centre Party politician.
[10] After this he returned to Bohemia where he worked till early 1939 as editor in chief, at the "Volkszeitung" (a Catholic newspaper) based in Warnsdorf[5] which was linguistically and ethnically still, at this stage, a German town, despite having been politically part of Czechoslovakia since 1919.
[6] However, in May 1940, eight months after the outbreak of the Second World War, but just a few days after the German army invaded France, the British government invoked legislation that triggered a massive round-up of so-called "enemy aliens".
He was extracted from his monastic refuge, becomings one of several thousand foreigners hastily placed in internment camps, at some stage incarcerated on the Isle of Man.
[6] He was released in 1942, initially employed as an "agricultural worker",[10] and ending up at the trappist monastery in the St. Norbert neighbourhood of Winnipeg, capital of the mid-western Canadian province of Manitoba.
[12] In his spare time he studied to master the English language and, later, to familiarize himself with the (still, especially in Canada, relatively underdeveloped) Anglo-American world of Social science.
For a number of reasons he selected the Russian Mennonites, an Anabaptist religious group, committed to pacifism, many of whom still spoke a version of Low German, known as Plautdietsch, as their first language.
Friesen later recalled that although Francis was, on most occasions, perfectly able to understand the Plautdietsch dialect he encountered during his researches, he always insisted on conducting his interviews in High German.Francis was able to devote himself full-time to the project, since the Historical and Scientific Society, which had commissioned the work, backed him with a fellowship which provided support from September 1945 till March 1947.
In the event the book in question was published only in 1955 due to issues over permissions (from the Historical Society that had sponsored the research) to publish and a succession of disagreements with the University of Toronto Press on matters such as the inclusion of large numbers of (expensive to reproduce) tables and appendices, along with the ticklish question of whether and how much the original manuscript might be edited down.
Even though many of the audiences from the Historical and Scientific society to whom he presented his findings were more appreciative of the historical narratives included in his work than in the extensive demographic, ecological and institutional analyses, many of them delivered by means of a formidable battery of number based charts and tables, by 1947 Francis was already establishing himself in North America as a social scientist of note.
[6] In 1947 Francis accepted an assistant professorship at the Catholic University of Notre Dame, located across the border at South Bend, Indiana.
[4] There is a sense that setting up the new Institute of Sociology and the quantity of teaching he found himself doing left little time either for writing or for "hiking in the Alps" beyond Garmisch.