[4] During the early and middle 1890s von Srbik attended the Theresianum, a prestigious secondary school in Vienna 10, a short distance to the south of the city centre.

The nature of the historical identity of Austria, subsumed as it was for many purposes in the ethnically and culturally disparate Habsburg empire, was much debated among scholars in Vienna during this period, and the theme was one which would become central in von Srbik's later researches.

As a newly qualified historian he would become an enthusiastic supporter of closer economic integration within the Austrian empire as a means whereby the entire construct might be prevented from total disintegration during an age of intensifying nationalism.

[12] Three years later he obtained the far less restrictive "venia docendi" (authorisation ) permitting him to lecture and teach "general history" at the university, on the basis of a treatise he produced on the seventeenth century mercantilist-cameralist, Wilhelm von Schröder.

[1][8] In 1911 von Srbik accepted an additional supplementary appointment as a "Beisitzer" (loosely, "process assessor") on the "Burschenschaftliche Historische Kommission" (fraternity historical commission).

[1] In the long summer breaks during the four years between 1915 and 1918, as a reserve officer (presumably ever since having undertaken his military service two decades earlier), von Srbik served in the Austrian army on the Italian front.

[1][2] Among his better remembered students from his Vienna years were the writer Heimito von Doderer, Chancellor Josef Klaus and the historians Taras Borodajkewycz and Hellmuth Rössler.

Heinrich Srbik's two volume biography of Metternich was published in 1925 and is still considered by admirers, almost a century later, a standard work on the man whom many lauded or blamed for having created a political road map that was followed across much of Europe for more than a generation after 1815.

[16] Srbik saw Metternich as a conservative, whose world view had been formed before the French Revolution, who stood for defending the monarchist state against the destructive impulses created by revolutionary and egalitarian precepts.

One reason for the secrecy surrounding the group was that their advocacy of a limit of perhaps 10% on the proportion of academic posts that might be filled by Jews was in direct contravention of the principles of equality of opportunity that were enshrined in Austria's post-imperial constitution.

The group's activities seem to have gone largely unremarked at the time, but after 1945, as newsreels of the Nazi death camps created popular awareness across Europe of the nature and extent of the Holocaust, Srbnik's involvement as a member of as the "Bears' Cave" would leave him isolated and, in the judgment of many post-war commentators disgraced, during his final years.

Both "solutions" presented a string of follow-on questions, among which one of the most pressing concerned what might become of those parts of the Austrian empire where German was not the principal language of the inhabitants if they were to be excluded from a new "greater Germany".

The post-1919 political structure of the region represented an imposed solution to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire, based around Anglo-American statist conceptions of nationalism which, it could be argued, took no account of more nuanced "on the ground" realities.

And in Vienna before 1914 – even more before 1871 – there would have been very little pressure to perceive any significant contradiction between a German self-identity and the constantly proliferating ethnic diversity that had developed through more than six centuries of "Mitteleuropa" under the Habsburg monarchy .

Srbik's answer was to celebrate ethnic diversity as a source more of great strength than of inherent weakness, which was no more than a spelling out of the widespread assumption that had underpinned Hapsburg rule through decades of ever sharper nationalist pressures during the nineteenth century.

His acceptance that it would be natural for those of a self-defined ethnic German background to dominate government and society across the formerly Austrian or Russian imperial territories of central Europe even when non-German speakers were in the majority was nevertheless open to challenge, and when brutally imposed by force of arms on the basis of simplistic "Nazi" mantras from Berlin would become generally discredited during the 1940s, and irrelevant in the wake of industrial-scale ethnic cleansing after 1944.

During the 1930s, however, Heinrich von Srbik was widely respected as one of the leading historians of his generation, and the "complete Germany" vision with which his reputation was associated became increasingly mainstream across and beyond German-speaking central Europe.

[1] Nevertheless, there is no indication on the part of admirers or of critics of Heinrich Sbrik, that when democracy was unceremoniously abolished across German-speaking central Europe during 1933 and 1934, he jumped in to condemn the development.

Like many others, inside and outside Austria, he was evidently persuaded by the economic crises and ensuing political polarisation that republican democracy had failed and probably needed to be sacrificed to the greater good.

It was reported that even Hitler was surprised by the warmth of the reception from the crowds as his car passed by on the way past the little town of his birth on the border, en route to Linz where he had attended school and where he spent the night with his team.

It is significant in terms of Heinrich Srbik's own career and his relationship with the régime that in 1938 he became one of the 814 National Socialist Party members elected to the 814 seat parliament in Berlin.

[12] A couple of weeks after the election, on 27 April 1938, Heinrich von Srbik delivered a speech in which he greeted the "Austrian annexation" as "the realization of a thousand year dream for the German people".

In the judgement of one admittedly relatively supportive commentator, it was as early as 1935, that when he was offered a prestigious and presumably well remunerated teaching chair in modern history in succession to Hermann Oncken at Berlin University, Srbik was "in all probability" dissuaded from accepting the post only after being told by a well-connected friend that the vacancy had arisen because Oncken had fallen victim to a party purge (backed up by a well-choreographed party media campaign) at the university.

[31] Meanwhile, the Vienna "Gauschulungsamt", which had direct oversight responsibilities for education on behalf of the regional governor, reported that Srbik never participated actively in local party group meetings and rejected the recommendation that he produce an evaluation of racial driving forces in history.

The HiKo position might have become an important job under more normal circumstances, but under the intensifying wartime pressures of the time it never became more than a sinecure/>[31] One source lists a further six learned academies of which he was at some point a member, these being those in Budapest, Bucharest, Göttingen, Lund, Paris and London.

By this time he had become terribly disillusioned by the failure of the government to recreate something more closely akin to his own idealistic "complete Germany" vision in the six years that had passed since the annexation.

In a listing produced in 1948 in the context of the "épuration" programme undertaken by the military administrators, he was classified as a "Lesser Offender" (Minderbelasteter) which lifted the threat of further imprisonment.

[4] He professed to see his time in Ehrwald as an opportunity for reflection and personal reassessment He wrote prodigiously, producing expanded and updated versions of several existing works.

Despite his stated intention to focus on reassessment, there is little slogan of any fundamental reappraisal of the "complete Germany" thesis with which he had long been associated and which twelve years of Hitler government had totally discredited among mainstream historians from Moscow to Chicago.

He continued to insist that his detailed formulation of it had owed absolutely nothing to "Nazi influences" and now that there was no risk from Gestapo surveillance he was openly resentful of the way in which the National Socialists had taken over the concept and distorted it to justify their monstrous actions and beliefs.