Born in Magdeburg, he 1925 took up Philosophy, Psychology, Ethnology, and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin.
As an enemy of the Nazis, he could not obtain his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) in the Reich, so he emigrated to Switzerland in 1937 and passed the examination at the university of Zürich, 1938.
He never gave up cultural studies writing the first sociology of fashion, but at the same time he was a German pioneer of empirical methods, as against the ideological biases of many contemporal colleagues.
[1] Besides, he was en engaged liberal writer and essayist, and translated the novelist Giovanni Verga from the Italian into German.
The René König Society (René-König-Gesellschaft) is publishing a complete edition of his writings.