Emerich K. Francis

Emerich Francis (born Emerich Franzis: 27 June 1906 – 14 January 1994) was an Austrian-American sociologist.

This meant that despite being born in what became, after 1918, Czechoslovakia, he was nevertheless able to retain his Austrian citizenship after the postwar break-up of Austria-Hungary.

After passing his school final exams he was briefly apprenticed as a typesetter.

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.

He openly rejected his Jewish provenance, presenting himself instead as a committed Roman Catholic and German nationalist.

At one point, taking advantage of his vocational training during the 1920s, he was able to take skilled work as a typesetter.

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.

He then studied for two terms during 1924/25 at the University of Innsbruck where he embarked on courses at the Philosophy and Arts ("Philosophisch-Kulturwissenschaften") Faculties.

In 1926 he moved on to Prague where he studied a wide range of subjects, including Germanistics, Philosophy, Pedagogy, Psychology, Social History and what then counted as Mainstream History.

During the 1930s his work had a German-nationalist focus, and dealt in particular with ethnic and religious minorities.

His student years were concluded with a period at the University of Münster where, subsequently, he took a junior academic post as a research assistant at the "German Institute for Foreign Trade" ("... Institut für Auslandkunde") which he would retain for three years, between 1930 and 1933.

Meanwhile, in 1930 he received his doctorate from Prague University for a dissertation on the educational aspects of Bernard Bolzano's work.

As a postgraduate student in Prague he also supported himself both through journalism and by working as a home tutor to families from the Bohemian nobility.

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.

During 1935 Emerich Francis married Gisela Schweizer from nearby Leitmeritz.

In September 1938 the region was incorporated into the newly enlarged German state as the "Reichsgau Sudetenland".

In 1938 Francis was still insisting on his Catholicism but by early 1939, unable any longer to conceal his Jewish provenance, Emerich Francis fled to the South Tyrol (Alto Adige), which since 1919 had been part of Italy.

From Italy he made his way to England.

In England, Francis lived for some months in seclusion at Prinknash Abbey, in a Benedictine monastery near Gloucester.

One source indicates that he was hoping to become a monk or a priest.

(He is also identified in some sources under the pseudonym that he sometimes used as "Junius".) 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.

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 which was linguistically and ethnically still, at this stage, a German town, despite having been politically part of Czechoslovakia since 1919.

The couple's son was born in March 1939, but Emerich Francis only met his boy in 1947 when the family were reunited in the United States.

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".

Those hastily arrested included several thousand Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

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.

As the summer progressed the internment policy became progressively more controversial with members of the British political class: many foreign internees were shipped overseas.

Francis was one of those now sent for internment to Sherbrooke, Quebec.

He was released in 1942, initially employed as an "agricultural worker", and ending up at the trappist monastery in the St. Norbert neighbourhood of Winnipeg, capital of the mid-western Canadian province of Manitoba.

Several sources describe his professional career over the next couple of years as "adventurous".

He was employed variously as an orphanage care assistant, a gardner and a bank clerk.

After 1945 his contributions became more theoretical and less overtly political.

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.

Both his parents had converted from Judaism before he was born: that was something of which he remained unaware through much of his childhood.

He grew up in a Catholic home in Innsbruck, however.

During 1945 Francis briefly taught German at United College (today the University of Winnipeg)). He also helped out at the Political sciences department. As matters turned out, this marked a return to the academic life for which he had been trained before 1933. Later that year the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba asked Francis to undertake a detailed study of one of the ethnic groups in Manitoba. 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. Since his release from internment in 1942 Francis had already come across various Mennonite communities. He was able to receive help from others, notably the scholar-businessman (and "fervent Mennonite") Ted Friesen, who dedicated a considerable amount of time to driving Francis round the countryside, between the East and West Mennonite "reserves".

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.

He also continued to teach German and assist the embryonic sociology department at the university.

While undertaking his study Francis was able to cultivate the Winnipeg historian William Lewis Morton, with whom he had much in common personally and politically.

Morton became an ally in the search to try and find a publisher for the substantial book that the research work could support.