Frank Knopfelmacher

Frank Knopfelmacher (Vienna, February 3, 1923 - Melbourne, May 17, 1995), Australian-domiciled political philosopher and psychologist, the subject of nationally famous controversies during the 1960s and 1970s.

A youthful card-carrying Communist while working on a Palestine kibbutz, Knopfelmacher - often nicknamed "Franta" throughout his life - spent World War II as a member of the Free Czech Forces attached to the British Army. The Nazis rounded up and slew every last one of his relatives. Once Prague (to which he had returned in 1945) had been taken over by those Communists on whom reading Arthur Koestler’s "Darkness at Noon" had soured him, he used money from his family estate to bribe officials into letting him flee to England. He thereafter detested the Soviet Empire while continuing to revere Marx the man (whom as late as July 1983 he defended in a "Quadrant" article).

At the University of Bristol Knopfelmacher completed his doctorate in philosophy and psychology. In 1955 he moved to Melbourne, and took up a lectureship at Melbourne University’s Psychology Department.

Few outside professional circles had heard of him until 1965, when he applied and was approved for a post in Political Philosophy at Sydney University, but had his appointment blocked - in what became a front-page "cause célèbre" - by the University Senate. The Senate considered Knopfelmacher’s published criticisms of Moscow and its apologists to be unduly strong meat. He had written of Melbourne leftists that "like rats, they wish to operate in the dark" ("Twentieth Century" magazine, Volume 18, 1964). Those firmly supporting him included Sydney philosopher David Malet Armstrong, who called Knopfelmacher "a man fatally ahead of his time by a few years. A short time afterwards academic rebels were saying pretty much anything they liked, how they liked, about their opponents. If anyone tried to censure them or impede their careers as a result of this, the shouts that their academic freedom had been violated were deafening. To Knopfelmacher, however ... Saki’s saying applied: it is the first Christian martyr who gets the hungriest lion."

A more controversial view of Knopfelmacher came from another champion of his, B. A. Santamaria, who stated (in his 1969 book "Point of View") that compared with Knopfelmacher's opponents, "Pontius Pilate was an amateur!". This implied comparison of Knopfelmacher's importance with Christ's has met with little support among most theologians.

During the late 1960s Knopfelmacher (still lecturing at Melbourne University) became "de facto" academic leader of those - usually associated with the Santamaria-controlled Peace With Freedom group - who favoured continuing Australian military involvement in the Vietnam War. His courage could not be denied; more contentious was his automatic equation of the need for combat against the Vietcong with the need for Australian conscription, especially given the abuses to which conscription by lottery lent itself. (Fellow political philosopher and anti-Communist Rafe Champion deplored this equation in the June 1988 "Quadrant".) In any case, when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, Peace With Freedom’s "raison d’être" (already weakened when the last Australian troops came home in 1972) ceased to exist.

With that cessation, Knopfelmacher’s own long-standing intellectual unpredictability became more pronounced. He turned vehemently against Santamaria; in "The Age" on April 7, 1984, he likened Santamaria’s treatment of trade-union opponents to Stalin’s treatment of Trotskyists. The previous year ("Quadrant", October 1983) he had directed some of his most sarcastic prose against Santamaria's supporters among pro-family Catholic activists.

Nor did his self-contradictions end there. In 1977 he had proclaimed (via an article in the short-lived Sydney magazine "Nation Review") that "Australia is a deeply racist nation", and lauded Indo-Chinese refugee arrivals, viewing their acceptance by the immigration authorities as a debt of honour which Australia owed to its defeated allies. Within five years he executed a complete "volte-face": condemning multiculturalism in sharp terms, calling it an "ethnic cauldron" ("The Bulletin", March 24, 1981) and "a banana republic of squabbling and mutually resentful expatriated mini-cultures, each with its own special bunch of ethnic ... führers" (Robert Manne [ed.] , "The New Conservatism in Australia", St Lucia, Queensland, 1982). From 1979 he denounced (notably in letters to Britain's "Encounter" magazine) John Bennett, secretary of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, for disseminating Holocaust denial literature. Yet by 1989 he was exchanging vituperation with those Jews in public life who publicly advocated a national war crimes statute (see W. D. Rubinstein, "The Jews in Australia" [Melbourne, 1991] .)

For all his admiration of Koestler and Orwell, Knopfelmacher wrote far less than either man: his hardcover bibliography amounted to one 1968 reflection, "Intellectuals and Politics". (A promised full-length memoir remains in manuscript, though a brief account of his political education appeared in the 1981 anthology "Twenty-Five Years of Quadrant".) His protracted, usually free-wheeling, invariably slanderous late-night telephone monologues - visited alike upon associates and, more often, antagonists - retained a mythic status for decades among Australian intellectuals, not least by their superabundant four-letter words, which evoked the heyday of Kenneth Tynan and Berkeley's Filthy Speech Movement.

Having in his old age revived with some success his long-defunct friendship with Santamaria (who from the early 1990s deliberately sought reconciliations with ex-Cabinet Minister Clyde Cameron and other erstwhile foes), Knopfelmacher died after incurring severe injuries in a road accident following a meeting with Václav Havel. Obituarists likened him to Primo Levi and to Dr. Johnson.

His first wife - fellow refugee Jarmila "Jacka" Pick, whom he had married in 1944 - succumbed in 1968 to an especially cruel and protracted form of multiple sclerosis. In 1970 Knopfelmacher wed Australian teacher Susan Robinson; the couple had two children.

Further reading

*Frank Knopfelmacher, (1968), "Intellectuals and Politics: And Other Essays" Nelson, Sydney
*James Franklin, (2003) "Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia" Macleay Press, Sydney