Knoepfmacher, Hugo, 1890-1980

Hugo Knoepfmacher was born on June 1st, 1890 in Vienna, the son of Dr. Wilhelm Knoepfmacher and his wife Selma (née Grabower). Wilhelm was a successful attorney, an active member of the Jewish community, and a childhood friend of Sigmund Freud. Hugo had a younger sister, Hedwig. He attended the Erzherzog Rainer-Gymnasium in Vienna before studying law at the University of Vienna. During World War I he had to interrupt his studies in order to serve as a soldier for Austria. In 1916, Knoepfmacher was taken prisoner by the Russians and sent to a war prison camp in Siberia. There he met Hans Kohn, the future historian of nationalism, and started what became a life-long friendship. Together with a group of other Jewish prisoners Knoepfmacher and Kohn began to study Hebrew, translate Hebrew poetry, and form a Zionist group. Even after the end of the war, the prisoners of war were trapped in Siberia by the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War. Knoepfmacher eventually escaped in 1920, via Outer Mongolia and China. When he returned to Vienna he took up his legal studies again, receiving his doctoral degree in 1921.

Beginning in 1924, Knoepfmacher practiced law in Vienna in the office of his father until the Nazi occupation of Austria (1938). In 1936 he married Juliana Swarowsky (née Laszky), who already had a son, Anton Swarowsky, from her first marriage to Johann Swarowsky. Hugo and Juliana left Vienna in 1939 and went first to Oxford and London, and shortly thereafter to the United States, where they took up residence in New York City. After some initial difficulties, they both succeeded in establishing themselves professionally. Juliana Knoepfmacher became a psychoanalytic therapist; Hugo Knoepfmacher, after studying library science, held several positions as a librarian with the New York Public Library and the United Nations, finally obtaining a position as research analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, working there from 1952 until his retirement in 1964. In 1974, the year of the death of his wife, he went back to New York City.

During the 1950s and 1960s Hugo Knoepfmacher wrote a respectable amount of unpublished essays examining the political and historical developments after World War II. He continued his activity as a writer in his retirement, when he did some research, writing, and consulting work for the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization of McLean, Virginia, and worked with several scholarly projects, including encyclopedia entries for Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Oesterreichisches Biographisches Lexikon .

Hugo Knoepfmacher died in New York City on May 6, 1980.

From the guide to the Hugo Knoepfmacher Collection, 1865-1979, bulk 1920-1979, (Leo Baeck Institute)