JOHN E. TASHJEAN
291
ning,
and which I rounded out in my article in
The China Quarterly.
But an introduction to Borkenau's thought must begin with the mi–
lieu of his formative impulses.
* * *
Speaking of the German Communist leaders Ruth Fischer and
Arkady Maslow, R. Zimmermann, in
Leninbund(1978),
says of them
that their generation, born around 1890, consisted of professional
people or unemployed academics - paid by the Party to be orga–
nizers or editors. This applies to Borkenau. How had he come to be
a Comintern man and leader of Communist university students in
Germany in the twenties?
There is a pithy passage in the second volume of Spengler's
Decline oj the West
about the flow of talent from the provinces to
the capital which gives life to any tradition of high statecraft. But
Spengler did not consider the special case of an ethnically mixed em–
pire, such as the Austro-Hungarian one, where Borkenau was born
in 1900 .
Coming to Vienna from Hungary and Rumania, Heinrich Pol–
lak and Henrietta Schapira met and married. They wereJewish, but
they baptized their firstborn Rudolf Karl Adolf. He had a judicial
and academic career and became Franz's father. Rudolf's youngest
brother, Bernhard Otto, grew up to become, in Lowenthal's words,
"the famous Hofrat Pollak, chie. of the political police under succes–
sive regimes." This was as important to Borkenau as his father's
journalistic success: he co-founded the
N'eu.e Wiener Tagblatt
and pio–
neered the reporting of court cases. Certainly, Franz must have been
influenced by conversations with or between his journalist grand–
father, jurist father, and political-police uncle, and by their different
foci on public affairs.
Young Franz, whose mother was a Catholic from Frankfurt on
Main, attended the Benedictines'
Schotten-gymnasium
from 1910 to
1918. His grades were good, and so was his conduct. As the very
name of the gymnasium harks back to the
Scoti
or Irish missionaries
in pre-Carolingian Austria, local and medieval themes probably
gave some historic depth to familial discussions of public affairs. The
Scoti
show up prominently in
End and Beginning.
While young Borkenau was completing his secondary educa-
