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Franz Borkenau

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Franz Borkenau was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. Borkenau is known as one of the pioneers of the totalitarianism theory. Borkenau was born in Vienna, the son of Judge Rudolf Pollack and Melanie Fürth. Borkenau's father was born Jewish but converted to Roman Catholicism to improve his career prospects, while his mother was Protestant.

 Borkenau was raised as a Catholic. Vienna was the capital of the vast multicultural and multiethnic Austrian empire covering much of Eastern Europe, and Borkenau grew up in a cosmopolitan city full of various peoples. As a teenager, he became part of a youth subculture that was greatly influenced by the theories of psychoanalysis as promoted by Sigmund Freud and Freud's protégé Siegfried Bernfeld. 

After graduating from the Schottengymnasium in 1918, Borkenau was conscripted into the Austrian army. Borkenau was still in training at the time that the Austrian empire was defeated, and the ancient House of Habsburg was deposed in October 1918. As a student at the University of Vienna, he studied law, history, economics, and philosophy. As a student, he was convinced that the cause of the war that ended the Austrian empire was capitalism, which led to became active in Communist groups.

Borkenau was typical of the Austrian middle class who had enjoyed what the novelist Stefan Zweig called the "golden age of security" before 1914 and found the world that came about after 1918 to be as disorientating as it was disturbing, leading to a search for a new "anchor" ideology to provide certainty in a dangerous and uncertain world.

Both of his parents disallowed him from embracing Communism. As a university student, he rose up to become chairman of the German Communist Students' League. Borkenau ended up transferring over to the University of Leipzig, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1924. Borkenau's Ph.D. thesis was on the Universal History, an 18th-century British universal history. Borkenau was always interested in devising grand theories that could explain everything that had happened in history and believed that he had found such a theory in Marxism.

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