Robert Graham Knight

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Robert Graham Knight (born December 18, 1952 in Stoke-on-Trent ) is a British historian and university professor.

Robert G. Knight studied in Cambridge and Würzburg before he attended the University of London ( London School of Economics ) in History ( International History doctorate).

His first research focus was on British foreign policy at the beginning of the Cold War , especially with regard to occupied post-war Austria . Later he dealt with the internal dynamics of Austria in connection with the legacy of National Socialism . In 1988 he published verbatim transcripts of the Austrian federal government, which dealt with questions of compensation for “ Aryanized ” Jewish property. The title "I am in favor of dragging it out" refers to a statement made by then Interior Minister Oskar Helmer and corresponded to the attitude of most of the politicians of the time.

During the Waldheim affair he published an article in The Times Literary Supplement on October 3, 1986 with the title "The Waldheim context: Austria and Nazism", in which he argued that the consolidation of the national consensus in Austria after the war could only be achieved by avoiding serious denazification and dealing with the past . Governments would always have been more willing to compensate former Nazis for losses caused by denazification than Jewish victims. The then Foreign Minister Peter Jankowitsch called these theses “hair-raising” and appealed - in vain - to 16 Austrian historians to refute them.

Another research focus was the British handover of Cossack associations to Soviet troops in 1945. In this area, he criticized a work by his historian colleague Nikolai Tolstoy . In the defamation process that Baron Aldington brought against them in 1989, Knight provided an expert opinion.

From 1998 to 2002 Knight was a member of the historians' commission of the Republic of Austria to deal with the "Aryanizations" during the Nazi era and to investigate the previous compensation.

In 2006 he lectured at the University of Glasgow . Since 2010 Knight has been a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies . He is a Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University .

He is an honorary research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London . In the summer semester of 2019 he was Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna .

In addition to articles in trade journals, Knight also published articles in The Guardian and the Süddeutsche Zeitung .

Publications

  • "I am in favor of dragging it out". Verbatim minutes of the Austrian Federal Government from 1945–52 on the compensation of the Jews. Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-610-08499-5 (2nd edition by Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2000, ISBN 978-3-205-99147-2 .)
  • as editor: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the European Cold War. Continuum, London / New York 2012, ISBN 978-1-4411-5027-1 .
  • Slavs in Post-Nazi Austria: Carinthian Slovenes and the Politics of Assimilation, 1945–1960. Bloomsbury Academic, London 2017, ISBN 978-1-4742-5890-6 (English).

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Fischer and Neisser suggest Robert Knight. In: wienerzeitung.at . December 4, 1998, Retrieved May 4, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Staff: Robert Knight. (No longer available online.) Loughborough University , archived from the original on January 16, 2018 ; accessed on May 4, 2019 .
  3. ^ Robert Knight: The Waldheim context: Austria and Nazism . In: The Times Literary Supplement . London October 3, 1986, p. 1083-1084 (English, article online in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Sir Peter Ustinov visiting professor in summer semester 2019. University of Vienna , accessed on May 4, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Knight, Robert Graham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH 18th December 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Stoke-on-Trent