Where was Christian von Ehrenfels born?
875526#1
Christian von Ehrenfels was born on 20 June 1859 in Rodaun near Vienna and grew up at his father's castle Brunn am Walde in Lower Austria. He joined secondary school in Krems and first studied at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur in Vienna and then changed to the Universität Wien.
Christian von Ehrenfels
5857487#0
Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels (born 28 April 1901 in Prague - died 7 February 1980 in Neckargemünd, Heidelberg, Germany) was a prominent Muslim of Austrian origin.
Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels
5857487#1
Omar, or as he later chose, Umar Rolf Ehrenfels was born 28 April 1901 in Prague, Austria. He was baptised Rolf Werner Leopold von Ehrenfels. His father was Roman Catholic Baron Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) professor of philosophy at the German part of Prague University. He is known as the founder of the Gestalt theory. His mother was Emma von Ehrenfels (1862–1946) born André, in Bratislava (Pressburg). In her parental home both German and Hungarian was spoken. During World War I she worked for the Red Cross caring for Hungarian wounded soldiers. Widowed of her first marriage she brought her daughter Elfriede (Elfi) Hartmann into their home. The second daughter, known as the author Imma von Bodmershof (1895–1983), was born in Graz. Rolf as the only son of Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels inherited the title but he had to discard it according to new Austrian laws in 1920. As a convert to Islam he took on the name Omar or Umar, kept Rolf and omitted the others. 1932–37 he was a student of social anthropology (Völkerkunde) at Vienna University and got a doctorate there. At the Nazi occupation of Austria, Anschluss, 13 March 1938, he emigrated to India. There he lived until 1961, since 1949 as lecturer, later professor of social anthropology at the University of Madras. Umar Rolf Ehrenfels died 7 February 1980 in Neckargemuend, Germany having been guest professor at Heidelberg University and co- founder of its South Asia Institute 1961-71. Elfriede von Bodmershof (1894–1982) was his wife 1925–1948. The couple was separated due to the Nazi occupation of 1938. Later Ehrenfels married the French social scientist Mireille Abeille (1924–2007).
Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels
875526#25
In the 1890s, Ehrenfels-who was a passionate fan of Richard Wagner-befriended a fellow Wagnerite, the British born German "völkisch" thinker Houston Stewart Chamberlain, "the Evangelist of Race". Ehrenfels, who despite being a Wagnerite and a friend of Chamberlain's did not generally associate himself with the more extreme racist and anti-Semitic wing of the Wagner movement that Chamberlain came to be the leader of. Ehrenfels never accepted Chamberlain's anti-Semitism, but he was influenced by Chamberlain's theory that the Aryan race was the greatest and best race of them all. Chamberlain was later to have an affair with Ehrenfels's wife, Baroness Emma von Ehrenfels.
Christian von Ehrenfels
875526#16
The American historian Edward Ross Dickinson wrote the "pieces" of Ehrenfels's thinking were all mainstream, but the way he brought them together was "idiosyncratic". Dickinson suggested that these ideas were rooted in Ehrenfels's own tormented sexuality as he was both fascinated/repulsed by sex. Ehrenfels had been brought up in an extremely conservative, sexually repressive Roman Catholic family, and from his teenage years onwards, always felt deep shame and guilt about his sexual desires. Despite his obsession with sex, Ehrenfels was enraged by pornography (which he wanted to see ruthlessly stamped out) and by the "indecent" popular culture of Vienna, which he saw as far too sexualized. Ehrenfels was especially offended by the "Animierkneipen" ("hostess bar"), a type of popular bar in Austria where the buxom waitresses wore very low-cut dresses and were encouraged to flirt with the male customers in order to get them to buy more drinks; in the "Animierkneipen", the waitresses were paid commissions based on their nightly sales of alcohol. Ehrenfels was deeply disgusted by the sight of women flaunting their sexuality to manipulate men, and wanted the "Animierkneipen" banned. Besides for that, Ehrenfels complained constantly about "indecent puns" used by ordinary people, the "courtesan style" in modern fashion and by the "pornography of the humorous weeklies, in comic songs, farces and operettas".
Christian von Ehrenfels
5857487#3
For a period Rolf lived in Berlin. His first wife Ellen Feld can be seen as she has a part in a film, Das grosse Sehnen , for which Rolf wrote the manuscript. Rolf and his friend Willy Bodmershof worked on it together and shot it partly in a studio in Berlin, partly on location in Istanbul in 1923. On this trip, partly by bicycle, Rolf's interest in Islam was kindled. Also Christian von Ehrenfels appears in it, as a wise man. There are still photos in Ehrenfels archive, Lichtenau. The film is now in the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. The film was reviewed by Kurt Bauchwitz as press clippings in the Ehrenfels archive show. Kurt was one of the intellectual Jews in the Berlin Wilmersdorf area. With him Rolf Ehrenfels developed a friendship for life. Kurt called himself Roy C Bates when he had escaped to the US after 1933. Their relationship is documented in the Roy C Bates papers in the Grenander Collections at Albany University, USA.
Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels
5857487#10
Reiss' argumentation builds on his theory that there was a need for "the family´s de- Nazification". This can be compared to documented facts visible also on the dust jacket of Umar Rolf Ehrenfels' "The Light Continent" (1960). "Escaping the Hitler terror when the Nazis occupied Austria, Dr. U.R. Ehrenfels, born at Prague in 1901, took refuge in India in 1939." After respect to his father Christian we are informed of travels to the East and studies. "/In Vienna/ Ehrenfels became founder- president of Der Orientbund, an Afro-Asian students' federation." After a trip to India 1932- 33 "he went back to become the co- editor of "Gerechtigkeit" (justice) in Vienna, a journal which stood for the integrity of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and for Human Rights when Italy invaded that country." The book has a printed dedication: "In memoriam the victims of Sharpeville and Lunda" and to his wife Mireille called Mie. 
Tom Reiss did not go deep enough into the documents shown to him when he visited Lichtenau in 1998. "De- Nazification" was a British invention that all prisoners of internment camps had to go through after 1945. Also Jews who had escaped to India to save themselves from Holocaust were exposed to the process. Not all succeeded. Facts about this are not on the Internet. It seems to be a taboo subject to historians. Reiss solves a "mystery" by turning victims of Nazism into Nazists.
Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels
875526#6
Ehrenfels argued in numerous cultural-scientific and sexual-political writings against the cultural harmfulness of monogamy and for the utopia of a polygynian social order. He defended the opinion that monogamy would hinder a Darwinistic reproduction-logic and procreation-selection, which would have a devastating effect on society in a cultural-biological way and therefore monogamy should be combated. With those theories, Ehrenfels exposed himself to massive criticism, because he offered with his theories unimaginable thoughts to contemporary Western conventions. The basis of Ehrenfels's thinking about a new sexual order were expressed in a series of essays published in several academic journals in Germany and Austria between 1902-1910. In his essays, Ehrenfels began with the argument that men are not naturally monogamous, and that monogamy was something that had come to Europe with Christianity. Ehrenfels's starting point was that with many species of animals such as whales, walruses, elephants, lions, etc, the strongest male has a harem, which for him was sufficient proof that this was what nature had intended for humanity. Ehrenfels stated through monogamy had some useful functions such as the "iron discipline" it imposed on European men, on the whole Europeans had suffered terribly from the unnatural condition of monogamy, which had seriously interfered with the Darwinian progress of ensuring the survival of the fittest (Ehrenfels was an avid Social Darwinist). Ehrenfels believed polygamy was what nature had intended for men as it allowed the "fittest" men to father as many children as possible with as many women as possible in a process of "virile selection".
Christian von Ehrenfels
875526#2
There he studied philosophy, was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong, promoted under supervision of Meinong, following him after his move to the Karl-Franzens-Universität (Graz), in 1885 on the topic of "Größenrelationen und Zahlen. Eine psychologische Studie" ("Relations of magnitude and numbers. A psychological study"). He obtained his habilitiation in 1888 in Vienna with the work "Über Fühlen und Wollen" ("On feeling and willing"). From 1896 to 1929 he was professor of philosophy at the German university of Prague. Interested in his lectures were among others Max Brod, Franz Kafka and Felix Weltsch.
Christian von Ehrenfels
875526#21
Dickinson noted Ehrenfels's vision of humanity was a simplistic one, in which men fought and struggled to pass on their genes by impregnating as many women as possible. The existence of homosexuality and bi-sexuality posed a major problem for Ehrenfels's view of humanity. In 1897, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first gay rights group in not only Germany, but also the world was founded. One of the founders of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist and gay rights advocate, was a well known figure in the German-speaking world in the early 20th century and his theories were much debated. In 1899, Hirschfeld had argued in an essay: "that in all mental and physical characteristics there are only gradual, quantitative differences between men and women, that between them, in every respect, there are all sorts of mixed forms in extraordinary diversity". Hirschfeld's theories about varieties of human sexuality ranging from heterosexual to bisexual to homosexual and all of which were equally valid, posed a major for Ehrenfels. Ehrenfels simply dismissed everything Hirschfeld had to say out of hand, saying that homosexuality was a case of moral degeneration caused by a few "biologically degenerate homosexuals" who seduced otherwise "healthy boys" into their lifestyle. Ehrenfels could not accept Hirschfeld's theory that some people were born gay as it contradicted his view of male sexuality as an aggressive drive to pass on one's genes too much.
Christian von Ehrenfels