Univ.-Prof. Dr. August Maria Knoll

The Viennese August Maria Knoll experiences childhood and youth in the underlying Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. He studies state sciences after the Matura at the Realgymnasium at the school brothers at the University of Vienna. The encounter with the Catholic social reformer Anton Orel [1881–1959], in whose Christian young worker movement he enters in 1919 and here with the ideas of Karl von Vogelsang [1818–1890], the most important Catholic social reformer in the 19th century, is a pioneer in his later career. century, known. In the same year he joined the student association Thuiskonia Vienna and 1920 the student association Nibelungia.

In 1923, August Maria Knoll received his doctorate with the dissertation “Karl Freiherr von Vogelsang als Nachfahr der Romantik” as Dr. rer. pol. With the Nibelungen Ernst Karl Winter, Alfred Missong, Wilhelm Schmid and Hans Karl Frhr. Zeßner von Spitzenberg he participated in the foundation of the Austrian Action in 1926. In 1932 he is the private secretary of Ignaz Seipel in his last year of life.

After his religious sociological habilitation in 1933 “The interest in the Scholastik” begins his teaching as an ordination for sociology at the University of Vienna. He is completely in the service of social reorganization. So also as editor-in-chief of the “Wiener Arbeitspresse” in the forward publishing house and as employees of various social-political working groups.

In 1938, he is immediately expelled from the University and receives no teaching. With his family he has a fair existence, supported by ecclesiastical and noble idols. Together with Ferdinand Habl and Josef Müller-Fembeck, he contributes to the so-called Austrian resistance movement. “Resistance Hospital” where he helps to produce fake X-ray images and to exhibit pain certificates. He also maintains strong contact with military resistance circles and the Karl Gruber group, which has built a secret transmitter in the Hungarian Guard.

From youth he struggles for the connection of religious thoughts with social concerns and says of himself: “Because in the gymnasium, the social question was to me a concept and experience. The first impulses came from Bebel and Marx. Their anti-religious affect threatened me like the anti-revolutionary in the Christian-social and ecclesial circles. ‘

After the war he can resume his teaching activity, in 1946 he becomes a university professor and in 1950 the first ordination for sociology at the University of Vienna.