ABSTRACT
Legendary for controversies unleashed both as historian and publicist, Friedrich Heer has inspired a six-hundred-page biography. Anyone who knew Friedrich Heer will find the biography perturbing. Having written perhaps fifty thousand printed pages, Friedrich Heer at once invites and repels epitomizing. Friedrich Heer stands out among twentieth-century historians for having devoted a career to writing not treatises but anatomies. He wrote not one or two but eight or ten compilations, which juxtapose protagonists, quotations, and insights in mind-boggling profusion. Friedrich Heer wrote many anatomies. To non-native speakers of German, Friedrich Heer’s free association recalls the German language’s facility at compounding words. Just as that language allows disparate words to merge into unlikely new ones, so Friedrich Heer merged dispersed thoughts into unlikely insights. The reprint of Heer’s last Austria-book coincides with a revised edition of another classic on Austrian identity.
