Introduction

One of the more dramatic images that Hayek has left us from his long life—he was born in Vienna in 1899 and died in Freiburg, Germany in 1992—was the preparation he made in 1939 for a possible escape from Nazi-controlled Austria which he wanted to visit before the outbreak of war. Although by then he was a British subject and could travel with a British passport, "I didn't want to be suspected of having any special privileges with the Germans", he remembered. "I knew those mountains so well that I could just walk out. I knew [the mountains in Carinthia] well enough, even better than the Vorarlberg-Switzerland boundary". ¹ Those boundaries, indeed all of the boundaries of Eastern Europe which had to be established following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, lay at the core of much of the horror inflicted on the twentieth century.