Friedrich katz biography

Transnational History between Vienna, Mexico, Berlin and Chicago: Towards an Intellectual Biography of Friedrich Katz

Generously funded by the Austrian Zukunftsfonds and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies and carried out in cooperation with the University of Chicago, this project investigates the intellectual biography of Vienna-born historian Friedrich Katz.

It focuses on the development of Katz as an engaged intellectual and academic who escaped the Nazis to Mexico, joined the Austrian Communist Party after WWII, worked in East Berlin until 1968 and established himself as the leading specialist on Mexican history at the University of Chicago, where he died in 2010.

The archive at the Friedrich Katz Center for Mexican Studies and the university archives in Berlin, Vienna and Mexico hold the most important sources for this research.

Born in Vienna in 1927 and died in Chicago in 2010, professor Friedrich Katz was not only his era's foremost specialist in the hi