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Books, Manuscripts and Music from Medieval to Modern

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 232. F.A. Hayek | Autograph manuscript personal and family memoir, 1988-89.

F.A. Hayek | Autograph manuscript personal and family memoir, 1988-89

Lot Closed

July 19, 01:50 PM GMT

Estimate

10,000 - 15,000 GBP

Lot Details

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F.A. Hayek


Autograph manuscript personal and family memoirs


addressed to his grandchildren, recalling his own childhood and passing on his knowledge of family history, several short fragments, in English and German, 12 pages, A4, dated 3 December 1988-9 May 1989, in a manila envelope ("Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen für Christine und/oder Lorenz und seine Nachkommen begonnen Dezember 1988 Partly in English")


"...I remember vividly how the outbreak of war in 1914 meant for me the fifteen year old the end of the normal world or even the collapse of a civilisation one had taken for granted. It was, appalingly [sic], at first a wave of enthusiasm by which the very young were captured... Tall as I was for my age, I was often treated as if I ought already [to] be in uniform and was felt like destined to fight, although my life was inevitably dominated by school and home...Ich staune immer wieder, wie lebendig heute noch gerade die Erinnerungen von vor achtzig oder fünfundsiebzig Jahren also von vor 1914! - für mich sind - obwohl das stabilere Leben von damals sich mehr als das normale eingeprägt hat als die ständigen Veränderungen die ich seit etwa meinem 15ten Jahr durchmachen musste?..."


A UNIQUE AND UNPUBLISHED RECORD OF THE GREAT ECONOMIST'S PERSONAL MEMORIES. These notes were written for the benefit of his family when Hayek was in his late 80s, and the pages in English (his grandchildren's native tongue) have a stilted style very characteristic of a German-speaker, almost certainly preserving much more of Hayek's spoken voice than his formal published writings. He describes summers spent in his grandmother's country home in Lower Styria and visits to his grandfather in his grand apartment in Vienna. He recalls his father, a medical doctor who was much more interested in botany, as having been a man who "though perhaps not a very original, was a very active and widely read thinker with a good memory". His father had taken up mountain climbing and photography under the influence of his mother. This was an idyllic childhood in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, growing up within a family who had lived comfortably as administrators and merchants under generations of Habsburg rule.


Hayek was not a good student at school, and his education was interrupted in 1917 when he was called up for military service. He spent a year serving on the Italian Front from November 1917 (about which he here provides no recollections), but the Empire's collapse at the end of the war saw the disappearance of the world of his childhood. He also recalls his early university studies, when, in contrast to schooldays, he found himself "an easy master of all the tomes". These charming notes provide a very distinct insight into one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.