Published in The Sydney Papers, Vol. 62, 2o24. See the video of the book launch on Tuesday, 7 May 2024, with Gerard Henderson.
I have a case of impostor syndrome tonight, because a week ago I was asked, “could you turn up to the launch I’m doing at Gerard Henderson’s office of this book”. That call came from Michael Danby. Later that day, I discovered he had been doubled booked. Then I got a call from Anne saying, “Could you do it?” So here I am.
Frank Knopfelmacher is someone I heard about, and thought about, as a young man. And when I thought about coming along tonight, my brother Shane said, “He is part of our youth.” I remember clipping out all the articles he published in the Nation Review. That was a political education for me. I remember giving this valuable archive to a friend of mine who, within a few weeks, was in an argumentative and what turned out a very difficult divorce. I wondered when should I paw back this valuable archive. I never did. It’s a great loss.
I was fascinated by Knopfelmacher, partly from doing political science and philosophy at the University of New South Wales. People like Donald Horne, Doug McCallum, and other people of that vintage such as Owen Harries, spoke about the man. I remember meeting him when he visited Mary and me on one occasion. I have no memory of what was said or who else was there on that night. But I do recall two great lines of Franta, as he was called. One of them concerned Geoffrey Blainey, who spoke at the launch of this book last week in Melbourne. Franta said, “I’ve been thinking about Blainey; he’s not really a racist. Have you been to Ballarat?” At that time, I’d not been to Ballarat. Knopfelmacher went on, “If you go there, that’s the old Australia, that what Blainey identifies with. And so, if you go to Ballarat, you can understand the rest of what he’s saying.” I thought that was interesting.
Another line that he used was, “Politics sometimes takes two hands. One for the handshake; the other you hold your stomach in.” Franta, as he was known to his friends and enemies alike, was a person who had the gift of the gab and a very serious message to impart. I remember some great lines from those Nation Review articles, which still stick in my memory, even though I’ve not been able to recover that archive. There was a reference to Manning Clark, who wrote a book Meeting Soviet Man. Franta wrote that Clark met Soviet man and did not find him wanting. Which was a marvellous expression that conveyed so much. He also had a great line about Germany getting revenge on the United States for two world war defeats in a row by exporting Bauhaus architects in their thousands.
On another occasion, I remember hearing from one of my colleagues in the Cronulla branch of the Labor Party, commenting about the interesting intellectual, Frank Knopfelmacher. He said there was this moment when Knofels was debating the Vietnam War. And his great bête noire was Professor Frederick May of the University of Sydney, a professor of Italian. May was one of his great antagonists when Knopfelmacher sought a position as a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Sydney. May lead an opposition of the academics at Sydney University, even though Knopfelmacher been appointed to the position. It was overturned by the Professorial board and eventually the Senate, even though the Department of Philosophy intended to employ him. Debating Frederick May on television, Knopfelmacher said, “If I can reply to my learned friend, the professor of Double Dutch at the University of Sydney …” It went on like that.
That gives you a glimpse of the dynamic personality who may be created one or two enemies along the way. I found it interesting when doing a bit of research before coming here, about that controversy in 1965. was astonished by the turmoil it caused at the University of Sydney and elsewhere. His was a big name, “Knopfelmacher”, a headline in the papers in Sydney at that time.
Why was he interesting? I recently was involved in the publication of this book of Owen Harries’ essays. Harries wrote about his political education. In his book too of Knofels’ writings, there’s a great piece by Knopfelmacher on his own political development. I urge you to read that. Returning to Harries, coming to Australia as a Fabian socialist, Owen found our society more interesting than he expected. He wondered whether it might be a bit provincial and boring. But he discovered in the early 1950s, as he put it, “the politics was strange and harsh, involving Catholics and communists as major actors in a way that was more European than British”.
When I read that piece by Harries, I thought immediately of people like Richard Krygier, who was the publisher of Quadrant, and Knopfelmacher. They were lively, interesting characters, witnesses to the catastrophe of Europe in the twentieth century, with Communism and Nazism. Knopfelmacher significantly, towards the end of his life, was asked, “What have you achieved?” He replied, “Who knows?” Then he added, “But I educated a generation, a whole generation. If I have a lasting achievement, it is that.” I hope that was and is true. Because, today, we face new battles and new controversies. I wish that there was a Knopfelmacher on the TV screen, on the radio and in print, expressing his opposition to the kind of stuff that we are now seeing. Especially with the rise of antisemitism and the brutal hatred of sensible academic teaching of the canon of Western civilisation.
Knopfelmacher had a great insight. He believed that it important to teach his students there was no connection between communist concentration camp regimes and the theories and doctrines of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Conveying that kind of understanding is a battle, which we fight throughout our lives. In the Sydney University case against Knopfelmacher in 1965, I was astonished to read the attacks on Knopfelmacher, the ‘dirty linen’ that was put out on the ‘washing line’ in various articles at the time. Professor May, along with other people, claimed that Knopfelmacher wasn’t smart enough, that he was slow on his feet. He didn’t footnote his articles adequately. Here was May, no expert in the field that Knopfelmacher was involved in, making academic criticisms.
Knopfelmacher returned to the fray, as you might imagine he would. He wrote a letter in The Canberra Times on 4 May 1965 in response to May. He said, “I’ve never claimed to be the sort of chap who writes papers on three neglected letters of Edmund Burke, and I’m not likely to become one.” He also remarked that Professor May “thinks that footnotes are a necessary condition of fertility in political philosophy.”
Knopfelmacher was a wonderful debater. In this book of his collected writings, we see some of the best. For me, the most significant and interesting essay of them all is The Consequences of Israel. That was published in Quadrant in November 1967. You could imagine him writing it very soon after the Six Day War in June, and then getting it published. This article is incredible, because he made predictions as to what the consequences of the win would be. Franta wrote that there would be changes in Jewish political alignment as the left changed their minds on Israel and the Jewish people. For the gentlemen of the right, he wrote, “there’s nothing to despise among the farmers and soldiers of Israel. Military colleges all over the world will be honoured if General Dayan attends.” He also predicted that the left would no longer see the pathetic wandering Jew as part of their alignment, that they would see tough-minded Israelis as a party that they would abandon. Knopfelmacher, whenever given a choice between being deadly accurate and being memorable, never hesitated.
In that same article, Franta had another great line as to how the Russians might be feeling despair over all that military equipment that they had given and financed for the Egyptians and the other Arab armies It was like “giving bicycles to kangaroos”, he said. On another occasion, he wrote about Norman Podhoretz, who wrote a truly dreadful memoir when he was young, called Making It. He wrote a better memoir about the changes in his political alignment as he moved more to the right in the 1970s. Knopfelmacher had a great line in an article broadly praising Podhoretz. But he added, about Podhoretz’s book Breaking Ranks, “He could not really break ranks, because he never marched. He just hung around on the sidewalk, vaguely cheering, or booing as the fashion of the day indicated.”
There is an important message to insist on concerning Knopfelmacher – who had the kindly appearance of an old music teacher, and the manner of a tough politician, as Sam Lipski once said. He was controversial, admired and hated, partly because of his anti-communism but, more particularly, his effective anti-communism. In a review of a book published by Sidney Hook, the head of the philosophy department at New York University, Knopfelmacher made the point that this man had sacrificed a lot of his life, trying to educate the young in proper ways, about totalitarianism. That was also a statement that could be made about him.
Knopfelmacher, in the last essay published in this book, made the comment about himself as being “a near miraculous survivor, now of declining years, past three score and ten, he has only one remaining duty, to warn.” He made some admirable statements in the 1970s about the refugees from Indo China. He talked about Australia’s obligation, having fought in the Vietnam War, not to allow those refugees to drown like rats. He believed we had a moral obligation, and he wanted to warn us about the nature of the threat the country faced, and the nature of the totalitarian nations that had emerged in Southeast Asia. (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam). He insisted we had a moral obligation.
So, Frank Knopfelmacher was a person I once heard about. A person I eventually got to meet. I have now read nearly everything he ever published. What a fantastic person to honour tonight. I congratulate the family on putting together this book and giving us all a reminder of who he was. And a prod to think harder about the challenges we face. And to think what Knopfelmacher might have said if he were now amongst us.
