Ernst Karl Winter

Hello and Welcome!

My name is Mari McCarville, and I created this site as part of my thesis for my master’s degree in German Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I have spent the past three years researching my family heritage and learning about my great grandfather, Ernst Karl Winter (1895-1959), an Austrian sociologist and politician who served as the vice mayor in Vienna from 1934 to 1936.

I first became interested in Ernst Karl Winter’s life and work when his daughter, my great aunt, started sending me family trees, pictures, letters, and other documents. I wanted to learn more, so I traveled to archives in Vienna and visited family members around the world. I collected, digitized, and organized objects from my travels to make my own personal, digital archive about the Winter family. Then, I chose 22 of these objects to use as teaching materials for high school or college-level German language classes. This site is meant to display these objects. The site is not meant to frame Ernst Karl Winter as a hero or a villain, but rather as one figure to learn about and from.

Who was Ernst Karl Winter?

Ernst Karl Winter was known for his outspoken Catholicism, his self-published political newspaper called “Wiener Politische Blätter,” and his efforts to unite rival Austrian political parties against German National Socialism. When Hitler marched into Austria in 1938, Winter and his family fled the country through Switzerland to England. Eventually, the Winters made their way to the United States where they landed at Ellis Island and found a home in Tenafly, New Jersey. In 1939, Winter attempted to establish an Austrian American Center for Austrians in exile, and he began giving lectures at the New York School for Social Research on topics ranging from Cistercian monks to federalism to the economics and sociology of medieval towns. Over the next 14 years, Winter continuously tried to return to Austria, but to no avail. Even after Austria declared independence from Nazi Germany in 1945, Winter struggled to find ways to finance the journey for himself or his family, and his connections in Vienna could not promise him means of employment or housing. When he did manage to return to Austria in 1954, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Vienna, and he continued to write essays about Austrian history, politics, and society until he died in 1959. Today, Winter is commemorated in Vienna by a street named Ernst-Karl-Winter-Weg, a memorial plaque in front of the 18th housing district, and he is featured in a permanent exhibition in the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance. You can read more about Ernst Karl Winter and his family at Austria-Forum. If you would like to view books and manuscripts by Ernst Karl Winter online, go to NetInteractive Documents.

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