Ernst Karl Winter

Ernst Karl Winter (1895 to 1959) was an Austrian sociologist, journalist and politician, born in Vienna and raised in a socially committed Catholic milieu. After studying law and political science, with courses in sociology and history, he took a doctorate in 1922; a planned habilitation in sociology failed under pressure from German nationalist circles. He championed a social monarchy and an independent Austrian identity through the Österreichische Aktion and his own publishing house, and was consistently anti-Nazi. In 1934 he became Third Vice Mayor of Vienna and organised Aktion Winter, an attempt to build a bridge between the political left and right against Nazism. He lost the post in 1936, escaped to the United States in 1938 and became a professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research, and he died in 1959.