Obituary for Josef Ehmer

November 7 th , 1948, in the village of Gschwandt near Gmunden on the Traunsee in Upper Austria, died unexpectedly on May 10 th , 2023, at the age of 75.He was one of the leading European social and economic historians of his generation, professor in Salzburg and Vienna and member of large formal and informal research networks -including more than twenty years as member on the Editorial board of Jahrbuch fr Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook.Josef Ehmer's life was unusual, as he himself revealed in his self-reflective autobiographical sketch Parallel Lives published in 2023. 1 This concise, insightful, and inspiring account leaves the reader with the feeling of an inspiring dinner conversation with a fascinating colleague: Until the early 1990s, Ehmer was both an academic historian and a political activist.His parents were rural workers and active communists.After 1934, during the Austrofascist period, his father repeatedly served politically motivated prison sentences.His mother was active in the communist resistance and was abused in a Nazi prison for so-called collaboration.The prison was attacked by an Allied air-raid and the SS men in charge fired at the female inmates, who tried to escape from the burning barracks.After these years of hardship, Ehmer's parents considered their late-born second son as a special gift, and he grew up in a loving proletarian family that taught him to read before going to school and enabled him to get to know much more than his home village through communist networks.After finishing high school in Gmunden in 1968, Ehmer began to study history and German studies at the University of Vienna to become a teacher.Instead, he finished a doctorate in history under the supervision of Michael Mitterauer, who guided his interest towards historical methods.His thesis was about family structure and work organization in industrializing Vienna. 2 Especially during his early career, Ehmer's focus was influenced by communist ideology

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