HAYEK, Friedrich August von.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Autograph manuscript memoir. A unique and unpublished manuscript memoir by the elderly Hayek, reflecting on his childhood and family history, passed down to his daughter Christine and son Laurence. Any extensive manuscript material in Hayek's hand is very rare on the market - this is perhaps the most substantial and personal manuscript remaining in private hands.Hayek wrote the account when he was 89 - "Ich staune immer wieder, wie lebendig heute noch gerade die Erinnerungen von vor achtzig oder fünfundsiebzig Jahren also von vor 1914!" (translated: "I'm always amazed at how vivid the memories from eighty or seventy-five years ago, that is, before 1914, are still alive today!"). Starting "for you and later descendants in Family Hayek", the manuscript is in both Hayek's mother tongue of German and his adopted English. He describes childhood summers spent in his grandmother's country home in Lower Styria and visits to his grandfather's grand apartment in Vienna. He recalls his father, a medical doctor who was much more interested in botany, as a man who "though perhaps not a very original, was a very active and widely read thinker with a good memory". Hayek presents this as 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.This peaceful life was broken by the outbreak of the First World War. "I remember vividly how the outbreak of war in

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