Professor Dr. Salomon Frankfurter

Dr. Solomon Frankfurter was a prominent Austrian librarian, pedagogue classical philologist and archaeologist. He obtained his Ph.D. in Vienna, in 1883. The following year he became an officer of the Vienna University Library and its director from 1919 until 1923. He was also the author of numerous works and the uncle of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, who died in 1965.

Frankfurter Dies; Uncle of justice

Former Director of Library at Vienna University, a Noted Scholar, Retired in ‘35

Stricken abroad at 85

Academic and Cultural Leader Under Emperor and Republic was Imprisoned by Nazis

Professor Salomon Frankfurter, former director of the library of the Vienna University and an uncle of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter of Washington, D. C., died in Vienna on Sept. 24, according to word received here yesterday by the former’s son, Karl Frankfurter, at 67 Riverside Drive. His age was 85. He was planning to depart for the United States.

A prominent scholar, whose name was closely linked to the cultural and intellectual life of pre-Nazi Vienna, both in its imperial and republican dasy, Professor Frankfurter received under the Austrian monarchy the title of Imperial Court Counselor, and served under the Austrian democracy as adviser to the Ministries of Culture and Educatioin until the Hitler regime seized power. He was a knight of the Order of Franz Joseph, and the republic decorated him with the Austrian Order of Merit.

           Active in Many Fields

He was born on November 9, 1856, at Pressburg, Bratislava, a brother of Leopold Frankfurter, father of the Supreme Court justice, who emitrated to America in 1894. He studied with Mommsen and hartel in Berlin and Vienna, and specialized in philology, archaeology, pedagogics and Judaism. In all of these fields he wrote many articles, and as chief librarian in Vienna devoted his scientific knowledge to the expansion of that world-famous institute. He retired from that post in 1923.

When the Nazies took over Austria, Professor Frankfurter, together with other prominent Viennese, among them the late Dr. Sigmund Freud, was arrested and imprisoned. His cellmate was Ernst Kleinberg, a staff photographer for The New York Post, who later revealed the story. On March 26, 1938, through the efforts of our State Department, the elder Frankfurter’s release from jail was obtained and announced in Washington. Justice Frankfurter at the time was Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Professor Frankfurter married Sophie Chajes of Lemberg. She died in 1925. Two other children, Mrs. Emmy Fontana of Milan, Italy, and Elizabeth Frankfurter of this city, survive. – The New York Times, Oct 23, 1941