Figure of Hermann Heller is intimately linked to the history of Germany between the two world wars, however, is not German, Wilhelmine Reich citizen but a subject of His Catholic Majesty Francis Joseph, ruler of the Habsburg Empire birth. Nace, in fact, an der Olsa Teschen, a small town located between what is now the Czech Republic and the territories of the then vast and powerful German Reich. His family is Jewish bourgeois origin and religion. In 1915, Heller concludes the study of law in Graz, Austria's second city and home to a renowned university (there had taught until shortly before Gumplowicz Ludwig and teach there years after Joseph Schumpeter). In 1914 he had enlisted as a volunteer, like many contemporaries of the monarchy and the dismemberment of the empire. In this reduced to a sort of stump, gnawed on all sides by the territorial claims of the bordering countries, the state downgraded to Alpenrepublik (as defined by Joseph Roth), Heller can no longer be recognized Austria. This is common to an entire generation of veterans of the Great War and, in general, many subjects of the Habsburg Empire, which suddenly feel deprived of their political identity and even, in extreme, existential cases.
Unlike many of his countrymen of a lost kingdom, Roth and Musil, for example, that remained forever Heimatlosen, no country, Heller does not seem to have missed after the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, immediately find another city that membership matters: such is Weimar Germany. It will then understand how strong is the link that binds the identity of Heller to the first German republic.