Friedrich Hayek spouse Helene Bitterlich
Personal life
In August 1926, Hayek married Helen Berta Maria von Fritsch (1901–1960), a secretary at the civil service office where he worked. They had two children together. Upon the close of World War II, Hayek restarted a relationship with an old girlfriend, who had married since they first met, but kept it secret until 1948. Hayek and Fritsch divorced in July 1950 and he married his cousin Helene Bitterlich (1900–1996) just a few weeks later, after moving to Arkansas to take advantage of permissive divorce laws. His wife and children were offered settlement and compensation for accepting a divorce. The divorce caused some scandal at LSE, where certain academics refused to have anything to do with Hayek. In a 1978 interview to explain his actions, Hayek stated that he was unhappy in his first marriage and as his wife would not grant him a divorce he had taken steps to obtain one unilaterally.For a time after his divorce, Hayek rarely visited his children, but kept up more regular contact with them in his older years after moving to Europe. Hayek's son, Laurence Hayek (1934–2004) was a distinguished microbiologist. His daughter Christine was an entomologist at the British Museum of Natural History, and she cared for him during his last years, when he had declining health.Hayek had a lifelong interest in biology and was also concerned with ecology and environmental protection. After being awarded his Nobel Prize, he offered his name to be used for endorsements by World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon Society, and the National Trust, a British conservationist organisation. Evolutionary biology was simply one of his interests in natural sciences. Hayek also had an interest in epistemology, which he often applied to his own thinking, as a social scientist. He held that methodological differences in the social sciences and in natural sciences were key to understanding why incompetent policies are often allowed.Hayek was brought up in a non-religious setting and decided from age 15 that he was an agnostic.He died in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany, where he had lived since leaving Chicago in 1961. Despite his advanced age by the 1980s, he continued to write, even purportedly finishing a book, The Fatal Conceit, in 1988, although its actual authorship is unclear.
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