Thus Illich refuses to offer practical programs for political and social reform, preferring in his writings to critique what is wrong. By uncovering the "convivial" practices of the past, he offers a glimpse of the future.
Illich was born in Vienna, Austria, on 4 September 1926. His father, Ivan Peter Illich (also spelled Iliæ), was an engineer from a well-to-do Roman Catholic family from Croatia in what was then Yugoslavia, and his mother, Ellen (neé Regenstreif-Ortlieb) Illich, was from a Sephardic Jewish family that had settled in Heidelberg, Germany. Her grandfather had grown up in Texas and was a U.S. citizen. Illich grew up in Vienna, spending summers at his father's family home on the Dalmatian coast in Yugoslavia and frequently traveling around Europe. From 1936 to 1941 he attended the Piarstengymnasium in Vienna. In 1941 he was expelled from school because his mother's Jewish heritage, according to the anti-Semitic laws of the Nazi regime imposed after the Anschluss of 1938, made him ineligible to attend school. The family, which included Illich's twin younger brothers, Sascha Alex and Michael (born in 1928), fled to Florence, Italy, where Illich continued his studies, passing the state examinations at the Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci in 1942.
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