Selected Members Engelbert Pernerstorfer | Victor Adler | Richard von Kralik | Friedrich Eckstein Max von Gruber doctor, professor Gruber participated as an officer in the Circle, and like many members he was also a participant and officer within the Deutsche Leseverein. He was among the group members who signed the letter to Neitzsche indicating their readiness to dedicate themselves to his ideological vision. In his career as a doctor and researcher, he invented a method for detecting typhoid fever. Max Gruber wrote that for himself and others of his generation, there was a common bond of painfull adolescent rejection of the values of his parents and the standing political, economic, religious, and cultural structures of the Hapsburg Empire. For Gruber, and certainly for other members of the Circle, this common youthful bond remained a life-long foundation of values and thinking. On his 70th birthday, he made a statement that described an outlook probably common to all of the Circle: "To realize a noble humanity myself and to help others realize it -- that was actually, when I really consider it, always the ultimate aim of my longing. Problems of world view and morality have always concerned me more than all other things." He described himself as having throughout his life a restless despair at the disparity between ideal and reality. Engelbert Pernerstorfer | Victor Adler | Richard von Kralik | Friedrich Eckstein
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