THE founder of Sussex University’s centre for German-Jewish studies has died at 81.

Professor Edward Timms OBE was best known for his two-volume doctoral thesis titled Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Crisis in Habsburg Vienna.

The first volume was published in 1986 and it studies the life and work of renowned Austrian scholar Karl Kraus and his critique of the Habsburg family, the First World War and the horrors of Nazism.

The award-winning academic’s dissertation was immediately recognised as towering over all other studies of Kraus.

The book was translated into German and was made required reading in its English version in at least one Austrian university.

Prof Timms was born in Sunningdale, Berkshire, in 1937 and was the fourth of nine children.

His father, John Timms, was a vicar.

Prof Timms attended Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham. From 1956 he studied modern languages at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he concentrated on German.

He taught in Nuremberg and in 1963 he was appointed an assistant lecturer at the newly founded University of Sussex.

There, he met Saime Goksu, a Turkish theoretical physicist and later a psychoanalyst.

Prof Timms flew to Turkey to propose to her and they married in 1966. The couple adopted two children from Turkey, Yusuf in 1974 and Daphne in 1976. They then adopted the orphaned son of one of their friends.

Two years later, Prof Timms returned to Cambridge as an assistant lecturer and fellow of Caius.

His focus on Austria led to his starting an Austrian Study Group at Cambridge.

He returned to Sussex in 1992 as a professor of German.

Prof Timms had always been interested in the history of Jews in Austria and Germany.

Along with the support of two vice-chancellors, Gordon Conway and Alasdair Smith, he founded the Centre for German-Jewish Studies in 1994.

Prof Timms was assisted by a network of supporters from the Jewish community in London, Brighton and further afield.

The centre aimed to illuminate the history of Jewish emancipation, assimilation and persecution in German-speaking countries.

Prof Timms built up an archive of recorded stories of surviving refugees fleeing to the UK under Hitler’s persecution.

He also co-published numerous essays, notably the German-Jewish dilemma: from the enlightenment to the Shoah, in 1995.

His hard work in building up the centre paid off as he helped the university to secure a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to compile a database of refugee archives in Britain.

A particularly fascinating collection was the Arnold Daghani archive, which the university has held since 1987 without knowing its real value.

It has about 6,000 works of art and notebooks by a survivor of the Nazi slave labour camp at Mikhailovka, south west Ukraine.

Prof Timms, along with art historian Deborah Schultz, compiled the documents into several publications, including Memories of Mikhailovka: Arnold Daghani’s slave labour camp diary in 2007.

In 2005, he published the second volume of Karl Kraus, titled The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika.

Prof Timm’s remarkable academic achievements were not hindered by his suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Along with author Fred Brigham, he accomplished a seemingly impossible translation of Kraus’s monster drama The Last Days of Mankind, published by Yale in 2015.

For this, Prof Timms won the Modern Language Association of America’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation.

He retired from directing the Centre for German-Jewish Studies in 2003 and became a research professor in history until 2017.

He received the Austrian State Prize for the history of the social sciences in 2002, the Austrian Cross of Honour for arts and sciences in 2008, and the Decoration of Honour in Gold for services to Vienna in 2013.

Prof Timms, who lived in Sussex, was awarded an OBE for his services to scholarship in 2005 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006.

To his friends and family he was a man with humility, self-control, patience and kindness – and who enjoyed socialising.

He died on November 21.