Robert Stumpfl was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on 6 June 1904. His father was a senior official in the Foreign Ministry of Austria-Hungary. He studied English, German and Scandinavian at the universities of Vienna and Kiel, gaining his Ph.D. at Vienna in 1926 under the supervision of Rudolf Much. His dissertation was on Protestant theatre in Austria during the Reformation (16th century). In the 1920s the prospects for an academic career in Austria were dim, and Stumpfl subsequently lectured in German at the University of Edinburgh.
