BRUNO KREISKY AND HIS MULTI-LAYERED CHARACTERISTICS

On the 112th birthday of Bruno Kreisky

BRUNO KREISKY AND HIS MULTI-LAYERED CHARACTERISTICS
Attempts at a biographical dialectic

Commemorative Lecture: Professor Oliver Rathkolb
Professor at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna; author, editor and co-editor of numerous publications on topics of Austrian contemporary, cultural and media history; Chairman of the International Academic Advisory Board of the House of European History (European Parliament, Brussels)

Follow-up conversation with Christa Zöchling, journalist and publicist

Bruno Kreisky (1911-1990): The »best second man« as the most popular Federal Chancellor of the Second Republic.

Bruno Kreisky should never have been allowed to become leader of the SPÖ or Chancellor of the Republic of Austria - too many domestic political traditions stood in the way of these functions: he was of Jewish origin and agnostic, an intellectual from a bourgeois family, a revolutionary socialist, convicted "high traitor" to the Schuschnigg dictatorship and Gestapo prisoner, in exile in Sweden from 1938 to 1950, lived in an upper-class villa, was a cosmopolitan and a simple Austrian patriot.

It is no coincidence that Franz Schubert's »Unfinished« was one of Kreisky's favourite works and that he summed it up in 1983, »that we have the courage to question ourselves again and again and realise that everything we start remains unfinished. But others would have to try again«.

Speech by Prof Dr Oliver Rathkolb on the 112th birthday of Bruno Kreisky