THE DENIERS
YouTube premiere "From Kreisky's living room"
Robert Schindel in conversation with Wolfgang Maderthaner
DIE VERWEIGERER (©Wolfgang Benz)
Jewish-communist resistance - a republican history lesson
There are cycles, opinions, discourses and controversies in the memory of the resistance against Hitler. There are political, academic and emotional reasons for this. One area that is largely ignored in historiography is the resistance of Jewish communists.
The Austrian writer Robert Schindel was born on 4 April 1944 in Bad Hall near Linz and registered in the documents with the surname Soël. His parents, Gerti Schindel and René Hajek, Austrian communists of Jewish origin, had been smuggled into Austria from France in the summer of 1943 as "Alsatian foreign labourers" under the code names Susanne Soël and Pierre Lutz in order to set up a resistance group on behalf of the exiled Communist Party in Linz.
After the discovery of the mission in August 1944, the parents were deported to Auschwitz, the father was murdered in Dachau in March 1945, the mother survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, returned to Vienna in 1945 and found her son again with communist foster parents. He survived the National Socialist era in the Jewish hospital (Ferdinandstrasse, later Mohapelgasse/Tempelgasse).
Moderation Wolfgang Maderthaner, Historian, Association for the History of the Labour Movement
Robert Schindel attended primary school from 1950 to 1954, then the Bundesrealgymnasium in Vienna and began an apprenticeship as a bookseller at the Globus publishing house in Vienna in 1959, which he broke off to travel to Paris and work as a dishwasher in Sweden, among other places. In 1967, he completed his secondary school leaving certificate, began studying philosophy and was active in the student movement. Having grown up around the KPÖ and its youth organisations, Schindel was a party member from 1961 to 1967.
Schindel's writing has early roots in lyrical attempts in the late 1950s. In 1992, he published his debut novel „Gebürtig“ with Suhrkamp Verlag - one of the most important novels of post-war literature. In the mid-eighties, Schindel rejoined the Jewish Community.
In 2006, together with Rudolf Scholten, he founded the literature festival Literatur im Nebel in Heidenreichstein. From 2009 to 2012, he headed the Institute for Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts and has been a university lecturer there ever since. He has received numerous prizes for his literary work.