BRUNO KREISKY AND HIS MULTI-LAYERED CHARACTERISTICS

To mark the 112th birthday of Bruno Kreisky, a festive event was held at the Kreisky Forum on 23 January 2023. Oliver Rathkolb, historian and Kreisky biographer, paid tribute to "Bruno Kreisky and his multi-layered characteristics" and in his speech, "Attempts at a biographical dialectic":

"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«."

Following his lecture, Olver Rathkolb held a discussion with the journalist Christa Zöchling.