Josef Staribacher

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Josef Staribacher (standing, third from left) in the Kreisky I cabinet (1970)

Josef Staribacher (born March 25, 1921 in Vienna ; † January 4, 2014 there ) was an Austrian politician ( SPÖ ) and a longstanding member of the government of Kreisky I to Kreisky IV .

Life

Josef Staribacher learned the trade of stone and offset printer and made in evening classes the Matura .

During the Austrofascism he was temporarily imprisoned for political activity, after the "Anschluss" to the Third Reich he was imprisoned for nine months in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939/1940 and was then drafted into the armed forces. Shortly before he was sent to the front as an auxiliary sickbearer because he was not worthy of armed service, he married his wife Gertrude. After a serious war wound in autumn 1941, he was able to use the remaining war years to study political science in Groningen in the then German-occupied Netherlands and graduated in February 1945 with an economics degree .

From 1945 he worked in the Chamber for Workers and Employees in Vienna. In parallel, he studied at the Law and Political Science Faculty of the University of Vienna to the promotion of Dr. juris 1952. From 1968 to 1970, as director of the Chamber of Commerce, he was the highest-ranking employee of the Vienna Chamber of Labor.

From 1958 on he was chairman-deputy of the union of the food and beverage workers, from 1960 to 1989 he was its chairman and then honorary chairman (since 1990 "union of agrarian food enjoyment"). On May 9, 2006, the union of agri-food-enjoyment merged with the metal-textile union to form the new metal-textile-food union (GMTN). Since then, Staribacher has been honorary chairman of the GMTN.

From 1967 to 1971 he was a member of the board of directors of the International Union of Food and Beverage Workers' Unions. Since 1960 he has been a member of the federal board of the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions (ÖGB) and since 1983 a member of the ÖGB Presidium. In 1981 he was awarded the Columbus Prize of Honor by the Association of German Travel Journalists VDRJ for his services to sustainable and environmentally friendly tourism.

From 1961 to 1983 he was a member of the National Council and from 1970 to 1983 he was Federal Minister for Trade, Commerce and Industry in all four cabinets headed by Bruno Kreisky . The “ oil crisis ” after the 1973 Yom Kippur War also fell during this time as minister .

Due to the unexpected shortage of petrol, diesel and heating oil, Josef Staribacher issued an ordinance on a “car-free day”. Every owner of a car had to mark the self-selected weekday on which the vehicle was not allowed to be operated with a "sticker" on the windshield of the car, on which the day was noted. Violations of this ordinance resulted in fines of up to 30,000 schillings for the offender.

This measure earned the minister the nickname “Pickerl-Pepi” (in the Federal Republic of Germany “Etiketten-Joe”). On the other hand, he was called Happy Pepi because of his positive thinking and the mostly positive development of tourism to Austria , which he had to comment on as chairman of the Austrian tourism advertising .

Less successful undertakings - such as the construction of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant and the planning of the Hainburg power station on the Danube - underpinned the "Energy Minister" with his responsibility for an efficient energy supply, according to the obituary of the ORF , the Austrian national broadcaster, on the web.

On April 24, 1983, the regular National Council election took place. After eleven and a half years, the SPÖ no longer achieved an absolute majority. The government therefore resigned on the same evening; Kreisky left the future chancellorship to the previous Minister of Education, Fred Sinowatz . Staribacher's ministerial activities ended on May 24, 1983, when the federal government of Sinowatz , an SPÖ- FPÖ coalition, was appointed. In it, Norbert Steger (FPÖ) succeeded Staribacher as Minister of Economics.

Staribacher died on January 4, 2014 as a result of pneumonia . He was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery . He left around 15,000 pages of diary entries in the Bruno Kreisky Archive.

His second son, Andreas Staribacher , was Minister of Finance for a short time in 1995/1996 in the Vranitzky IV federal government , his first son Wolfgang Staribacher is a musician.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Conrad Seidl: Josef Staribacher 1921–2014 , in: Der Standard daily newspaper , Vienna, January 7, 2014, p. 7, and almost identical on the website of the newspaper from January 5, 2014.
  2. ^ "Happy Pepi" Josef Staribacher dead , message on the ORF website from January 5, 2014
  3. ↑ Dieter Kindermann: Kreisky's "Happy Pepi" , in: Daily newspaper Kronen Zeitung , Vienna, July 1, 2012, Krone bunt , p. 28 f.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Staribacher, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian politician (SPÖ), member of the National Council
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 4th January 2014
Place of death Vienna