Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi

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Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (2013)

Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (born January 15, 1932 in Prague ) is an Austrian journalist and editor.

Live and act

Coudenhove-Kalergi spent her childhood as a German-speaking citizen of Czechoslovakia. Her family lived in a villa in Prague- Smíchov , an industrial and working-class district. In 1939, when she was seven years old, the Wehrmacht marched into Prague.

Since she was expelled from her homeland as a Prague German in 1945, she has mostly lived in Austria. In 1951 she began studying interpreting at the University of Vienna , then changed subjects, but broke off. She worked as a journalist for the daily newspaper Die Presse (employed in the local editorial office in 1956), Neues Österreich , after its employment in 1967 for the Arbeiter-Zeitung (taken by Bruno Kreisky ) and for the courier and the news magazine profil . She became known to the wider public since the mid-1970s as a member of the ORF 's Eastern European editorial team, promoted by Gerd Bacher , initially on the radio, later also on television. Her sensitive reports for Austrian radio dealt with the countries that were still part of the so-called Eastern Bloc at the time , especially Poland and Czechoslovakia , where she was temporarily stationed as an ORF correspondent.

Coudenhove-Kalergi married the reform communist Franz Marek in 1975 . She dedicated the chapter The Love of My Life to him in her memoirs published in 2013 .

She is co-founder of the citizens' initiative “ Land der Menschen ”.

After the fall of the communist dictatorships, she returned to her native land. From 1991 to 1995 she worked as an ORF correspondent in Prague. Today she writes as a freelance journalist primarily for Czech and Austrian newspapers and is the editor of several books with texts on the past and present of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. She has been a member of the editorial board of Datum magazine since 2005 .

In 2005 she was a member of the jury at the first Peace Rose Awards .

family

Barbara Coudenhove- Kalergi's grandfather Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1859–1906), Austro-Hungarian diplomat, was married to Mitsuko Aoyama (1874–1941). The two had seven children (Hans, Richard, Gerolf, Elisabeth, called Elsa , Olga, Ida and Karl Heinrich, called Ery ). Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi did not get to know her paternal grandmother, although she lived in Mödling near Vienna and only died when Barbara was nine years old. Barbara's other grandfather was Count Hans Pálffy from the Hungarian aristocratic family who had acquired the Breznitz estate in southern Bohemia , where Barbara spent several summers of her childhood.

Barbara's father was the lawyer and Japanologist Gerolf Coudenhove-Kalergi (1896–1978), her mother was Sophie Pálffy . The father's brother was Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi , founder of the Pan-Europa movement . Although the nobility in the Czechoslovak Republic had been abolished in December 1918, Barbara's parents, as she writes, later belonged to the German-speaking Bohemian nobility in Prague , a fairly closed group that also has little contact with German civil society. Her brothers are Hans Heinrich (* 1927), Jakob (* 1928) and the painter Michael (1937–2018), who was born six years after her . The Coudenhove-Kalergi family, who spoke Czech, professed to be German in 1939 because of their mother tongue, without having National Socialists or resistance fighters in their ranks; Gerolf Coudenhove-Kalergi worked for a short time as a translator for Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath .

On May 8, 1945, after the Prague uprising against the declining Nazi regime, the family, like many other Prague Germans, was advised by the Czech police to join German troops withdrawing towards Bavaria. At the same time, radical Czechs were already hunting down the now outlawed Germans in the streets, so that there was no realistic alternative to leaving.

Awards

Works

Web links

Commons : Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss : Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life. Saur, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-598-10087-6 , p. 475, digitized
  2. ↑ Home is Everywhere , p. 26; see section literature
  3. ↑ orf.at: painter Michael Coudenhove-Kalergi is dead . Article from January 5, 2019, accessed on January 5, 2019.
  4. ^ Honorary award for Coudenhove-Kalergi on ORF October 15, accessed on October 15, 2013
  5. ^ The book favorites 2013 ( Memento from May 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved May 21, 2015.
  6. ↑ diepresse.com - Journalists of the year 2013 . Article dated February 13, 2014, accessed September 12, 2015.
  7. ↑ Journalist Awards: Media Lion - Winner . Retrieved September 9, 2015.
  8. ↑ Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book 2019 to Martin Schürz. January 9, 2020, accessed on January 9, 2020 (Austrian German).
personal data
SURNAME Coudenhove-Kalergi, Barbara
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech-Austrian journalist and editor
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague