Franz Kreuzer

This article deals with the Austrian politician. An article about the xylograph and painter of the same name can be found under Franz Kreuzer (painter) .

Moderator (left) at Andreas Rett's appearance at the Vienna Lectures in Vienna City Hall, 1987

Franz Kreuzer (born January 18, 1929 in Vienna ; † April 14, 2015 there ) was an Austrian journalist and politician ( SPÖ ).

journalist

Franz Kreuzer worked for many years at the Arbeiter-Zeitung , the central organ of Austrian social democracy, which is published in Vienna . When editor-in-chief Oscar Pollak was deposed by the party leadership under Bruno Pittermann in January 1962 , Kreuzer moved to the top of the daily newspaper. He became known to wider circles at the time when the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (known as ORF from 1967 ) held editors-in-chief discussions on current political issues on television. Kreuzer appeared in these programs together with Hugo Portisch and Otto Schulmeister and did not shy away from calling the future Federal Chancellor Josef Klaus on television a rivet .

In 1967 Bruno Kreisky became party chairman of the SPÖ. Kreuzer had supported him in replacing Pittermann in the party chairmanship, but was nevertheless replaced by Kreisky with Paul Blau as the new AZ editor-in-chief. Kreisky wanted to satisfy the trade unionists from whose ranks Blau came.

Franz Kreuzer switched to the state ORF and became editor-in-chief of the current service under the new general manager Gerd Bacher , who was elected in 1967 . This attracted a lot of attention at the time because it broke traditional political camp thinking. (Bacher hired, for example, the social democrat Helmut Zilk as television director, the arch-conservative Alfons Dalma as ORF editor-in-chief, and again Franz Kreuzer, previously editor-in-chief of the central red organ AZ, as TV editor-in-chief.)

In 1974 Kreisky succeeded in reducing the strong position of ORF general manager; The new general manager was the administrative lawyer Otto Oberhammer (until Bacher's return in 1978) . At his suggestion, Kreuzer was appointed TV director of FS 2 (today's name ORF 2) on October 14, 1974, and remained so until 1978. On October 5, 1976, the discussion series Club 2 , founded by Franz Kreuzer and Kuno Knöbl , was broadcast for the first time on FS 2 .

In 1984/85 Franz Kreuzer, again under General Director Gerd Bacher, was Information Director of Austrian television, then he was appointed to the government by Federal Chancellor Fred Sinowatz as Health and Environment Minister.

Politician

From December 17, 1985 to January 21, 1987, Franz Kreuzer was Federal Minister for Health and Environmental Protection. He was appointed to the Sinowatz federal government as the successor to Kurt Steyrer , as he was running for the office of Federal President and had resigned from his ministerial office. Kreuzer also belonged to the federal government Vranitzky I in the same function. During his tenure as Minister of Health, the measures that had to be taken to protect the population after the Chernobyl disaster fell . Kreuzer was criticized because his communications on the subject were not too dramatic.

According to politics

Afterwards, Kreuzer worked as a freelance journalist, among other things as head of the Club 2 editorial team at ORF. He also emerged as a book author.

Many of Franz Kreuzer's talk programs have also been published as books, including his conversations with Karl Popper , Konrad Lorenz , Friedrich von Hayek , Max Perutz , Ralf Dahrendorf , Arnold Keyserling , Hoimar von Ditfurth , Leopold Kohr , Egon Matzner , Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Erwin Ringel .

He became the first president of the "Karl-Popper-Foundation Klagenfurt" founded in 1997 by the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt , for which he moderated several events between 1999 and 2003. Kreuzer wrote several biographical works about the social democratic mayor of Vienna and later Federal President Franz Jonas .

The Viennese daily Kurier published its obituary on April 18, 2015 under the title An intellectual who shaped the ORF.

Fonts (selection)

• Franz Jonas - The way of the Federal President , Vienna 1965.
• with Konrad Lorenz : Life is learning , a conversation about the life's work of the Nobel Prize winner, Piper Munich 1981, ISBN 3-492-10223-9 .
• with Karl Popper : Open Society - Open Universe , a conversation about the life's work of the philosopher, Piper Munich 1986, ISBN 3-492-00776-7 .
• Nobel Prize for God , Chances and Limits of Bionics, Wonders and Riddles of Evolution, Open and Locked Gates of Knowledge, For the 2005 World Exhibition in Nagoya in Japan, Kremayr & Scheriau Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-218-00736-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Felix Czeike : Historisches Lexikon Wien. Volume 1: A – Da. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-218-00543-4 , p. 149 (entry Arbeiter-Zeitung ).
2. ↑ Harald Fidler: Österreichs Medienwelt from A to Z , Falter Verlag, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-85439-415-0 , p. 53.
3. ^ ORF report on the death of Kreuzer
4. ↑ Desiree Hebenstreit, Stefan Maurer, Doris Neumann-Rieser: Franz Kreuzer , University of Vienna , website kk-diskurse.univie.ac.at
5. ^ Website of the daily newspaper Kurier , Vienna

Web links

Commons : Franz Kreuzer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Franz Kreuzer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Franz Kreuzer in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Franz Kreuzer. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)
• Radio reports by and with Franz Kreuzer in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library
• Franz Kreuzer on the website of the Austrian Parliament