Fritz Sitte
Fritz Sitte (born August 30, 1924 in Krems an der Donau ; † January 7, 2007 in Villach ) was an Austrian journalist and author. He was best known in the 1970s and 1980s as an extreme journalist and author of numerous books and reports from crisis areas.
Life
Fritz Sitte, born in 1924 in Krems, Lower Austria , moved to his adopted home in Villach in 1938. As a schoolboy he worked as a local reporter for the Carinthian border call . After his service as a tank soldier in the Wehrmacht , he initially worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines until he began traveling all over the world in 1951. In 1967 he achieved his international breakthrough with his reports from the then civil war area in Yemen .
His work as a photo reporter has been published in numerous news magazines, for example in Life magazine , Time magazine , Paris Match , as well as in Observer , Schweizer Weltwoche and stern .
In 1972 Sitte published his first book "Flammenherd Angola ", for which he was awarded the Dr. Karl Renner Journalism Prize the following year. He was thought missing for eight months when, under adventurous circumstances and great personal danger , he advanced into the civil war in Angola to write a report on the UNITA rebels under the leadership of Jonas Savimbi . As early as 1968 he was also making ( 16mm ) feature films on his travels, his reports on the Unita rebels in Angola were broadcast on BBC , NBC and ZDF , for example .
As a freelance journalist, Sittes took up current issues relating to crisis areas around the world, which he also documented in books. In order to interview freedom fighters and representatives of the liberation movement in their home countries , he often undertook physical exertion and illegal journeys (with illegal border crossings). His reports are always carried by his personal experiences and inevitably by adventures on these trips, which has occasionally earned him the criticism of being "subjective" and an "adventurer", but he himself always rejected the classification as an "adventurer".
In addition to Angola and Yemen, Sitte also traveled to Chad , Sudan , Cambodia , Burma and Afghanistan, among others .
Awards
- 1973 Dr.-Karl-Renner-Publizistikpreis
- 1988 Culture Prize of the City of Villach
- 1995 professional title professor
- 1999 Great Decoration of Honor from the State of Carinthia
Publications
- Flame stove Angola . 1972
- Focus on Yemen . 1973
- Panic zone Panama . 1974
- Dirty oil . 1975
- Black Gods: Adventure in Suriname . 1976
- Inferno Black Africa. The west is losing a continent . 1977
- Adventure in our time . 1978
- Rebel state in the Burma jungle . 1979
- Pearls, smugglers, adventure . 1979
- I was with the Kurds. Eyewitness to a struggle for life . 1980
- Flight to Hell in Angola. The forgotten war . 1981
- The Khmer Rouge. Genocide in the Far East . 1982
- Question of fate Namibia . 1983
- Hot ice Antarctica . 1984
- I was in Nicaragua . 1985
- Bushman, shoot or die . 1986
- Yemen - curved dagger and petroleum . 1988
- Adventure in our world . 1989
- In the drug jungle . 1990
- Supertanker Alpha. World powers in the fight for oil . 1991
- Getting old but staying young . 1993
- Fritz Sitte very personally. From rascal to crisis reporter . 1994
- Bonzius . 1994
- Pictures of a crisis reporter . 1999
Web links
- Literature by and about Fritz Sitte in the catalog of the German National Library
- Fritz Sitte's website with the cover pictures and blurbs of his books
- Radio broadcast recording (Mp3 audio file) From day to day - Fritz Sitte, Austria's last adventurer , Helmut Feucht (interviewer), ORF Radio Austria 1, almost 30 minutes.
- Obituary on Villach.at
- Obituary on ORF.at
- Excerpt from the book Fritz Sitte: Fateful Question Namibia , Verlag Styria, Graz; Vienna; Cologne 1983, ISBN 3-222-11462-5
Individual evidence
- ↑ THE LETZTE ADVENTURER Journalist and photographer Fritz Sitte is dead. ORF , January 9, 2007, accessed on April 11, 2014 .
- ↑ from the blurb of his book, Fritz Sitte: Adventure in our time - A journalist risks head and collar , ECON-Verlag, Düsseldorf, Vienna, 1978, ISBN 3-430-18544-0
- ^ War correspondent with a worldwide reputation is dead , Wiener Zeitung of January 9, 2007
- ↑ http://www.kaernoel.at/cgi-bin/kaernoel/comax.pl?page=page.std;job=CENTER:articles.single_article;ID=2160
- ↑ Mp3 audio file Von Tag zu Tag - Fritz Sitte, Austria's last adventurer , Helmut Feucht (interviewer), ORF Radio Austria 1, about 30 minutes
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Custom, Fritz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian journalist and book author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 30, 1924 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Krems at the Donau |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 7, 2007 |
| Place of death | Villach |