Hans Thalberg

Hans Thalberg (born May 4, 1916 in Vienna ; † July 15, 2003 ibid) was an Austrian diplomat and resistance fighter. He belonged to the staff and closest circle of friends of the Foreign Minister and later Chancellor Bruno Kreisky , whose Middle East policy he was able to play a key role.

Live and act

Son of a respected middle-class Jewish family, Thalberg fled to France under dramatic circumstances after the “ Anschluss ” in 1938, while his parents, his sister and almost all of his relatives, who had stayed in Vienna, fell victim to the Holocaust . In 1942 he came illegally to Switzerland, where he founded the Exil-Verein Austria with a small group of Austrian students , established contacts with groups of emigrants and took part in resistance campaigns. After returning home in February 1946, he was accepted into the diplomatic service and immediately sent to Washington, where he helped rebuild the Austrian embassy and was responsible for press, information and cultural work until 1955. One of the most delicate tasks at the time, as he noted in his memoirs, was to dissuade the Western leadership from its reservations about neutrality - in the eyes of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles "a sin against the spirit of the free world".

Entrusted with the preparation of the establishment of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Organization) in Vienna , Thalberg headed the Austrian delegation in Berlin from 1958–1962. After four years as head of the Department of Documentation and Information at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he became ambassador to Mexico in 1966 . As such, he was co-accredited in Cuba and the Central American Republics.

After establishing diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China , Thalberg was appointed ambassador to Beijing in 1971. He managed to win over the Chinese leadership for the election of Kurt Waldheim as UN Secretary General. Commissioned in 1973 as special advisor to Federal Chancellor Kreisky to coordinate the information policy of the federal government, Thalberg renounced the post of foreign minister offered to him in 1974 after Rudolf Kirchschläger was elected Federal President, in order, in his own words, not to “strain the philosemitism of the Austrians”.

From 1975 to 1981 Thalberg was ambassador to Switzerland .

After his retirement, Thalberg took over the management of the Austrian Institute for International Politics (OIIP) in Laxenburg near Vienna. In his 1984 memoir Von der Kunst, Österreicher zu sein , the top diplomat dealt with the "vicious domestic political bickering". As a “liberal close to the SPÖ” he had “met with cold rejection from the entire ÖVP team” at Ballhausplatz, “with a mistrust that often took on insulting forms”. At the same time he warned emphatically against any renewed susceptibility to "German national experiments". Austria's chance to remain a peace factor depends largely on the ability to “keep Germany's influence politically, economically and culturally within bounds”.

In 1988 Thalberg founded the Austria and Europe initiative with the ex-foreign ministers Erich Bielka and Erwin Lanc ; In doing so, he rejected the assertions of the Federal Government at the time about the compatibility of neutrality and EC accession as a "fatal misjudgment". He expressed himself in despair about the “decline and dismantling” of Austrian foreign policy in the 1990s. He was harshly judged on what he believed to be a “catastrophic partisanship” of Vienna in the Yugoslavia conflict. All that remains for him, according to Hans Thalberg in 1995, is that “the EU will prevent Austrians from being as stupid as they really are”.

Thalberg was buried at the Döblinger Friedhof . His daughter is the journalist Jacqueline Thalberg .

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Thalberg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Interviews, radio reports and recordings with Hans Thalberg in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library

predecessor	Office	successor
Erich felt	Austrian Ambassador to Mexico (with Cuba , Costa Rica , El Salvador , Guatemala , Honduras , Nicaragua , Panama ) 1966–1971	Eugen Buresch
-	Austrian ambassador to China 1971–1973	Franz Helmut Leitner
?	Austrian ambassador to Switzerland 1975–1981	?