Imre Békessy

Imre Békessy (born November 13, 1887 in Budapest , † before March 17, 1951 in Budapest; Germanized also Emmerich Bekessy ) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and publisher who used unscrupulous methods to publish an early tabloid in Austria.

Life

Békessy came from a Jewish family, but converted to Protestant Christianity. His son Hans Habe (born 1911) also became a journalist and was also a writer.

In 1919 Bèkessy moved to Vienna - probably to avoid a military court conviction for extortion (according to another version, because he had offered himself to the regime of the Hungarian Soviet Republic Béla Kuns as a journalist ) - and was naturalized in Austria in 1923. This decision was made by the Governor of Vienna, Karl Seitz , even though Police President Johann Schober had drawn attention to the allegations (extortion, defamation, fraud) against Békessy in Hungary.

In Vienna he published the daily newspaper Die Stunden from 1923 , one of the country's first tabloids. It was broadly designed with many pictures and produced numerous scandal and disclosure reports , but also represented a democratic political line. Békessy's magazine Die Bühne, founded in 1924, took a similar line . Until 1926, the editor-in-chief of the hour was Karl Tschuppik, who is known as a serious journalist . The staff of the sheet included u. a. Anton Kuh , Franz Blei , Alexander Nadas and - at the age of 18 - the later film director Billy Wilder .

Békessy was an extremely controversial figure: his most prominent opponent was the writer Karl Kraus , who repeatedly attacked him in his magazine Die Fackel , accusing him of unscrupulousness and extortionate methods. His sentence “Get out of Vienna with the villain!”, Often exclaimed at the end of lectures, quickly became a popular phrase. On the other hand, Békessy was not only courted by social democratic politicians at times, because he - with this dubious form of ostentatious pseudo-modernity - did not shy away from attacking taboos, and his benevolence was expected to benefit journalists. Békessy spoke of journalistic freedom in the capitalist newspaper business and of the fact that certain distances could be covered together with socialism .

Békessy's journalistic influence initially ensured that the number of his opponents remained relatively small. What was later nicknamed revolver journalism (the revolver stood for the threat of publication) came first as a fresh innovation. In the course of a court case in which he appeared as a plaintiff against "defamation", he testified: The newspaper is not a moral institution .

Ernst Spitz worked for the lesson , but said among colleagues that the paper was corrupt; it even blackmailed simple coffee house owners. According to Spitz, this statement was heard by the management through Billy Wilder; Spitz was fired. 1926 attacked Spitz in his book Békessys revolver the extortionate methods of hours to -Verlags. Friedrich Austerlitz supported the Békessy criticism in the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung .

Now the public prosecutor intervened. The head of advertising acquisition of the hour , Ernst Ely, was arrested for extortion, but no trial followed. Since the owners and financiers of Kronos Verlag, to which the hour belonged, Siegmund Bosel and Camillo Castiglioni , had lost large parts of their assets in currency speculations, the financing of Békessy's papers collapsed. In addition, Békessy threatened proceedings in the course of the investigation against Ernst Ely. He therefore did not return to Vienna from a spa stay in France, sold his shares in Kronos Verlag in 1926 to a consortium under the leadership of Vernay Verlag AG and settled first in Paris, later in Hungary, where he again in the thirties worked as a journalist and newspaper editor. From 1938 he lived in exile in Switzerland in Geneva and finally emigrated to the USA in 1940.

Karl Kraus caricatured Imre Békessy in his 1928 drama The Insurmountable in the character of Barkassy . Békessy himself retaliated at the same time with the publication of a periodical under the title "Békessys Panoptikum", in which he sharply attacked Karl Kraus himself. After Békessy's departure, the lesson was published by the publicist Josef C. Wirth and others until it was discontinued in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by the National Socialists. In 1946, Imre Békessy published the novel Barrabas under the name Emery Bekessy .

After the end of the war he returned to Hungary, but under the new political conditions he was no longer able to build on his prewar journalistic career. He made several suicide attempts, the last one in Budapest in 1951 with his wife Bianca. The two probably died from an excessive dose of morphine. Békessy may have been severely addicted to morphine since the 1920s, having made at least three suicide attempts using morphine over the decades, with the dose apparently increasing from trial to trial. His son Hans Habe, who later became extremely successful as a writer and journalist, describes in his autobiography "I stand myself" his father's risk of suicide.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Der Spiegel 44/1954, cover story about Hans Habe, miscarriage of a character [1]
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Armin Thurnher : “Out of Vienna with the villain!” Case Békessy. Extract from the lecture media, local and global , “Karl Kraus Lecture” of the “Vienna Lectures”, April 11, 2008, City Hall. In: Falter , Vienna, No. 16/2008 (April 16, 2008), p. 21 f.
3. ^ Andreas Hutter and Klaus Kamolz : Billie Wilder. A European career . Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1998
4. ↑ Andreas Hutter : Razor blades in the head. Ernst Spitz - man of letters, journalist, educator . Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2005. pp. 116–151.
5. ↑ Andreas Hutter: Razor blades in the head. Ernst Spitz - man of letters, journalist, educator . Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2005, pp. 174-185.

literature

• A.Hutter:  Bekessy, Imre . In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 . 2nd revised edition (online only).
• Békessy's Panopticon. A magazine against stupidity and lies. No. 1-5. April – May 1928.
• Ernst Spitz : Békessy's revolver. Vienna, Saturn-Verlag 1926.
• Ernst Spitz : Békessy's revolver. Issue 2. Vienna: Wittenberg, 1927.
• Andreas Hutter and Klaus Kamolz : Billie Wilder. A European career . Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1998.
• Andreas Hutter : Razor blades in your head. Ernst Spitz - man of letters, journalist, educator . Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2005.

Web links

• Literature by and about Imre Békessy in the catalog of the German National Library