Jiří Dienstbier (politician, 1937)

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Jiří Dienstbier (2009)

Jiří Dienstbier (born April 20, 1937 in Kladno , † January 8, 2011 in Prague ) was a Czech politician and journalist .

After the turn of 1989, he was the first foreign minister of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the communist government. In 2008 he was elected senator for the ČSSD in the Kladno district.

Life

Monument to the opening of the Iron Curtain in Nové Domky

Jiří Dienstbier came from a family of doctors. His father Emil was an ophthalmologist - primary doctor in Kladno . He studied at the Charles University Philosophy and worked as a journalist in the Czechoslovak Radio . In 1958 he joined KSČ . As a foreign correspondent, he mainly reported from the Far East and was noticed as a critical mind, among other things because - contrary to the regulations - he also sent interviews that were not authorized by the communist leadership in Prague.

In 1968 he was one of the supporters of the Prague Spring . When this reform movement was forcibly suppressed with the invasion of Warsaw Pact soldiers and tanks , Dienstbier was the correspondent for the Czechoslovak Radio in Washington, DC , and his son was born there. He returned home out of a sense of duty and with the will to save what can be saved. The new rulers closed Dienstbier from the Communist Party from besieged him with a prohibition , it could always arrest and forced him into financial difficulties and isolation.

Dienstbier earned his living in various activities and continued to work as a member of the opposition. He signed with many other dissidents , the Charter 77 . In 1979 he was sentenced (together with Václav Havel and others) to three years in prison for his political commitment .

After his release in 1982 he had to work as a stoker (until his appointment as minister) , but he was not deterred in his political commitment and continued to write for underground newspapers . With the political turning point of 1989 (cf. Revolutions in 1989 ; in Czechoslovakia referred to as the " Velvet Revolution ") he stepped back into the limelight. Dienstbier was one of the founders of the democratic citizens' forum .

On December 10, 1989, he was appointed Foreign Minister in the Marián Čalfa I government , headed by Marián Čalfa . On December 17, 1989, he and the then Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, together with a bolt cutter, cut the barbed wire of the Czechoslovak-Austrian border fence between Hatě and Kleinhaugsdorf , thereby underscoring the fall of the Iron Curtain . The ceremony on December 23, 1989 at the Waidhaus - Rozvadov border crossing , together with the then Federal German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, was similar .

After the conservative wing of the Citizens 'Forum had formed as the ODS , Dienstbier founded the Občanské hnutí (OH; "Citizens' Movement") party with the more left-wing liberal wing and was elected chairman. He resigned as Foreign Minister in July 1992; in the following years he worked as a local politician in the city council of Prague and also worked again as a journalist. After the failure of the OH in the 1992 election and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the party renamed itself Svobodní Demokratie (SD; Free Democrats). This merged in 1995/96 with the Liberal National Social Party (LSNS) to form SD-LSNS, whose co-chair was Dienstbier for a short time. After another failure in the 1996 election , the SD-LSNS disbanded and Dienstbier was non-party. From 1998 to 2001 he was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the former Yugoslavia .

After Dienstbier and Hans-Dietrich Genscher founded the German-Czech Historical Commission in 1990 , he and Genscher received the 2004 Art Prize for German-Czech Understanding , which the Munich-based Adalbert Stifter Association together with the Union for Good Neighborhood for Czech and German speakers Lends countries from Prague.

In 2008 he entered the Czech Senate as a non-party candidate with the support of the Social Democrats (ČSSD) . He held this post until his death. Dienstbier died of cancer after a long illness. Genscher paid tribute to him.

Dienstbier was married a total of four times. He had three daughters: Monika, Kristina and Irena (died in 1998). Dienstbier's son Jiří is also a politician. He was elected to the Senate for the Social Democrats in March 2011 in his father's constituency (Kladno).

literature

in German language

  • Prague Talks 1978: Zdena Tominová, Jiří Dienstbier, Ludvík Vaculík on the Czech opposition today. In: Trace, Hamburg, 1 (1978), 3, pp. 29-32.
  • Jiří Dienstbier: Through the eyes of a Central European: a strategy for Europe . In: Neue Gesellschaft, Frankfurter Hefte 35 (1988), no. 4, pp. 384-392.
  • Jiří Dienstbier: What is left? 20 years after the Prague Spring , in: OSTKREUZ. Politics - history - culture. Samizi magazine . Berlin (GDR), January 1989
  • Jiří Dienstbier: Dreaming of Europe . Berlin 1991. ISBN 3-87134-003-0 .
  • Manfred Leier (Ed.): Prague and the landscapes of Czechoslovakia. With contributions by Jiří Dienstbier . Hamburg, Sternbuch published by Gruner & Jahr, 1991. ISBN 3-570-06630-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jirí Dienstbier in Spiegel 3/2011 accessed on October 24, 2012
  2. ↑ Signatories of Charter 77 on ORF from January 9, 2011, accessed on January 11, 2011
  3. ↑ Czech Republic: Ex-Foreign Minister Dienstbier died ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the APA on January 8, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.apa.at
  4. ↑ Genscher mourns the loss of his "great friend" Dienstbier January 9, 2011
  5. ^ Social Democrats in Senate again in majority: Dienstbier wins supplementary election on Radio Praha on March 26, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Service beer, Jiří
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech politician and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Kladno
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 2011
Place of death Prague