Otto Pick (political scientist)

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Otto Pick (born March 4, 1925 in Prague ; † March 20, 2016 there ) was a Czech political scientist and deputy foreign minister.

Life

Otto Pick was born into a Czech-Jewish family and grew up bilingually (Czech and German). He attended the English grammar school in Prague, so that he soon mastered English as a third language. One of his classmates at the English High School was Ernest Gellner .

First escape from Prague, World War II and return to Prague

After the German occupation of his hometown in March 1939, taking Jewish children to England on one of the child transports organized by Nicholas Winton saved him from the camp and from death. With his savior Nicholas Winton, who died eight months before him, he remained connected well into old age. His father, who tried to flee to Poland, hardly died in the process in an unexplained way. His mother was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . She was the victim of a British air raid on Hamburg while on duty in an external command .

In England Otto Pick finished his school days in a boarding school. He was admitted to the University of Oxford 's Queen's College and won a scholarship as an Organ Scholar , with the obligation to play the organ at church services at the University. But at the earliest possible point in time, his 18th birthday, he signed up for the Czechoslovak Army in Exile and became a soldier of the Czechoslovak Independent Armored Brigade, which was set up in 1943 . During their attack on the “ Atlantic fortress ” Dunkirk , he was slightly wounded in April 1945. After the end of the war, he and his brigade moved to Markt Eisenstein (Železná Ruda), where they were demobilized .

From there, Pick returned to liberated Prague and began studying law at Charles University in Prague . He earned his living by teaching English and from 1947 as an interpreter for the military attaché of the US embassy.

Second escape from Prague, academic career in England, Radio Free Europe in Munich

It was above all his service in the Czechoslovak Army in Exile and his contact with the US embassy that had made Pick “suspicious” and endangered since the Communists came to power in February 1948. Faced with the threat of arrest, he fled for the second time from Prague in April 1948, nine years after his first escape, this time to Germany, together with his wife Zdeňka, whom he had married that same month. Shortly afterwards, the young couple went to Oxford, where Otto Pick now accepted the study place (in history) including the scholarship that he had received five years earlier. After graduating, he began working for the BBC Monitoring Service in Caversham near Reading , which analyzes news from abroad for the BBC World Service and for British government agencies. Pick initially translated from Czech and German, then rose to become senior editor of the night shift at BBC Monitoring . A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled him to do postgraduate studies in political science at the London School of Economics (LSE). He received his doctorate at the LSE and then worked there as an assistant. In 1966 Pick was appointed to the University of Surrey at Guildford , which was founded in the same year . There he set up the Institute for International Relations in the Department of Political Science. His research areas were foreign policy and security policy. He was elected dean of the faculty for humanities and social sciences and was the university 's vice chancellor (deputy chancellor with his own department). When the British government imposed drastic austerity measures at the young universities in 1981, Pick had to manage the closings of facilities and the layoffs of employees, a difficult task which - as has often been attested - he mastered with fairness.

Still, Pick didn't want to stay at the University of Surrey afterward; he dismissed, as he used to say, "as the last myself". In 1983 he became director of the Czechoslovak program of Radio Free Europe in Munich. He also took on visiting professorships in Munich and at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna .

Second return to Prague

In 1991 Pick returned to Prague for the second time. At the Charles University he built up the political science department, which was to be redesigned after the end of communist rule. From 1993 to 1998 he was director of the Institute for International Relations at Charles University. At the same time he was director of the Prague Diplomatic Academy (the training center for budding Czech diplomats), where he taught well into old age.

In 1998 he was appointed Deputy Czech Foreign Minister (until 2000). Foreign Minister Jan Kavan entrusted him in particular with the integration of the Czech Republic into the structures of NATO . He was then a special envoy for relations with Germany and Austria. With Hans Martin Bury and Christoph Zöpel (from the German side) he was co-chair of the German-Czech discussion forum. He was also the Czech co-chair of the Board of Trustees of the German-Czech Future Fund .

Otto Pick died in Prague at the age of 91.

Honors

Fonts

As an author

  • with Julian Critchley: Collective security . Macmillan, London 1974, ISBN 0-333-17344-9 .
  • Political and ideological aspects . In: Edgar Feuchtwanger, Peter Nailor (eds.): The Soviet Union and the Third World . Macmillan, London 1981, ISBN 0-333-28736-3 , pp. 3-11.
  • Problems of Adjustment: The Gorbachev Effect in Eastern Europe . In: SAIS Review (School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University), Vol. 8 (1988), pp. 57-73.
  • with Hanns W. Maull : The Gulf was. Regional and international dimensions . St. Martin's Press, New York 1989, ISBN 0-312-03738-4 .
  • with Stefan Sarvas and Stanislav Stach: Democratic Control over Security Policy and Armed Forces . In: Laurent F. Carrel, Otto Pick u. a. (Ed.): Democratic and civil control of security policy and armed forces (= Zurich contributions to security policy and conflict research , vol. 41). Research Center for Security Policy and Conflict Analysis (FSK), ETH Zurich, Zurich 1997, pp. 76–120.
  • with Vladimír Handl: Germany and the East Central Europe since 1990 . Karolinum, Prague 1999, ISBN 80-246-0041-2 .
  • Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. A new era on the eve of EU enlargement? In: German Foreign Policy in Dialogue , Vol. 3 (2002), No. 8, pp. 2–37.

As editor

  • The Cold War legacy in Europe . Pinter, London 1992, ISBN 0-312-06543-4 .
  • Zahraniční politika České republiky 1993–2004. Úspěchy ,problemémy a perspective . Ústav Mezinárodních Vztahů, Prague 2004, ISBN 80-86506-39-8 (translation of the book title: The Foreign Policy of the Czech Republic 1993-2004. Successes, Problems and Prospects ).

literature

  • John Taylor: Professor Otto Pick . In: Christopher Pick (ed.): Understanding the real world. A visual history of the University of Surrey . University of Surrey Press, Guildford 2002, ISBN 1-85237-246-X , pp. 63-65.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ John A. Hall: Ernest Gellner. An Intellectual Biography . Verso, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-84467-602-6 , p. 12.
  2. ↑ Gerald Schubert: The rescued Prague children on "Winton's List" . In: Der Standard, February 8, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Institute of International Relations, Prague: Otto Pick's 90th Birthday .
  4. ^ A b John Taylor: Professor Otto Pick . In: Christopher Pick (ed.): Understanding the real world. A visual history of the University of Surrey . University of Surrey Press, Guildford 2002, ISBN 1-85237-246-X , pp. 63-65.
  5. ↑ a b c Otto Pick (1925-2016) - Životopis (Czech).
  6. ↑ a b c d Ian Willoughby: Interview with Otto Pick (English).
  7. ↑ Svobodník vv Otto Pick (1925-2016) (Czech).
  8. ^ University of Surrey: Department of Politics , accessed March 30, 2016.
  9. ↑ Christopher Pick (ed.): Understanding the real world. A visual history of the University of Surrey . University of Surrey Press, Guildford 2002, ISBN 1-85237-246-X , pp. 76-78.
  10. ↑ Cornelia Frank erroneously made him Deputy Minister of Defense in her dissertation NATOization of Polish and Czech Security Policy in the Field of Civil-Military Relations (University of Trier 2010) (p. 339).
  11. ^ A b Karl-Peter Schwarz: Otto Pick died . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 2016, p. 5.
  12. ↑ Information report on the current situation of the German minority in the Czech Republic of February 12, 2003, accessed on March 30, 2016.
  13. ↑ Christoph Reichmuth: "Beneš was not a great politician". Otto Pick on German-Czech relations and Czech history in the 20th century . In: Prager Zeitung of July 10, 2008, accessed on July 6, 2020.

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Pick, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech political scientist and Deputy Foreign Minister
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 2016
Place of death Prague