Ursula Pasterk

Ursula Pasterk (2013)

Ursula Pasterk (born June 23, 1944 in Oberschlierbach , Upper Austria) is an Austrian politician ( SPÖ ) and cultural manager at rest. Pasterk was the city councilor for culture in Vienna from 1987 to 1996 .

Study and job

Pasterk completed a degree at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna , which included elements from philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, German studies and history, wrote a dissertation on the philosopher Ernst Bloch and graduated in 1970 with a doctorate.

She then worked as a freelancer for ORF and from 1970 as an employed journalist, since 1972 for the news magazine profil , which appeared fortnightly from October 1972 and has been published weekly since January 1974. There she got into a dispute with publisher Oscar Bronner : Inside the editorial team, a feminist-inspired women's group led by Trautl Brandstaller , Ursula Pasterk and Sigrid Löffler protested . She resisted, in her opinion, excessive rewriting of her texts by the editor-in-chief . In 2007, Hans Rauscher , Peter Michael Lingens and Helmut Gansterer remembered the time when the news magazine had to prove itself on the market and the intellectual and stylistic brilliance brought by the "culture ladies" like Ursula Pasterk and Sigrid Löffler .

When Helmut Zilk, known all over Austria due to his work on ORF television , was given the office of City Councilor for Culture by Mayor Leopold Gratz , he brought Pasterk into his office as a consultant. Pasterk also worked for him when Zilk became Minister of Education in 1983 .

Director and President of the Wiener Festwochen

After Zilk had been elected mayor of Vienna on September 10, 1984 to succeed Gratz, he transferred the management of the Wiener Festwochen to Pasterk that same year . From 1987–1991 she acted as the festival president, but continued to be the artistic director until 1991 on a voluntary basis. For the further duration of her city council function, she was then on leave as director. After leaving the city senate at the end of 1996, at the beginning of 1997 she renounced the continuation of the director's contract, which ran until 2001, and a large part of her financial claims from this contract.

City Councilor for Culture

On December 9, 1987, she was elected by the Vienna City Council as the leading City Councilor for Culture within the framework of the state government and the Zilk II city ​​senate. During her tenure as city councilor, Pasterk made possible the foundation of the festival “ Wien modern” proposed by Claudio Abbado in 1988 , the establishment of the Kunsthalle Wien in 1992 and the expansion of the Vienna Music Summer organized by the city's cultural department . Among those honored by her or with her participation were Wolfgang Ambros , Leon Askin , Manfred Deix , Kirsten Dene , Elfriede Jelinek , Otto Schenk , Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Ulrich Weinzierl .

In 1987/1988 Klaus Albrecht Schröder , head of the Albertina since 1999 , acted as office manager for the new city councilor. From 1992 until the end of her city council work, Gerald Matt , who she made director of the Kunsthalle Wien in 1996 , was Pasterk's personal advisor. Martin Gabriel (Press and Information Service of the City of Vienna) was her press officer throughout her city council work.

Pasterk referred to her office as an ideology department in 1994 - a definition that still served as food for thought more than ten years later. She referred to the ideologically justified behavior of politics, as it had been taken for granted in Red Vienna in the interwar period, but was no longer popular in her own party in times of depoliticization.

Before the National Council election in 1995 , the Viennese Freedom Party advertised with posters that read “Do you love Scholten, Jelinek, Häupl, Peymann, Pasterk ... or art and culture?” Freedom of art instead of socialist state artists .

Pasterk retained her portfolio in the city senate Zilk III and his successor in the city senate Häupl I . When the SPÖ lost its absolute majority in the municipal council elections in 1996 and formed a coalition with the ÖVP , Pasterk had to hand over their office to Peter Marboe (ÖVP) on November 27, 1996, as previously agreed by Mayor Michael Häupl (not with Pasterk) .

Political comments

The then again oppositional ÖVP municipal councilor Andreas Salcher commented in 2001 on the transfer of office to Marboe:

... Mrs. Pasterk did not find it worth the trouble to hand over her office to the Marboe City Council. That was an empty office and that was a style that didn't necessarily speak for itself.

In 2005, the Social Democratic MP Ernst Woller , at that time a member of the municipal council's culture committee for 18 years , stated in a resume dedicated to several councilors for culture:

Ursula Pasterk has doubled the culture budget in her 10 years. The reason it was so easy to remember is that it has increased from EUR 1 billion to EUR 2 billion in 10 years. Ursula Pasterk really had rough edges and she created a lot of new things. It re-created the Kunsthalle, it repositioned the Viennale and the Festival Weeks, it pushed through a move towards contemporary art in this city and it triggered a boom in the independent scene, where the funding back then, I only know about it the schilling amounts have been increased from ATS 7 million to ATS 70 million. Well, that was Ursula Pasterk. It has undoubtedly moved a lot and left a lot of positive things behind.

Salcher said at the same meeting:

Ursula Pasterk understood and managed the cultural department as a left-wing ideology department.

In 2013 she was described in the Viennese daily Der Standard as a social democratic culture armor and legendary city councilor .

Own texts (selection)

• The phenomenon of utopia in Ernst Bloch's thinking: On the critical foundation of human hope in an "ontology of not-yet-being" , phil. Diss., Vienna 1969
• Current aspects in the competition between metropolises. - Vienna on the way to a European city of culture , in: Austrian Yearbook for International Politics , Ed. Austrian Society for Foreign Policy and International Relations, Vienna, and Austrian Institute for International Politics, Vienna. Vienna 1990
• The writers and the restoration (speech at the opening of the symposium of the International Erich Fried Society), in: Alexander von Bormann: The writers and the restoration , Häusser, Darmstadt 1991, ISBN 3-927902-58-6
• What is the politician's position on opinion polls , in: Paul Lazarsfeld Society for Social Research, Cultural Department of the City of Vienna (ed.): 60 years after Marienthal. Departure in Eastern Europe: Social researchers report , WUV-Universitätsverlag, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85114-078-8
• Cultural policy is not an either-or , in: Michael Häupl (Ed.): ModellStadt - WeltStadt , Promedia, Vienna 1997
• The art of doing politics in the first person. A lot was suddenly possible under Bruno Kreisky. / The Art of Conducting Politics in the First Person. Under Bruno Kreisky Many Things Suddenly Became Possible , in: Foundation Bruno Kreisky Archive (ed.): Bruno Kreisky , self-published by the Museums of the City of Vienna , Vienna 1998 (= special exhibition of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna No. 240)
• The favor of the hour. Or: what could be done with a culture of guilty conscience? , in: Steirische Kulturinitiative (Ed.): Does culture create new work? Symposium lectures and guest contributions; (Analyzes, Practice, Perspectives) , Literas Universitätsverlag, Vienna 2000

Surname

The name Pasterk is of Carinthian-Slovenian origin. Half of all persons with this name entered in the telephone directory in Austria live in the Carinthian district of Völkermarkt , which borders directly on Slovenia and in which Slovenian is recognized as the official language. Franc (1912 to 1943) and Jurij Pasterk (1903 to 1943) from Lobnig were Carinthian partisans in the fight against the Nazi regime.

Awards

• 2016: Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st class

Web links

Commons : Ursula Pasterk  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Ursula Pasterk. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)
• Culture - an ideology department? , on the website of the daily newspaper Der Standard , Vienna, March 21, 2008 ; referring to a Pasterk definition from 1994

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ursula Pasterk: The phenomenon of utopia in Ernst Bloch's thinking. On the critical foundation of human hope in an “ontology of not-yet-being” . Dissertation. University of Vienna, Vienna 1970, OBV .
2. ↑ Herbert Lackner : The Eternal Fighter Oscar Bronner . In: profil.at , October 4, 2008, accessed on December 17, 2013.
3. ↑ Herbert Lackner: Every Monday: profil has been accompanying Austrian politics for 35 years . In: profil.at , November 5, 2005, accessed on December 17, 2013.
4. ↑ Hans Rauscher , Peter M. Lingens , Helmut Gansterer : - on the death of Alfred Worm . In: profil.at , February 10, 2007, accessed on December 17, 2013.
5. ^ Dissolution of the directorship contract of Dr. Ursula Pasterk, amicable solution decided by the Board of Trustees, Wiener Festwochen pay only 1.5 million instead of 8 million . In: ots.at , February 19, 1997, accessed on December 17, 2013.
6. ↑ see photos of or with these honorees on the website of the Austrian National Library , catalog search for Pasterk
7. ↑ see web links
8. ↑ Do you love Scholten, Jelinek… . Twelve-sheet poster (238 cm / 504 cm). Sn, Vienna 1995.
9. ↑ Municipal Council, 3rd meeting on June 25, 2001, verbatim protocol, p. 71
10. ↑ Municipal Council, 57th meeting on June 28, 2005, verbatim protocol, p. 11 ff.
11. ^ Bogumil Balkansky: Everyday stories of a Spira-Assis . In: dastandard.at , January 8, 2013, accessed on December 17, 2013.
12. ↑ Thomas Drozda awards Ursula Pasterk the Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st Class ( Memento of the original from November 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Article dated November 3, 2016, accessed November 13, 2016.