Willy Schmieger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Willy Schmieger (before 1931)

Wilhelm "Willy" Schmieger (born April 24, 1887 in Vienna ; † October 10, 1950 there ) was an Austrian journalist , soccer player and official. His original profession was a high school professor of Latin and Greek. He won the Challenge Cup in 1905 and 1912 with the Wiener Sportvereinigung and its successor, Wiener Sport-Club , of which he later became president . Between 1907 and 1912 he played as a striker in the Austrian national soccer team . Between 1915 and 1936 he held various top positions in Austrian football. He was a pioneer of live sports broadcasts on Austrian radio and, in addition to legendary football games, reported on the Olympic Games in 1936 and 1948. In the second half of the 1930s, he was editor of the predecessor of the Kronen Zeitung , the Illustrated Kronenzeitung.

Live and act

Schmieger, who grew up in the 18th district of Währing , studied classical philology at the University of Vienna from 1907 to 1912 and passed the teaching examination in 1913 . As early as 1909 he began to work as a journalist and was the editor in charge of the newspaper Sport im Wort . From 1904 he also appeared as a football player at the Vienna Sports Association, which he joined in 1901 and which merged with the Vienna Cyclists to form the Vienna Sports Club in 1907 .

On November 3, 1907, the striker made his debut in Budapest in a 4-1 defeat against Hungary in Budapest in the national team. At the time, the game was known as the “City Game Budapest - Vienna” and was only later recognized as an international game. Schmieger scored his first goal for Austria with the consolation goal. His seventh and last international match he gave on December 22, 1912 in Genoa in a 3-1 win over Italy, where he equalized the Italian lead with his sixth international goal. It is unclear whether Josef Brandstätter or Schmieger was the captain of the Austrian team here.

With the Vienna Sports Association he won the Challenge Cup for the first time in June 1905 , a competition for club teams from Vienna and Budapest, with a 2-1 final victory on the Viennese cricket ground in Vorgartenstraße over the Magyar AC from Budapest. With the sports club he reached the final of the Challenge Cup again in 1909, but lost there to Ferencváros Budapest to the “miracle striker” Imre Schlosser with 1: 2. It was probably he who scored the interim 1: 1 equalization in the 53rd minute on the Hohe Warte in Vienna. When the WSC once again advanced into the final of this competition in 1912, which the sports club won 3-0 against Ferencvaros on the pitch of the Vienna AC , Leopold Neubauer was mainly stated as the 1-0 shooter, but it was considered possible that Schmieger scored this hit.

The discovery of the “talent of the century” Karl Braunsteiner , who also competed for the sports club and died at a young age in the First World War , is often ascribed to him . Even in his time as a player and beyond, he was active as a referee and also came to international assignments. He directed his first international match on November 8, 1914, when Austria lost 2-1 to Hungary on the WAC pitch .

During the First World War, between 1915 and 1918, he was President of the then leading association in Austrian football, the Lower Austrian Football Association , where he represented the founding president Ignaz Abeles . Schmieger then became Vice President. In his six-year tenure as section head at the sports club, the club became champion in 1922 and cup winner in 1923.

In later years he became president and honorary captain of the sports club and at that time was also responsible as the author of the club's anthem Heil Wiener Sportklub Unser Hort . An " Aryan paragraph " was also included in the association's statutes under his aegis. He even claimed that the sports club was “the only [club] that had an Aryan paragraph in its statutes when it was founded” and stated that of “changes in the football association and at the clubs” only the “Wiener Sportklub "Is not affected, since he" has never accepted Jews as members since it was founded ". This attitude later used members of the sports club such as Ferry Dusika when applying for membership in the NSDAP to prove their anti-Semitic and National Socialist attitudes.

In the 1920s he headed the Illustrierte Sportblatt . In 1925 he took over the sports department of the Wiener neue Nachrichten - a function that came to an end with the temporary suspension of the newspaper after the “Anschluss” . His book Der Fußball in Österreich on the history of Austrian football up to 1925, published in 1925, also attracted attention .

He appeared as a pioneer of sports broadcasts for Radio Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft (RAVAG), the Austrian radio. In 1928 he reported live for the first time from an ice hockey game. In October 1928, the station broadcast the first live football from a football match, the international match between Austria and Hungary. His reports became famous from the matches of the Austrian “ miracle team ”, as the Austrian national team was called from 1931 to 1933, but also from games for the Mitropa Cup . His “rousing report” in December 1932 from the London stadium at Stamford Bridge , where Austria scored a respectable success despite a 3: 4 defeat against England, even interrupted a meeting of the parliamentary finance committee. It is reported that his picture-rich reports were characterized by a combination of competence and Viennese humor. The creator of the wonder team, Hugo Meisl , called him his "co-supervisor". His " Schall zu Vogl , Vogl zu Schall" - the description of a once-usual double- passing game between two Admira players in a game against Scotland - gained cult status and became Schmiegers' enduring trademark.

In 1935 he was named "Group Leader" or "Supreme Sports Leader" for football in what was then the Austro-Fascist corporate state by the sports leader and Vice Chancellor Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg . Here, however, he remained ineffective, as his German national attitude met resistance. Therefore, he had to resign the following year and was replaced by the association president, the registered NSDAP member Richard Eberstaller .

In 1935 he became deputy editor-in-chief of the Wiener Illustrierte Kronenzeitung and gave up his teaching post. In March 1938 he became the "responsible editor" and thus practically held the function of editor-in-chief. After the "Anschluss", he was formally only operating as editor for the sports department with absolute personal responsibility. His monthly salary of RM 1500 was the highest in the Krone editorial team and was on par with the main editor. Colleagues at other newspapers earned only about half as much in similar positions.

In a report on the "follow-up game" of what is now "Ostmark" against Germany on April 3, 1938, the 2-0 ended, he reveled in the "sports-historical greatness of the moment" in which the 60,000 spectators in Vienna's Prater Stadium " standing, bare head and arm raised in German salute “Listened to Germany song and Horst Wessel song. Austria's sports community would “deeply thankful” to have experienced such a day, “prove it to the Führer on April 10th with an enthusiastic and convinced yes”. Schmieger became a member of the NSDAP in 1941 (membership number 9,029,182). In his application for membership, Schmieger pointed out that he had reported positively about National Socialism at the 1934 Winter Olympics.

He remained the sports editor of the Kronen-Zeitung until at least 1942 and a sports reporter for the Reichsender Wien until 1944. In 1943 he lost his only son, Willy, in the war, which he was never to get over.

After the end of World War II, Schmieger was classified as a minor in 1947 . Schmieger thereupon applied for an exemption from registration as a National Socialist, since he had not "hidden his internal rejection of National Socialism [...] from the outside" and only joined the NSDAP under pressure from outside. Schmieger cited Josef Krips , Rudolf Henz , Josef Gerö and Friedrich Funder as witnesses . The application was approved in March 1948 by Federal President Karl Renner .

From 1945 to 1948 he was still the sports editor at the Kleiner Volksblatt . In addition to further football reports on the radio in 1948, he rejoined RAVAG as head of the sport department and reported on the 1948 Summer Olympics from London. His achievements there were judged devastating by the criticism. With Heribert Meisel , who named Schmieger as a role model, a new star also appeared in the reporter sky. Decades later, Edi Finger , another ORF radio reporter who had become a legend, would remember "the unforgettable voice of Willy Schmieger".

On October 10, 1950, “Professor Schmieger” died at the age of 63 from an “insidious disease”.

In 1963 the "Schmiegergasse" in his home district of Währing was named after him.

Works

  • Forty years of the Vienna Sports Club. 1883-1923. A look back at the history of the Viennese sports club on the occasion of its forty years of existence, issued for the festival week from June 2 to 10, 1923 . Sports club, Vienna 1923.
  • Football in Austria . Burgverlag, Vienna 1925.
  • Rudolf Hiden. Austria's soccer goalie . Winkler, Vienna and Leipzig 1932.

literature

  • Walter Smekal: The ancestor of the radio report: Willy Schmieger. In: Josef Strabl (Ed.): Wir Sportreporter. 100 years of the Austrian sports press. Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1980, pp. 58–60.
  • Gerhard Urbanek: Austria's Germany Complex: Paradoxes in the Austro-German soccer mythology. LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, p. 108 ff., 169 ff.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ambrosius Kutschera: Schmieger Wilhelm - national team balance sheet , football in Austria, as of November 20, 2012.
  2. ↑ Ambrosius Kutschera: Challenge Cup 1904/05 - final , football in Austria, June 4, 2011.
  3. ↑ Ambrosius Kutschera: Challenge Cup 1909 - Final , Football in Austria, June 4, 2011.
  4. ↑ Ambrosius Kutschera: Challenge Cup 1910/11 - Final , Football in Austria, June 4, 2011.
  5. ↑ Michael Almaszi-Szabo: Karl von Gottes Gnaden ( Memento from February 15, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) , Wiener Sport-Club , 2004. Via Web Archive as of November 20, 2012.
  6. ↑ Herbert Wesely: NÖFV Chronicle from 1911 - 2011 , Lower Austrian Football Association, February 16, 2011 (PDF, 1.9 MB).
  7. ↑ a b c Street names in Vienna since 1860 as "Political Places of Remembrance" (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 206 f., Final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
  8. ↑ Clemens Zavarsky: Everyone adored Meisl ( memento of the original from November 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ballesterer.at 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. , Interview with Karl Heinz Schwind, Ballesterer Fußballmagazin, December 18, 2009.
  9. ↑ Joseph Strabl (Editor): We sportscaster. 100 years of the Austrian sports press, Vienna 1980. → Edi Finger : radio reporter - on the verge of a heartbeat

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Schmieger, Willy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmieger, Wilhelm (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian soccer player, soccer official, radio reporter, sports journalist and author of sports books
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 10, 1950
Place of death Vienna