Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi

Barbara Coudenhove- Kalergi (born 15 January 1932 in Prague) is an Austrian journalist and editor.

Life and work

Coudenhove- Kalergi spent her childhood as a German citizen of Czechoslovakia; you lived in a villa in Smíchov, an industrial and working-class neighborhood. When she was seven years old, in 1939, the Wehrmacht marched into Prague.

Since she was expelled in 1945 as a Prague German from her home, she usually lives in Austria. In 1951 she entered the University of Vienna Dolmetschstudium, then changed the subject, but broke off his studies. She worked as a journalist for the daily newspaper The Press (1956 in the local newsroom employed ), New Austria, in 1967, following cessation of the Arbeiter-Zeitung ( by Bruno Kreisky was added ) and the courier profile and news magazine. The wider audience she became known as a member of the forced by Gerd Bacher Eastern Europe office of the ORF since the mid-1970s, initially on radio and later on television. Your sensitive reports for the Austrian Broadcasting dealt with the then still the so-called Eastern bloc countries not members, especially with Poland and Czechoslovakia, where it was temporarily stationed as ORF correspondent.

Coudenhove- Kalergi married in the 1960s, Franz Marek ( 1913-1979 ), a reformist Communist member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Austria ( CPA ), which he left later. Marek had as friends in many countries of Europe.

She co-founded the citizens' initiative "Land of the people ".

After the fall of the communist dictatorships, she returned to her native country. From 1991 to 1995 she worked as an ORF correspondent in Prague. Today she is a freelance journalist especially for Czech and Austrian newspapers and is the editor of several books with texts on the history and present of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Since 2005 she is member of the Editorial Board of the journal date.

In 2005 she was a member of the jury at the first Peace Rose ceremony.

Family

Barbara Coudenhove Kalergis - grandfather Heinrich Graf von Coudenhove- Kalergi (1859-1906), kuk Diplomat, was married to Mitsuko Aoyama ( 1874-1941 ). They had seven children (Hans, Richard, Gerolf, Elizabeth, named Elsa, Olga, Ida and Charles Henry, called Ery ). Barbara Coudenhove- Kalergi has her paternal grandmother not met, even though they lived in Mödling near Vienna and only died when Barbara was nine years old. Barbara's other grandfather was Hans Graf Palffy from the Hungarian noble family which had acquired the estate Breznitz in South Bohemia, on the Barbara spent several summers of her childhood.

Barbara's father was a lawyer and Japanese studies Gerolf Coudenhove- Kalergi (1896-1978), her mother was Sophie Palffy. Brother of the father was Richard Coudenhove- Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European movement. Although the nobility was abolished in the Czechoslovak republic since December 1918 included Barbara's parents, as she writes, in Prague later in the German- Bohemian nobility, a fairly closed group that barely keeps in touch also to the German bourgeois society. Her brothers are Hans Heinrich ( * 1927), Jacob (* 1928) and was born six years after her painter Michael (* 1938). Family Coudenhove- Kalergi, the Czech powerful, well-known on the basis of their mother tongue in 1939 to Germanness, without having in its ranks Nazis or resistance fighters; Gerolf Coudenhove- Kalergi briefly worked as a translator for the Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath.

On 8 May 1945, after the Prague uprising against the setting Nazi rule, the family like many other Prague Germans were encouraged by the Czech police to join Bayern direction retreating German army units. At the same time made ​​radical Czechs in the streets already chasing the now outlawed Germans, so that there was no realistic alternative but to leave.

Awards

Works

• Issuer with Hans Benedict: Revolution. The liberation of Eastern Europe from communist absolutism. Youth and Community, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-224-17637-7.
• My roots are elsewhere. Austrian identities. Czernin Verlag, Wien 2001, ISBN 3-7076-0110-2.
• Issuer with Oliver Rath Kolb: The Beneš decrees. Czernin Verlag, Wien 2002, ISBN 3-7076-0146-3.
• Monika in Juch (ed.): Media. Power. Opinion. Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-901485-19-8.
• Home is everywhere. Memories. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Wien, 2013, ISBN 978-3-552-05601-5.