Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

for nine months. He had been instructed not to
give any interviews to Western media. He did it
all the same. He knew what he was doing.
This was shortly before the political change.
But did things always turn out all right for your
interview partners and for those who provided
you with information?
B. C.-K.: I hope so. For one interview with a
dissident we had to get away from our official
guide. This was a real adventure. We made
the interview in the middle of the night in the
Vyšehrad cemetery behind a tombstone. Afterwards
there was a frightful row. For the following
eight years I couldn’t obtain a permit to
enter Czechoslovakia. I haven’t looked at the
secret service records about me, but a friend
sent me his Stasi files and showed me what was
written about me there.
“The sources that we journalists
can use are often the
local critical NGOs”
What did the secrete service write about you?
B. C.-K.: The accusation was that I wanted to
recover the property once owned by my family,
which was of course without any foundation.
Ridiculous. Most of the material was simply
untrue. Secret service records of this kind were
just part of the way things were. In the GDR the
Stasi repeatedly tried to trip me up by coming
to me and asking me whether I would like to
write an analysis of the country. Even through a
question of this kind you entered the files. Colleagues
warned me for heaven’s sake not to give
them anything in writing, that they would immediately
use this against me. I followed this
advice.
You once said something along the lines of “you
can only sent the politically left-wing to the
East, they are the more severe critics“?
B. C.-K.: It wasn’t I who said this but the former
director general of ORF Gerd Bacher, a great
devourer of communists. He engaged my services
for ORF at the beginning of the 1970s.
I told him that I was married to a member of
the politburo of the KPÖ (Austrian Communist
Party). Gerd Bacher answered: “That’s fine!”
In my work the private connection to a reform
communist like my husband was, naturally,
more of a disadvantage. Hardly anyone in the
East knew about this, except perhaps the secret
service.
Was the ORF more involved than average in reporting
from Eastern Europe?
B.C.-K.: During my time in the Eastern Europe
office of the ORF before the collapse of the communist
system often not very much of political
interest was happening in these countries. I
was more interested in the life in the countries
that bordered Austria directly, independent of
the regime. At that time the ORF was very open
to all suggestions.
M. K.: When something then did happen it
was certainly an enormous advantage to have
people in the editorial offices who knew these
countries.
B. C.-K.: That’s right. Shortly before the
Solidarność movement started at the end of the
1960s I was in Poland and met Adam Michnik
who had been in prison for many years. He revealed
to me that they were thinking of implementing
free trade unions. That of all things, I
thought to myself. That will never be allowed.
Then, a short time later, a report arrived in the
ORF by telex – these were strips of paper – and
I read: “Strike in the Danzig shipyard – one of
the demands: free trade unions!“
I headed off immediately. We were one of the
first from the foreign press and I knew a few
people there. Our radio stories were played
throughout German-speaking Europe. Then
Gerd Bacher came up with the idea of setting up
an Eastern Europe editorial desk in the ORF.
Were there sources in the East bloc countries
that people in the West could regularly refer to?
B. C.-K.: Emigrants, many of whom lived in Vienna
after 1968, were good sources of information.
Radio Free Europe was a very important
source. They had their people locally, they followed
media reports in the respective countries
very closely, and they had, for example, economic
statistics at hand that we could never
have obtained. What they called their research
material was an indispensable source.
In the Internet era things are easier in this respect,
don’t you think?
M. K.: Well, you still can’t use the official sources
of the government for the most part because
the former East bloc countries and the countries
of former Yugoslavia still tend to dress things
up. The sources that we journalists can use are
often the local critical NGOs, like the Helsinki
Committee for Human Rights, Collaboration
and Security in Europe, institutions that are involved
in building up the civil societies there.
These are reliable sources, as they are often in
opposition to what officially happens there.
Do Western governments not tend to prettify
situations also?
M. K.: My impression is that they do. In Vienna
I have had this kind of experience while carrying
out my research. If you ring up the Ministry
of the Interior and want to have official figures
about Islamists, you don’t get an answer, even
though public prosecutors and police in Bosnia
warn that radical ideas are exported to Bosnia
from Vienna. As a journalist in Austria you at
times encounter resistance that you wouldn’t
expect in a Western democracy.
Do Austrian and German media report differently
about Eastern Europe?
M. K.: Very definitely. The Austria media report
more comprehensively and more regularly from
Eastern and South-eastern Europe than do the
German media. This is due to family ties that
still exist in Austria from the joint past under
Habsburg rule, but naturally is also due to new
business links. In Austria there is a vital eco-
nomic interest in this region. And geographically
it is, quite simply, far closer.
Marion Kraske (born 1969) studied political science,
political economics and Slavic studies and literature. After
a traineeship with the Deutsche Presse Agentur she
worked as a journalist for the news service of ARD television.
In 2002 she moved to “Spiegel online”, and one
year later to the foreign office of the German news magazine
“Spiegel”. From 2005 to 2008 she was “Spiegel”
correspondent in Vienna, where she is also responsible
for the coverage of Austria and Southeast Europe. Since
then she works as a freelance author and publisher.
Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi was born in Prague in
1932 and since she was expelled from her native country
in 1945 has lived in Vienna. She wrote as a journalist
for the “Arbeiter-Zeitung”, “Die Presse”, “Neues Österreich”,
“Kurier” and “profil”. From 1975 she worked for the
Eastern Europe office of the ORF, for which she reported
from Prague from 1991 to 1995. She was already
known to a wide public through her reports in ORF radio,
particularly from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Today she
writes as a free-lance journalist for various Czech and
Austrian newspapers (including “Der Standard”) and
has published a number of books with texts on the history
and the present of the countries of Eastern Europe.
In 2001 she was awarded the Tomáš-Garrigue-Masaryk
Order by Vaclav Havel. Among her many involvements
she is one of the founders of the citizens initiative “Land
der Menschen” which strives to improve the coexistence
of foreigners and natives.
Book tips
Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, Oliver Rathkolb, (eds.),
“Die Beneš-Dekrete”, Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2002
Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (ed.), “Meine Wurzeln sind
anderswo (Österreichische Identitäten)”, Czernin Verlag,
Vienna 2001
Marion Kraske, “Ach Austria! Verrücktes Alpenland”,
Molden Verlag, Vienna 2009
Published in “Report” in September 2008 (online)
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