This year Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the Oscar upon Austria for its feature film, The Counterfeiters, marking a great success for the producers and Austria’s film industry.

We are glad to present an interview with the Austrian-born musicologist Siegmund Levarie, who spoke with Austrian Information on the memories of his youth in Vienna during the 1930s at a time when his father headed the Vienna Jewish Community, and on the following years of persecution and his emigration to the U.S.

Impressions and memories of Jewish cultural life in the 1920s and 30s surrounding Vienna’s coffeehouses are reflected throughout the well-known anecdotes by Friedrich Torberg, whose legendary collection of anecdotes entitled, Tante Jolesch, was recently translated into English.

Founded by two young Austrians in 2005, the company Jajah is the fastest-growing provider of telephoning via the internet. It is a phenomenal success story signaling potential for the future.

Other topics include the contribution of Ariadne Press publications in promoting Austrian Literature in the U.S. as well as coverage of the recent gala held at the Austrian Embassy, celebrating the German-American of the Year Award.

Yours sincerely,

Wolfgang Renezeder
Editor-in-Chief

The small gold-plated statuette, a mere 12 inches in height, is fiercely coveted, and this year Austria took home the prize. After three-quarters of a century of recognizing excellence in cinema, Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the Oscar upon Austria and its entry film, the Austrian/German production, The Counterfeiters, (Die Fälscher) during the 80th Academy Awards. Unlike the other Oscars, the Best Foreign Language Film Award is not presented to a specific individual but is considered an award for the entire country. It is of special significance, for from a record number of 95 countries invited to submit their best film, Austria was selected for the honor.

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by Sonat Birnecker Hart

From the turn of the century until 1938, the Viennese literary coffeehouse was known to foster a liberal, intellectual, and creative environment; a kind of “ersatz-home” for members of society seeking refuge from the establishment and its parochial mores. Most of all, it owed its renown to its Jewish literary denizens, who not only wrote and conducted affairs in the coffeehouse but also celebrated its unique atmosphere in their literature. Among these writers, including Peter Altenberg and Joseph Roth, it is Friedrich Torberg who stands out for having created the most thorough tribute to the coffeehouse world in his Tante Jolesch or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes, published for the first time in English this year (Ariadne Press, ISBN: 9781572411499). In Austria, Tante Jolesch has already become a classic, beloved for its descriptions of a world with a slower pace than our own, one imbued with the cultural vestiges of the Habsburg Empire and its vibrant Jewish cultural elite.

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by Robert Birnecker

You have been in the U.S. for quite some time now, but what was your life like in Vienna with your father being the head of the Jewish Community in the 1930s?
The Community was a state within a state – it was recognized by the Austrian government as autonomous. You had to pay taxes to the Community as well as to the Austrian state and every four years there were elections. My father, Josef Löwenherz, had always volunteered for the Community and was eventually elected to be vice-president, still an unpaid job. In 1936, he gave up his law practice to become “Amtsdirektor,” a paid fulltime position to run the administration.

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Austrian literature is a constitutive element of Austria’s culture and serves as a medium to bring Austria closer to a wide variety of people. Yet to bring this literature to new shores requires assistance, and Ariadne Press of California has been dedicated to this task, publishing “a canon of Austrian literature from Grillparzer to now” as Jorun B. Johns, one of the founders and editors points out. Thirty years ago, most books written in German were considered “German Literature” and even German professors were reluctant to accept Austrian Literature as representative of a unique literary tradition. Today, however, Austrian Literature is generally accepted as a distinct category, even by the Library of Congress, and Ariadne Press is happy that it has played a small part in helping to bring about this awareness.

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On April 17, 2008 Margrit B. Krewson was honored by the German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA as the Distinguished German-American of the Year for 2007.  The awards gala was held at the Austrian Embassy under the Patronage of Ambassador Eva Nowotny.  Guests of Honor included Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg and Nobel Prize laureate and Distinguished German-American of the Year of 2005, Dr. Günter Blobel. 

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In the past few decades many of the innovations that have advanced the world and enlightened society have come from computer technology. It is a world that encourages revolutionary ideas, driven by competition and internet talents, and drawn to places like Silicon Valley in California. The environment is competitive and working hours endless. To compensate, companies such as Microsoft, Google or Yahoo have created luxurious campuses for their employees – with fitness gyms, massages and free-of-charge restaurants – the perfect environment for spawning brilliant ideas.

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Robert Propst (1915 – 2008)
Co-founder and longstanding president of the Austrian-American Council West in Valencia, California, Robert Propst died at the age of 94. Born in Vienna, he left Austria in 1938 via Sweden for New York, where he joined the U.S. military. After the war he began a career in the fashion industry, heading displays for well-known department stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 1977 he founded Architectural Designers and Planners, Inc. In 1982, he was invited by Fritz Molden to contribute to the founding of the Austrian American Council West, to which he strongly dedicated himself as president and later honorary president. He also served as president of the Vienna Cultural Club in Los Angeles and took special pleasure in organizing the Vienna Opera Ball. For his untiring work in maintaining and furthering strong relations between the United States and Austria he was awarded the Silver and Gold Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria and the Golden Rathausmann by the City of Vienna

Walter Rudolph Weber 1925 -2008
Former Austrian Honorary Consul General for the Northwest, Walter Rudolph Weber passed away on February 8. Born in Vienna, Weber arrived in 1955 with his wife and two pre-school age sons and after earning a BA in Business Administration at the University of Washington, became a Certified Public Accountant and founded his own CPA firm. Weber, who bought and restarted the bi-lingual newspaper “Die Pazifische Rundschau” in 1989 and co-founded the Austria Club of Washington distinguished himself as Honorary Austrian Consul for Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana (1983- 1987) and then as Honorary Consul General until 1997 and was awarded the Medal of Merit in Gold for his extraordinary service.

Vienna born journalist, author, publisher, political official, supporter of writers, musicians and artists, Hans Janitschek died in New York on February 21 at the age of seventy-three. As of 1994 Janitschek was working out of New York as a correspondent covering the U.S. for Austria’s largest daily newspaper, the “Neue Kronen Zeitung.” His multi-faceted career as a once quoted “passionate intellectual and lively journalist” began in the 1950s in New York working for the news agencies, United Press and Reuters, followed by a return to Vienna as correspondent for “Kurier” and “Express.” In 1963 he joined the Austrian Foreign Service and was posted in N.Y. before returning once again to Austria in 1966 as an advisor to the late Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky.

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a Boeing 777, with daily service from Washington, D.C. on May 1, 2008. To ensure that your flight simply flies by, enjoy Austrian’s Business Class lie-flat sleeper seat and our in-flight coffeehouse. Everything about our service is designed to make sure you arrive at your destination fully rested. Visit www.austrian.com or call 1-800-843-0002 to book your flight today

(coverpage) Tommaso Manzi; Jeromy Roberts; Norbert David Axmann; IMAGNO/Franz Hubmann, Barbara Pflaum, Austrian Archives; Ariadne Press; Jajah; Peter Cutts; Kronen Zeitung