The controversial psychoanalyst Prof. Klaus Ottomeyer in his contribution to the Tolerance Talks warned that the whole life is determined by the logic of “Homo Oeconomicus”. He criticized the fact that exchange values such as money or gold and their accumulation today are the most important values in our society, while living values such as…
Europeans will only exist in the global village if they concentrate on their strengths, reject national egoism and understand digitization as an opportunity. Free trade, free markets and free entrepreneurship are the main drivers of prosperity. In an increasingly interconnected world, they can only be secured and expanded through MORE instead of less freedom. Protectionist…
Within the framework of the European Tolerance Talks 2017 PEN Club Austria celebrated the 70th anniversary of its re-establishment with a reading and a “long night of literature” in the Carinthian mountain village of Fresach. PEN President Helmuth A. Niederle and Vice President Kurt F. Svatek therefor asked for the issuance of 20 Nansen passports…
Decades of unresolved promises made by the democratic forces have led to the emergence of more and more people. The success of authoritarian and illiberal politics in Europe, therefore, can not be attributed solely to propagandist attitudes. In Fresach, experts analyzed the concept of right-wing populist politics to position themselves as a patron of protection…
“Freedom can exist in a country only if it is also a paradise for heretics.” With this remarkable sentence, the Protestant bishop Michael Bünker opened the European Tolerance Talks in 2017, which also included the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. However, liberty in Luther’s time had a completely different meaning and would probably not be…
The heads of the Carinthian state government and the churches recognized the European tolerance talks as an “extraordinary event for Austria and Europe”. “The tolerance talks are a great enrichment for the country,” praised Carinthian Gouvernor Peter Kaiser. Many important impulses would emerge from Fresach. Villach’s mayor, Günther Albel, spoke of “a strong sign that…
Freedom is being challenged daily anywhere in the world, not only in far-off countries, but in the middle of Europe, as recent developments in Poland and Hungary show. More urgent than ever, therefore, we need political education as an obligatory teaching subject to consolidate democratic consciousness. Ronald Barazon, the disputable chief editor, said this in…
This is the way to look at fates of people who are confronted with war. Leyla Imret left her Turkish hometown Cizre as a four-year-old girl, after her father had been shot under suspicion for the Kurdish PKK. Twenty years later, she returned from Germany and will be elected mayor by overwhelming majority in 2014.…
“Freedom as an innovation driver for the economy” is the topic of the European Tolerance Talks on 2 June. On the podium of the Entrepreneurship Day there are among others Economic Chamber Vice President Sylvia Gstättner, Infineon CEO Sabine Herlitschka, demographer Elisabeth Gruber and the beauty entrepreneur Katja Wagner, who became known as “Waxing Lady”.…
She was an icon, an opportunist and a fellow traveler. Few artists were as ambivalent as the Swedish NS-film actress Zarah Leander. With the play “I, Zarah or the wild flesh of the last diva”, a production of the neuebuehnevillach http://neuebuehnevillach.at, the Austrian author Franzobel raises a critical look at her brittle biography and asks…