Honored Persons

 

Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi

Coudenhove-Kalergi spent her childhood as a German citizen of Prague. Since she was driven out of her homeland as a German in 1945, she has been living mostly in Austria. She worked as a journalist at the daily newspapers "Die Presse" and "Neues Österreich" . She was recruited in 1967 by the "Arbeiter-Zeitung", later by "Kurier" and "profil". In the mid-1970s she became known to the broader public as a member of the ORF's Eastern Europe Department, initially on radio and later on television. Her sensitive reports for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation dealt with the then still the so-called Eastern bloc. From 1991 to 1995 she was ORF correspondent in Prague. Coudenhove-Kalergi married the reform Communist Franz Marek in 1975. In her memoirs which she published in 2013 she dedicated the chapter "The love of my life" to him. She is co-founder of the citizens' initiative "Land der Menschen". Today she writes as a freelance journalist for Czech and Austrian newspapers and is editor of several books with texts on the history and present of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Since 2005 she has been a member of the editorial board of the magazine Datum. In 2005, she was a member of the jury at the first peace rose ceremony.