Honored Persons

 

Susanne Scholl

Born September 19, 1949 in Vienna, journalist. Susanne Scholl comes from an Austrian-Jewish medical family. Her parents - both from Vienna - had met in exile in London. They remigrated to Vienna in 1949. The paternal and maternal grandparents were murdered under National Socialism - a fact that Susanne Scholl also made a topic in her first novel "Elsa Grandfathers" ( Picus-Verlag 2003). The book focuses on the escape in the Third Reich and is dedicated to her grandparents. Susanne Scholl, who made a name for herself above all as a journalist, read Slavic studies in Rome, where she earned her doctorate in 1972. She worked for the newspaper "Le Monde" before she joint the Austria Press Agency and Radio Austria International. In 1986 the Eastern Europe expert Paul Lendvai brought her to the just recently launched Eastern Europe ORF - this was the beginning of a long-standing activity in public television until retirement in 2009, of which 16 years were spent as a correspondent of the ORF in Moscow. Since 2009 she has worked as a freelance journalist - for example, for the magazine "News" and "Salzburger Nachrichten". Four of her non-fiction books are devoted to her specialty Russia and analyze the history of the country, the everyday lives of people, especially grievances, problems and conflicts. Scholl is also quite critical of her native Austria: The fate of refugees and asylum seekers in this country is the subject of the book "Alone at home" (2011). The book seeks to prosecute xenophobia and prejudice and calls for more solidarity and policies that do not give place to misanthropy. Civil courage, democracy and human rights, in particular freedom of speech and the press, have always been the concern of the writer, who has been writing against stereotyping, fascism and racism for decades, using a wide range of channels and sometimes taking unusual paths. In 2017 she founded the "Grannies against the Right".