Heinz Rudolf Fischer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Fischer

http://www.bundespraesident.at/en/dr-heinz-fischer/career/

Heinz Fischer was born on 9 October 1938 in Graz. His paternal grandfather was a bookkeeper with a firm in Wiener Neustadt and his maternal grandfather was a railway employee. His maternal grandmother was from western Hungary.

His parents (Dr. Rudolf and Emmi Fischer) met in an Esperanto class in Wiener Neustadt; after the events of February 1934, they moved to Graz, where Heinz Fischer was born.

After the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria to Germany) and the National Socialist take-over, Dr. Rudolf Fischer lost his position with the Graz municipal authorities. Unable to find any other employment in Graz, he then moved his family to Vienna during the war.

Heinz Fischer started primary school in Pamhagen, a small town in the federal state of Burgenland. The six-year old was sent there when the bombing reached Vienna, to stay with a woman who was his mother’s cousin.

When the front came nearer, towards the end of 1944, Heinz Fischer and his sister moved from Pamhagen to the tiny Lower Austrian town of Loich on the Mariazellerbahn railway line, where he completed the first year of primary school.

A few weeks after the end of the war, the family returned to Vienna, where Heinz Fischer continued and finished primary school at the Otto Glöckel School in Hietzing, Vienna’s 13th district, after which he attended the classical secondary school “Hietzinger Gymnasium” on Fichtnergasse for eight years. In secondary school, he was especially interested in sports (particularly football), but an early interest in politics also became apparent. The fact that his father was an Under-Secretary of State in the Raab/Schärf government from 1954 to 1956 (during the time when the Austrian State Treaty was concluded) lent further impetus to his political interest, and in the mid-1950s he joined the secondary-school social democratic movement.

Heinz Fischer graduated in 1956. After graduation, he completed a one-year course for secondary-school graduates (Abiturientenkurs) at the commercial college on Karlsplatz in Vienna and enrolled to study law.

He was particularly preoccupied with the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Stalinist dictatorship and participated in many campaigns supporting Hungary’s fight for freedom and condemning the Stalinist dictatorship. In 1958 (from March to December), he completed his compulsory military service (then nine months) in the Federal Army, played football on the ASV13 team (in the Vienna football league’s second class) and became increasingly interested in hiking and mountain climbing.

As a student, he was active in the Austrian National Union of Students and served both on its main committee at the University of Vienna and on the central committee for all of Austria (which at the time was still elected directly by students in a general election); in the 1961 student union elections, he was the top social democrat candidate. In the same year, he completed his studies, earning his doctorate in law, and began his year of judicial clerkship (Gerichtsjahr).

At the end of 1961, he received an offer to work as a legal consultant for the Social Democratic Group in Parliament, upon which he was officially assigned to the Second President of the National Assembly. He began these duties at the beginning of 1962, at a time when Leopold Figl was still a member of the National Assembly and parliamentarians such as Franz Jonas, Franz Olah, Bruno Pittermann, Rosa Jochmann, and Bruno Kreisky, as well as Alfons Gorbach, Alfred Maleta and Grete Rehor, were on the National Assembly.

It is interesting to note that future Federal President Franz Jonas, who was then Mayor of Vienna and a member of the National Assembly, sat next to the young parliamentary group member at that time.

In the summer of 1963, when Heinz Fischer succeeded Leopold Gratz in the position of the Secretary of the Social Democratic Group in Parliament, he also had to introduce himself to Federal President Adolf Schärf, who (as the former parliamentary group Secretary during the First Republic) was particularly interested in events in Parliament with regard to both the players and the topics.

In 1964, Heinz Fischer was co-opted into the Federal Party Board of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ), and two years later ran for the National Assembly for the first time (from a hopeless position on the party list).

He worked closely with Bruno Kreisky, who was elected to succeed Bruno Pittermann as Chairman of the SPÖ at the beginning of 1967. It was also Bruno Kreisky who, in spring 1967, wrote a letter of recommendation to Professor Henry Kissinger at Harvard, when Heinz Fischer applied for a postgraduate seminar taught by Henry Kissinger at Harvard University in the summer term of 1967.

During this time (the second half of the sixties), Heinz Fischer wrote his first books, including a commentary on the National Assembly’s rules of procedure, a compilation of texts on Austrian constitutional history and a book about Otto Bauer.

On 20 September, Heinz Fischer married his wife Margit, and is proud to have been married to her for exactly 377 months as of February 2005.

In 1971, at the age of 33, Dr. Heinz Fischer was elected member of the National Assembly in the National Assembly election. At the suggestion of Bruno Kreisky and Leopold Gratz, he also continued as the parliamentary group Secretary, and in 1975 Kreisky proposed him as the Executive Chairman of the Social Democratic Group in Parliament. His membership in the SPÖ Party Presidium was also related to this.

In 1971, Dr. Heinz Fischer was elected as one of the SPÖ’s Vice-Chairmen. He continued his intensive journalistic activities in the 1970s, and his book Das politische System Österreichs [The Austrian Political System], published in 1974, became a standard work in the area of political science.

In the second half of the seventies, he received an invitation from Dr. Hans Klecatsky, a university professor and Institute Head at the University of Innsbruck, to undertake a post-doctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) at the University of Innsbruck. Fischer accepted this invitation, and in 1978 was qualified as an associate professor in political science at the University of Innsbruck, where he also lectured for a good number of semesters.

As Bruno Kreisky was winding up his political duties in 1983 and put forward Fred Sinowatz as his successor in the functions of Federal Chancellor and Party Chairman, Heinz Fischer took over the Federal Ministry of Science and Research in the Sinowatz administration. At that time, this ministry was also responsible for federal museums and libraries. This position allowed Dr. Heinz Fischer to strengthen his good contacts with a number of scientists and artists, many of which he has maintained to this day.

In 1987 (after the large coalition between the SPÖ and the ÖVP [Austrian People’s Party] was formed), he returned to Parliament as the Chairman of the SPÖ parliamentary group and remained in this position until 1990, serving a total of 11½ years as Chairman or Executive Chairman of the parliamentary group. In this capacity, he built strong and friendly relationships with Stephan Koren, first and foremost, but also with Alois Mock and Heinrich Neisser. In 1990 he was elected President of the National Assembly by an impressive majority, and served in this position for twelve years as well, having been re-elected several times.

In 1992, Dr. Fischer was also elected Vice-Chairman of the Party of European Socialists (a post which he held until he was elected Federal President), and in 1994 he assumed the position of Chairman of the European Forum for Democracy and olidarity. This was an international organisation concerned with the development of democratic structures in the young democracies of the former Eastern-bloc countries. In this position, he developed numerous contacts with leading figures in the former Eastern-bloc countries, as well as in other countries that were pursuing future accession to the European Union.

In 1994, he was appointed full professor at the University. His most important publications in the 1990s were Die Kreisky Jahre [The Kreisky Era] (1993) and Reflexionen [Autobiography] (1998).

His latest book was published in 2003 and is entitled Wende Zeiten [Times of Change]. It describes government negotiations for both 1999/2000 and 2002/2003. Fischer, notably, participated in all government negotiations conducted by the SPÖ since 1975.

Fischer’s love for music in general, and jazz music in particular, goes back to his secondary-school days (his music teacher at the Fichtnergasse school was composer and ensemble leader Friedrich Cerha). His predilection for mountain climbing led to his 1972 election as the President of the Austrian Friends of Nature – a function that he assigned to the Executive Chairman after he was elected Federal President, and which he finally relinquished in spring 2005 after 33 years.

He was nominated as a presidential candidate on 3 January 2004 and elected as the eighth Federal President of the Second Republic with 52.39 percent of the votes in the Presidential election held on 25 April 2004.

On 8 July, he was inaugurated as Federal President in Vienna before the Federal Assembly, that is, in a joint session of the National Assembly and the Federal Council.

Margit and Heinz Fischer have two children: Philip (born 1972, a management consultant) and Lisa (born 1975, a physician).

They have lived in the same house in Josefstadt, Vienna’s 8th district, for over 33 years, and share their home with over 5000 books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Fischer

Heinz Fischer, GColIH (born 9 October 1938) is the President of Austria. He took office on 8 July 2004 and was re-elected for a second and last term on 25 April 2010. Fischer previously served as Minister of Science from 1983 to 1987 and as President of the National Council of Austria from 1990 to 2002. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), he suspended his party membership for the duration of his presidency.

Fischer was born in Graz, Styria, in what had recently become Nazi Germany by Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. Fischer attended the gymnasium, focusing on humanities, and taking his Matura exams in 1956. He studied law at the University of Vienna, earning a doctorate in 1961. In 1963, at the age of 25, Fischer spent a year volunteering at Kibbutz Sarid, northern Israel.[3] Apart from being a politician, Fischer also pursued an academic career, and became a professor of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck in 1993. Political career[edit]

Re-election party, 2010-04-25. Fischer was a member of the Austrian parliament, the National Council, from 1971, and served as its president from 1990 to 2002. From 1983 to 1987 he was Minister of Science in a coalition government headed by Fred Sinowatz. First term as President[edit] In January 2004 Fischer announced that he would run for president to succeed Thomas Klestil. He was elected on 25 April 2004 as the candidate of the opposition Social Democratic Party. He polled 52.4 per cent of the votes to defeat Benita Ferrero-Waldner, then Foreign Minister in the ruling conservative coalition led by the People's Party. Fischer was sworn in on 8 July 2004 and took over office from the college of presidents of the National Council, who had acted for the President following Klestil's death on 6 July. Fischer's critics, foremost among them Norbert Leser, his university colleague, have derided him as a Berufspolitiker ("professional politician") and suggest he has never been in touch with the real world. They claim that Fischer has always avoided controversy and conflict, even when that seemed required, pointing to Fischer's tacit support for Bruno Kreisky in his attacks on Simon Wiesenthal. On being nominated for President, Fischer said that he hated antagonising people and that he considered this quality an asset rather than anything else. Second term as President[edit]

Fischer with Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in the Pink House. In April 2010, Fischer was re-elected as President of Austria, winning a second six-year term in office with almost 79% of the votes. The voter turnout of merely 53.6% was a record low.[4] Around a third of those eligible to vote voted for Fischer, leading the conservative daily Die Presse to describe the election as an "absolute majority for non-voters".[5] The reasons behind the low turnout may be that pollsters had predicted a safe victory for Fischer (Austrian presidents running for a second term of office have always won) and that the other large party, ÖVP, had not nominated a candidate of their own, and had not endorsed any of the three candidates. Some prominent ÖVP members, unofficially but in public, even suggested to vote 'null and void', which some 7% of the voters did. Personal life[edit]

Heinz Fischer is welcomed to ESO’s premises in Santiago.[6] Fischer is an agnostic[7] and has been married since 1968. The couple has two grown children. Fischer enjoys mountaineering and has been president of the Austrian Friends of Nature for many years.