World: An Unorthodox Route to Power

BRUNO KREISKY came by his left-wing convictions via an unorthodox route. No shirtsleeve Socialist from Vienna’s proletarian slums, Kreisky is the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist who headed a wool combine. At 15, distressed by the misery he saw in the working class, he joined the Socialist Youth Movement. At 23, he was jailed for 18 months by the Von Schuschnigg regime for attending an illegal Socialist Party meeting. A few years later, he was exiled by the Nazis. Now, against all odds, the onetime Jewish emigre is about to become Chancellor of the country that had rejected him.

Kreisky’s climb bears strong parallels to that of Willy Brandt, West Germany’s first postwar Socialist Chancellor. After taking a law degree from Vienna University, Kreisky was briefly imprisoned by the Nazis, then exiled to Sweden. There, like Brandt, he wrote as a journalist and took a Scandinavian bride. “He said he would go back to Austria and become a politician when the war was over and that would not be an amusing life,” remembers his wife Vera. Also like Brandt, Kreisky has a student-age son named Peter, whose politics are distinctly more radical than his father’s. “He has the same opinion as I held—30 years ago,” laughs Kreisky.

After the war, the burly, red-haired Kreisky remained in Sweden for six years as occupied Austria’s unofficial ambassador. Returning to his homeland as foreign affairs adviser to then-President Theodor Körner, he composed Körner’s landmark 1951 speech proposing Austrian independence under permanent neutrality. Four years later, Moscow unexpsctedly accepted his formula, freeing the country of Allied and Soviet occupation. Beginning in 1959, Kreisky served for seven years as Foreign Minister in coalitions dominated by the People’s Party. A pragmatist with the reputation of being Austria’s most astute politician, Kreisky became Socialist Party chairman in 1967 and led it to last week’s upset.

Kreisky considers himself an agnostic, but in a country with a deeply ingrained tradition of antiSemitism, he is considered a Jew. As one Austrian observer noted: “He is our first Jewish Chancellor. That we have reached this point through civilized means indicates that we have at last reached democratic maturity.”