Viktor Reimann

Viktor Riemann (25 January 1915 - 7 October 1996) was an Austrian author, commentator, journalist and politician (VdU).

In 1936 he was actively involved with the (still, in Austria, illegal) National Socialist Party.

After 1938 he switched to a position of opposition, driven primarily by simple hostility to Austria having recently been integrated into an enlarged German state.

In the autumn of 1938, Reimann teamed up with the Augustinian canon regular Roman Karl Scholz to set up a "catholic-conservative" resistance group.

After war broke out, in September 1939, the group was renamed, becoming the "Austrian Freedom Movement" ("Österreichische Freiheitsbewegung").

Their political objectives were to start by educating people about the true nature of National Socialism, and then to accomplish the downfall of the Nazi regime.

This should be accompanied by the extraction of the Danube and Alpine provinces from the recently enlarged German state, and the re-establishment of an independent Austria, which should also incorporate Bavaria, thereby extending in a northerly direction all the way to the River Main.

In the end, there were around 300-400 members, many of whom had been taught by Scholz at the monastery school an hour's walk downriver from Vienna.

The group was also networked with other resistance groups, notably in former Czechoslovakia, and maintained contacts with agents of the allied powers.

Such contacts were not without their own risks, however.

The "Austrian Freedom Movement" was smashed thanks to betrayal by one of its members, the government spy and Burgtheater stage actor Otto Hartmann.

The authorities arrested Riemann towards the end of 1940.

He was held in investigatory detention for two years and then, early in 1943, sentenced by the special People's Court to ten years imprisonment.

Till 1945 Viktor Reimann survived his detention at the punishment prison in Straubing.

Soviet troops reached the border from Hungary at the end of March 1945 and captured Vienna after two weeks of savage fighting by the middle of April.

By the end of 1945 the Soviet occupiers had acquiesced in the creation of a provisional government under Karl Renner which immediately came into line with the tide of history by endorsing the 1943 Moscow Declarations and repudiating the 1938 annexation.

War formally ended in May 1945, and with it the National Socialist chapter in Austrian (and European) history.

When he was released from prison Viktor Riemann was already relatively close to home and in July 1945 he became a contributing editor on the newly launched Salzburger Nachrichten (daily newspaper).

Austria had been divided into four zones of military occupation: Salzburg had ended up not in the Soviet occupation zone but in the US occupation zone, and initially the newspaper's publication was under the close control of General Eisenhower's twelfth army corps.

By the end of 1945 Reimann had become deputy editor in chief, a position he retained till 1948.

There are nevertheless suggestions that his (at this stage) pro-US political stance sometimes led to difficulties with senior colleagues at the paper.

During his time at the Salzburger Nachrichten Viktor Reimann rediscovered an appetite for political activism more generally.

In the previous election, which had taken place in 1945, approximately 556,000 former members of the National Socialist party had been deprived of the right to vote.

He sat as a member of the "Nationalrat" ("National Parliament") between 1949 and 1956.

Despite his involvement in liberation activism and subsequent imprisonment following the country's incorporation into Hitler's Germany, Riemann found himself identified as a controversialist, or on occasion more simply as an embarrassment, by representatives of the consensual centrist Austrian political mainstream during the postwar decades.

A succession of political biographies and his newspaper contributions may have contributed to this.

Viktor Reimann was born and died in Vienna.

Successful completion of his schooling led him to the University of Vienna where he studied History and Germanistics.

Heinrich von Srbik and Hans Hirsch were two of his history tutors.

With Herbert Kraus, he was a co-founder, in March 1949, of the "Verband der Unabhängigen" ("Federation of Independents" / VdU) party.

When a Salzburg party branch was set up on 1 September 1949 Reimann became its chairman, as well as head of the party press department.

Viktor Reimann became a member of the "Nationalrat" ("National Parliament") in 1949.

His was one of 16 seats allocated to the "Wahlpartei der Unabhängigen" (as the VdU was briefly known) which had won nearly 12% of the national vote.

These people regained their voting rights ahead of the 1949 election.

There were strong inferences drawn from the pattern of the election results, that the former National Socialists voted in disproportionately high numbers for the VdU rather than for the mainstream centre-right and centre-left ÖVP and SPÖ parties (with respectively 44% and 39% of the national vote).

Attitudes towards Reimann, a relatively high-profile VdU member of parliament, were affected by those perceptions, both during his political career and subsequently.

(loosely, "Who smuggled the communist wooden horse into the German Rome?"), Reimann wrote that "giving Bertolt Brecht Austrian citizenship [in 1950] shows that our country is still undermined by communism and the Americans are continuing to fund the spiritual Bolshevisation of Austria, exploiting the eager collaboration of certain socialist intellectuals along with the uncertainties and weaknesses of the cultural power-brokers of the [governing (in coalition)] ÖVP ("centre-right Austrian People's Party"),

Throughout his time as an opposition member of parliament, Reimann's increasing public profile seems to have owed more to his continuing work as a journalist than to any contributions he made with his parliamentary work.

In a contribution which he made in October 1951 to the bimonthly periodical "Die Neue Front" under the headline "Wer schmuggelte das Kommunistenpferd in das deutsche Rom?"

During the build-up to the ("anti-communist") Vienna Brecht boycott which took hold in the city's theatres for ten years between 1953 and 1963, Reimann joined in the criticism of the iconic playwright.