Thomas Klestil

Thomas Klestil was born on November 4, 1932 in Vienna, the youngest child of a working-class family in Erdberg, a modest quarter of the city's Landstrasse district. His father drove a tram for the municipal transport service, and the household had little money to spare ^[1]. Klestil grew up during the years of Austrofascism, the German annexation of 1938, and the Second World War, experiences that left him with vivid childhood memories of a city under bombardment and occupation.

After the war he attended secondary school in Vienna and proved a capable student. He went on to the Hochschule fuer Welthandel, the Vienna college of world trade that later became the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where he studied commerce and economics. He completed a doctorate in 1957 ^[2]. For a young man of his background, an academic degree in economics opened a path into the federal civil service that would otherwise have been hard to reach, and anyone asking who was Thomas Klestil must begin with this climb from Erdberg into official Vienna.

That same year, at the age of 24, he joined the economic coordination section of the Federal Chancellery. Postwar Austria was rebuilding its administration and its international ties after regaining full sovereignty through the State Treaty of 1955, and able young officials found opportunities quickly ^[2].

Klestil's first foreign posting came in 1959, when he was sent to Paris to work at Austria's mission to the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the body that became the OECD in 1961. Three years later he moved to Washington as an economic officer at the Austrian embassy, beginning a long association with the United States that shaped the rest of his career ^[1]. He returned to Vienna in the mid 1960s to serve in the office of Chancellor Josef Klaus, handling international economic questions for the head of government.

In 1969 the foreign ministry gave him a distinctive assignment: to open Austria's first consulate general in Los Angeles and serve as its founding consul general. He spent five years in California, cultivating business, cultural, and Hollywood contacts for a small neutral country that wanted visibility on the American west coast ^[3]. Colleagues from those years described an energetic networker with fluent English and an easy manner, qualities not always associated with the Viennese bureaucracy.

Back home from 1974, Klestil headed the international organizations section of the foreign ministry and worked on one of Bruno Kreisky's signature projects, the establishment of the Vienna International Centre that made the Austrian capital the third headquarters city of the United Nations. In 1978 he became Austria's permanent representative to the UN in New York, and in 1982 he reached the peak of the diplomatic ladder as ambassador to the United States ^[2]. His five years in Washington coincided with the eruption of the Waldheim affair in 1986, when revelations about President Kurt Waldheim's wartime service in the German army strained relations with Washington and led the US government to place Waldheim on its watch list of excluded persons. Klestil had the awkward task of defending Austria's head of state abroad while the country's standing deteriorated. In 1987 he returned to Vienna as secretary general of the foreign ministry, the top civil service post in Austrian diplomacy ^[3].

The Austrian People's Party (OeVP) nominated Klestil for the federal presidency in 1992, when Waldheim declined to seek a second term. Though a party member since his youth, Klestil ran on his record as a professional diplomat rather than as a partisan figure, campaigning under a slogan promising a president trusted abroad. In the runoff of May 24, 1992 he defeated the Social Democratic candidate Rudolf Streicher with roughly 57 percent of the vote and took office that July ^[4].

Repairing Austria's international position was the central task of his first term, and it is the achievement most often cited in any account of Thomas Klestil achievements. Foreign governments that had kept Waldheim at arm's length reopened their doors: Klestil was received in Western capitals and undertook a heavy schedule of state visits. The most consequential came in November 1994, when he became the first Austrian head of state to address the Israeli Knesset. Speaking in Jerusalem, he said that many of the worst henchmen of the Nazi dictatorship had been Austrians and that Austria had never fully confronted this side of its history, an explicit break with the long-cultivated image of Austria as merely Hitler's first victim ^[5]. He also lent his weight to the campaign for membership of the European Union, which Austrians approved by a two-thirds majority in the June 1994 referendum before the country joined on January 1, 1995 ^[4].

Klestil was re-elected in April 1998 with about 63 percent of the vote in the first round, a comfortable mandate that nonetheless preceded the most difficult period of his presidency. After the October 1999 parliamentary election, the OeVP under Wolfgang Schuessel negotiated a coalition with Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party. Klestil made no secret of his opposition. He explored alternatives, delayed, and, when no other majority could be formed, swore in the government on February 4, 2000 with visible reluctance, his stern expression at the ceremony becoming one of the defining photographs of the episode ^[6]. Before doing so he extracted a signed declaration from both party leaders committing the government to European values, and he refused to accept two of the Freedom Party's proposed ministers, Hilmar Kabas and Thomas Prinzhorn ^[6]. The fourteen other EU member states imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria for several months, and Klestil spent much of 2000 arguing his country's case abroad while relations with his own chancellor turned frosty.

In 1957 Klestil married Edith Wielander, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The marriage came apart during his presidency: the couple separated publicly in 1994 amid reports of his long relationship with Margot Loeffler, a career diplomat nearly two decades his junior who had served on his staff ^[7]. The separation was an uncomfortable subject for a president elected with strong support from Catholic conservative voters, and Austrian media covered it intensely.

Klestil and Edith divorced in 1998, and in December of that year he married Loeffler in a quiet ceremony. As first lady she accompanied him on state visits and later returned to diplomatic work ^[7]. Those who knew Klestil described a man of considerable personal charm and ambition, a lover of protocol and ceremony, and a devout Catholic whose faith remained important to him despite the turbulence in his private life.

His health became a recurring concern. In the autumn of 1996 he fell gravely ill with severe pneumonia complicated by a rare infection, spending weeks in intensive care before recovering to resume his duties ^[1].

The final years of Klestil's second term were quieter but marked by his estrangement from the Schuessel government. Constitutional practice gives the Austrian president limited day-to-day power, and Klestil, who believed the office should be more than ceremonial, chafed at his inability to shape policy. He continued to travel widely, promoted Austrian business abroad, and spoke often about European integration and the responsibilities that came with the EU's eastward enlargement ^[4].

Barred by the constitution from a third term, he prepared to hand over to Heinz Fischer, the Social Democrat elected in April 2004. The transfer never took place in the usual form. On July 5, 2004, Klestil suffered two heart attacks and fell into a coma; he died in a Vienna hospital late on July 6, aged 71, just two days before his term was to expire ^[8]. The presidential powers passed on an interim basis to the presidium of the National Council until Fischer's inauguration on July 8.

His state funeral at St Stephen's Cathedral drew an unusually large gathering of foreign leaders, among them UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and numerous heads of state from central and eastern Europe, a reflection of the personal ties he had built across four decades of diplomacy ^[8].

Assessments of Klestil usually return to two moments: the Knesset speech of 1994 and the grim-faced swearing-in of February 2000. The first helped move Austria's official memory of the Nazi era from evasion toward acknowledgment, complementing Chancellor Franz Vranitzky's 1991 admission of Austrian co-responsibility ^[5]. The second showed both the limits and the uses of the presidency: he could not block a lawful coalition, but he could set conditions, veto individual ministers, and signal to the world that Austria's head of state stood apart from it ^[6].

Any fair Thomas Klestil biography also records the diplomat beneath the politician. He helped anchor the United Nations in Vienna, represented his country in Washington through one of its worst reputational crises, and then, as president, methodically rebuilt the access and respect Austria had lost. Among the basic Thomas Klestil facts, his rise from a tram driver's household to the Hofburg remains one of the more striking personal stories in the Second Republic, and Austrians still cite his career as evidence of what the postwar republic's schools and civil service could make possible ^[1].