Heinz Fischer

Origins and early life

Heinz Fischer was born in Graz on 9 October 1938, seven months after the Anschluss, into a social-democratic family; his paternal grandfather, Jakob Fischer, born in 1876, was a Jew, expelled in his student days from the University of Vienna for shouting 'Down with Lueger', the antisemitic mayor, in a lecture hall, and his father Rudolf, who had 'an Aryan mother but a Jewish father', lost his job after the Anschluss for that reason — the one grandparent on which this fiche rests, as Fischer himself recorded it in his memoirs. Raised in a Catholic Austria and a socialist home, he studied law at Vienna and took his doctorate in 1961.

Work and career

He gave his life to the Social Democratic Party and to parliament: a member of the National Council from 1971 to 2004, chairman of the party's parliamentary group for a decade, Federal Minister of Science and Research from 1983 to 1987, and President of the National Council, the presiding officer of the Austrian parliament, from 1990 to 2002. In 2004 he was elected Federal President of the Republic, and re-elected in 2010 with nearly eighty per cent of the vote, the head of state of Austria for the two terms the constitution allows, until 2016, a president of consensus who used the office's moral authority against the far right and for the memory of the Austrian victims of Nazism; in 2018 he became co-chairman of the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens.

This fiche is factual and dated, and records what he has said himself: that he was raised without religion and did not know the details of his grandfather's story until adulthood.