HUBERTUS CZERNIN was a campaigner against all that he perceived to be injustice in contemporary Austria and his country’s recent history. This included politicians with unsavoury war records, the theft of art treasures by the Nazis, and a sexually predatory Church leader.
Czernin was born in Vienna in 1956, to a branch of a Bohemian noble family that had included Emperor Franz Josef’s last foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, who attempted to start peace negotiations during the First World War.
Czernin was anything but a typical member of the Austrian nobility. After reading history, art history and politics at university he went into journalism, first on the Kurier, which he joined in 1974. In 1984 he joined the staff of Austria’s leading news magazine Profil; and in 1992 he became its editor.
Under his stewardship the magazine pursued a policy of “inform and illuminate”. Czernin wanted hard news; he was never comfortable with the soft themes that appealed to the Austrian “boulevard” papers.
He was sacked four years later when he approved a photomontage on the cover portraying Franz Vranitzky, the Austrian Chancellor, naked. His dismissal provoked protests from colleagues and the offices of the magazine were hung with black flags.
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Czernin went into publishing the following year, first as the editorial director at the house of Molden before starting his own company, Czernin Verlag, in 1999. By his own description the publisher was to be “small and refined”.
Czernin Verlag not only published books on modern Austrian politics — some of them by Czernin himself — but also works on Austrian history, the role of the Church, anti-Semitism and the pillage of Jewish property in 1938. They were themes close to Czernin’s heart. He was a prolific writer; along with countless articles, he published six books and wrote the introductions to two more. He used his books to lend weight to the causes he espoused.
His greatest coup occurred 20 years ago when he exposed the murky past of the Austrian presidential candidate, Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary-General. Waldheim, who became President, had had a convenient loss of memory over his service during the Second World War when, as an intelligence officer, he had been involved in the deportation of Greek Jews. The revelations are believed to have been largely responsible for Waldheim losing the 1992 election.
Czernin was also responsible for discrediting the Defence Minister, Friedhelm Frischenschlager, who was sacked after he rather too cordially greeted a Nazi war criminal who had returned to Austria after his release from prison. Frischenschlager was a member of Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party, against which Czernin mounted a consistent campaign. That Austria now belatedly recognises its own role in the injustices committed by the Nazis is also to some extent Czernin’s work.
In a shift away from political scandal, Czernin led the campaign which exposed and deposed Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, the Archbishop of Vienna and head of the Austrian Church, who was accused of molesting a former pupil. The Church eventually took the hint, and the prelate spent his last years in ignominious retirement in the Benedictine monastery at Göttweig in Lower Austria.
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The cause which exercised Czernin a good deal in his last years were the six paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been taken by the Nazis from the Bloch-Bauer family, and which the Austrian Government had refused to return.
They included the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Czernin’s campaign resulted in the passing of an Austrian art restitution law. The Bloch- Bauer heiress Maria Altmann, who lives in Los Angeles, finally had the paintings returned to her this year, and Czernin went to meet her in April.
It was to prove his last triumph. Over the past few months, he was bedridden with the rare cell disease mastocytosis, but continued to take a keen interest in politics and injustice as well as the activities of his publishing house.
Czernin was due to be honoured by the Israeli organisation Bnai Brith as a “righteous Gentile” for his work in bringing justice for Jews in Austria. The award was made posthumously.
Czernin was married twice. He is survived by his wife, Valerie, and his three daughters.
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Hubertus Czernin, journalist, writer and publisher, was born on January 17, 1956. He died on June 10, 2006, aged 50.