Dear Readers,
The pleasant though demanding task of Editor-in-Chief of our long-standing magazine Austrian Information comes with the job of any Director for Press and Information at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
The roots of women’s suffrage movement in general can be found in the 18th century: Olympe de Gouges, widely regarded as being the first champion of female suffrage, published her declaration of rights of the woman and the female citizen (Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne) after the French Revolution in 1791.
The 1970s in Austria: Times of Change
The 1970s in Austria were characterized by reform and change both within the Austrian society as well as the Austrian political system. A shift in traditional economic structures led to a greater prosperity and to the formation of a new middle class that exhibited a flexible and unpredictable voting behavior. A new civil society started to emerge.
On 21 June 1914, just a few days before the deadly shots fired in Sarajevo set the final stage for World War I, Bertha von Suttner died in Vienna at the age of 71. Having become a well-known figure in the international peace movement after publishing the novel “Lay Down Your Arms,” she was spared not only from living through the horrors and killings of World War I which at its end left around ten million soldiers dead and many more injured, but also from discovering that her long and persistent fight for peace had been, at least as it seemed at that time, futile and pointless.
Every year during the month of May, the space in front of the city hall in Vienna is transformed into a festive outdoor music venue, providing the Viennese as well as countless tourists the opportunity to listen to some of the world's most famous classical music pieces and to watch theater plays and opera performances. The Wiener Festwochen (the Vienna Festival) were founded in 1951 to newly invent post-war Vienna as a cultural metropolis.
