ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Heinz Fischer’s honesty regarding his inability to be objective about Bruno Kreisky refreshing and commendable. Fischer describes how he and a few other Kreisky confidants and party leaders would gather in Kreisky’s Viennese home in the Armbrustergasse the evening before the major event. Fischer portrays a Kreisky who appears to have synthesized the best qualities of social democracy with those of a brilliant political strategist. Kreisky’s political sense, as well as his love of modernization, coincided with the necessity for a societal overhaul and cultural shift that would liberalize institutions and mores that Kreisky viewed as anachronistic and deeply unjust. By portraying the Social Democratic Party as Austria’s modernizer, Kreisky hoped to change the perception that social democrats were poor managers of the economy. Kreisky’s political Fingerspitzengefühl led him towards a rapprochement with social democracy’s erstwhile enemies, the Catholic church and the country’s farmers.
