Great Austrians

[Barrel of Fun]

NO.......................

Why not? Great doesn't necessarily mean good.

The Great Depression wasn't just a factory closing with the loss of 200 jobs. The Great Fire of London was not an opportunity to have a stroll in a nice warm evening or warm some marshmellows. The great big wave that killed many thousands in the Southern Hemisphere was not an opportunity to grab your surf board and catch some waves.

 

[Napper]

Fritzl ?

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

Joseph Haydn
Franz Schubert
Johann Strauss
Ferdinand Porsche
Gaston Glock
Simon Wiesenthal

 

[Gully]

Great call on Simon Wiesenthal Tyrone, kind of balaces out Kurt Waldheim...who everyone thought was a great politician until they found out about his Nazi past!

I will offer up:

Egon Schiele
Christian Andreas Doppler
Franz Kafka
Oskar Schindler

 

[TheBlueAndWhiteStrips]

DJ Otzi

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Franz Ferdinand

 

[Gwylan]

I will offer up:
Franz Kafka

He was Czech. If you go to Prague you can scarcely move for all the Kafka tat.

Freud is normally regarded as Austrian but he was from Pribor, now in the Czech Republic.

How about Hitler's classmate, Ludwig Wittgenstein

And surprisingly, given his first name, no-one has mentioned the other Gus - Mahler.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

Ultravox

 

[crasher]

If you're looking for a modernist novelist - Robert Musil's your man. Wrote a massive book called The Man Without Qualities which almost no one (myself included) has read.

 

[Gully]

He was Czech. If you go to Prague you can scarcely move for all the Kafka tat.

He was indeed born in Prague at a time that it was in Bohemia which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire...so, very losely Austrian.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

 

[chops]

Josef Fritzl

 

[Buzzer]

Another shout here for Wittgenstein. As complete a definition of genius as there ever could be.

Also the world can be thankful for the 'Austrian School' and in particular Mises and Von Hayek and Popper. Between them they absolutely destroyed the claims that socialism makes for a freer, fairer society.


Edit - and Schoenberg, pioneer in atonal music.

 

[Jonno]

Wittgenstein may have been a genius, but he was mostly wrong.

 

[Buzzer]

Really? Genuine question as I was under the impression that his later writings were so esoteric as to be almost impossible to conclusively refute.

Right or wrong - I would still love the bloke. Completely hatstand, bordering on autistic with deep psychological problems, history of looniness in his family, eccentric above and beyond the call of duty, undoubtedly brave and honourable and allegedly and inadvertently started the Second World War. That's some CV!

 

[Jonno]

Really? Genuine question as I was under the impression that his later writings were so esoteric as to be almost impossible to conclusively refute.

Right or wrong - I would still love the bloke. Completely hatstand, bordering on autistic with deep psychological problems, history of looniness in his family, eccentric above and beyond the call of duty, undoubtedly brave and honourable and allegedly and inadvertently started the Second World War. That's some CV!

Yes, you're kind of right. However, his first work, the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus was even refuted by Wittgenstein himself by the time he came to writing his second and last work, the Philosphical Investigations. It's true that the latter is quite esoteric, very hard going with an almost mystical quality, highly aphoristic too and it's very difficult to actually know what he really means in many places. For a highly entertaining, if not always fully accurate, demolition job of Wittgenstein's philosophy and Linguistic Philosophy in general, read Words & Things by Ernest Gellner. Also quite heavy going but worth it.

One thing that makes me laugh about Wittgenstein is that he is one of the few people I've ever heard of to admit that he had no sense of humour.

 

[tonymgc]

King of the mullett. Ladies & gentlemen i give you TONI POLSTER

 

[colinz]

Egon Schiele, Great Painter or just an old pervert ?

Beware of artists whose works bare little resemblance to their nude models.
Egon Schiele - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Austrian Gull]

I've got to stick up for my adopted country. Some more not mentioned so far.

Sport:
Hermann Maier - skiing legend who came back from a serious motorbike accident.
Andreas Herzog - very skilful playmaker for Werder Bremen.
Herbert Prohaska - perm & 'tache still in fashion here. Great midfielder of the 70s/80s.
Thomas Muster - former world tennis number one.

Thinking about the question, though, I could hardly name a famous Austrian woman. A definitely masculine biased society.

 

[Gwylan]

Thinking about the question, though, I could hardly name a famous Austrian woman. A definitely masculine biased society.

Lotte Lenya was Austrian

EDIT. And Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel literature prize winner, is also Austrian