On June 21, 2005, the ÖSV President at the time, Peter Schröcksnadel, asked Clemens Hellsberg, then the director of the Vienna Philharmonic, whether he would like to make a musical and rhetorical contribution to the “100 Years of the Ski Association” ceremony in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier. The gifted musician and rather talentless skier initially declined, but then became acquainted with Schröcksnadel’s way of turning requests into orders, and later drew an elegant comparison with the Eighth Symphony in his speech entitled “Anton Bruckner and the Streif in Kitzbühel”. of the master from St. Florian with the notorious descent on the Hahnenkamm.
A good 26 years after the first encounter, the now former Philharmonic board member has published a book about the former ÖSV president, which bears the pragmatic title “Schröcks Nadel” but at the same time goes beyond the format of the usual biographies of protagonists from the world of sport. The musician from Linz praises the ski sport maker, who has since become friends, in the highest tones. He reinforces his score with numerous quotations from classical literature. In Hellberg’s introduction alone one finds 73 of a total of 398 footnotes as sources. Those who survive the heavy fare of this 17-page overture will be rewarded in the first chapter with details about Peter Schröcksnadel’s family roots and childhood. The family connections of the Tyrolean with the Mühlviertel are particularly exciting. Schröcksnadel’s family tree is in Hofkirchen im Mühlkreis. In his ancestral gallery there is Father Antonin Schröcksnadel, a missionary who was murdered in China in 1946, and Joseph Schröcksnadel, who was concertmaster of the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra in the post-war period.
Peter Schröcks Nadel grew up in an entrepreneurial family in Innsbruck. “Peterl” got good reviews in kindergarten (“A sunny child – very sensitive to Rüge”). At the age of eleven, out of loyalty to a friend, he moved to the Bundeskonvikt in Lienz, where as a “pupil” he was exposed to arbitrariness, abuse and bullying by old Nazis. “Justice fanatic” Schröcks Nadel fled, broke off his studies, started a family and later became a successful entrepreneur and sports official. The admiration of Clemens Hellsberg and his co-author Josef Metzger has earned the now 80-year-old Schröcksnadel.
Source: Nachrichten