Image: (APA)
This was announced by the foreign office on Wednesday in a broadcast “in deep sadness”. Schallenberg, the father of Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP), entered the foreign service in 1952 and served as ambassador to India, Spain and France. He was already working for the State Department at the meeting between then US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet head of state and party Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, as was his son Alexander after returning to Washington from his trip to the USA , where he met his counterpart Antony Blinken, among others, told journalists.
Schallenberg also worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna as head of the department for press and information and as head of the cultural policy section. In 1992 he was finally appointed Secretary General. “A post that he carried out with incredible passion and commitment until his retirement in December 1995,” says the broadcast.
“Entered the diplomatic service shortly before the signing of the state treaty, he stood like no other for a new, self-confident Austrian foreign policy. Wolfgang Schallenberg played a key role in the development of Austrian diplomacy in this turbulent phase of the republic,” it said.
The Austrian Society for Foreign Policy (ÖGAVN) and the United Nations, of which Schallenberg was Honorary President, also paid tribute to the diplomat in a broadcast. “His intellectual work and his cosmopolitan attitude was not only a valuable inspiration but also a basic prerequisite for making foreign policy accessible to broad sections of civil society,” said the ÖGAVN.
Source: Nachrichten
