This was announced by the “Kronen Zeitung” on Sunday. Nimmerrichter was 101 years old. His often controversial columns appeared in the daily newspaper between 1965 and 2001, to which he returned briefly in 2011.
For decades, Nimmerrichter, who was born on December 31, 1920, has earned the reputation of a brutal columnist. He polarized the public with his daily “Staberl” columns. He repeatedly occupied the press council and had to appear in court more than once. When a court in 2004 attested that Austria’s largest daily newspaper had “anti-Semitic and racist undertones”, several “Staberl” columns were cited as evidence for this finding.
His opponents accused him of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, not least because of allegations such as in 1992, when he reasoned about the Holocaust and the “methods of mass murder” and came to the conclusion: “Only relatively few of the Jewish victims were gassed.”
The writer Elfriede Jelinek was inspired by Nimmerrichter for her play “Stecken, Stab und Stangl”, which was created in response to a right-wing extremist bomb attack in Burgenland in 1995 and into which she incorporated numerous “Staberl” quotes. “Staberl” is also reflected in the title. Nimmerrichter himself has always sharply rejected allegations of anti-Semitism.
Throughout his professional life, however, he openly wrote against the left, liberals and political correctness and acted against the grand coalition and for the then FPÖ leader Jörg Haider as a pike in the political carp pond. Before he started working for “Krone”, for which he wrote more than 13,000 columns, he worked for the United Press news agency, “Welt am Montag”, “Weltpresse” and “Express”. The “Krone” mourns the “legendary voice of the people,” as it writes in an obituary on its website.
Source: Nachrichten
