2007 Nuclear-Free Future Lifetime Achievement Award
Freda Meissner-Blau, Austria
An elegant gait, a graceful carriage. If one needed a
figure on which to model such expressions, one surefire
right choice would be Freda Meissner-Blau. The way
she conquers a hiking trail is the same manner by which
she reels in her successes: goal-orientated, courageous,
uncompromising, brassbound. The characterization of
Freda by our jury member Christine von Weizäcker
contains in sketch-format all the ingredients a lengthy
portrait needs: »How easily beauty degrades into public
pose, originality ebbs into peculiarity, eloquence and
social grace become weapons of manipulation,
sophistication descends into cynicism, cleverness
becomes witless conceit, and a love for nature embitters
one’s connections with other people, even spawns
human contempt. How rich it is that with your rich gifts
you have side-stepped each such peril.«
Freda Meissner-Blau was born in Dresden on 11
March 1927 as the youngest of four children. She grew
up in a liberal, sophisticated household and took great
pleasure in nature, culture, art. How devastating it must
have been when, because of his publications, her father
was branded by the Nazi regime as an enemy of state,
and that because his name appeared on a Gestapo list
he would be forced to flee the country for England.
Freda would lose a great many friends and relatives to
the war. She personally witnessed the terrible night of the
Dresden inferno. Then during the fifties in the Belgium
Congo she observed and sided with the indigenous
resistance to the colonial power. Freda’s life has been
shaped by powerful forces. And her dedication to work
for a peaceful and just world is highly steeled.
Freda Blau-Meissner’s mistrust of the nuclear
industry began already during the fifties. When a front
was formed against the 98% completed Zwentendorf
nuclear power plant in 1978, she dedicated her energies
to stopping the reactor’s finalization, forming a front
together with such people as Stefan Micko, Wolfgang
Pekny, Peter Weish, and her living partner Paul Blau.
Chancellor Bruno Kreisky reacted to the civic unrest by
sanctioning a people’s referendum; on November 5th the
nuclear power plant opponents won a slender victory,
garnering 50.5% of the total votes cast. Shortly thereafter
the parliament enacted a law prohibiting the use of
nuclear fission in Austria to supply energy. Freda later
tapped into this change of current to barnstorm across the
land as the energetic presidential candidate of the Greens.
For Freda Meissner-Blau the struggle against the
nuclear industry is an expression of a conflict more
profound: »Governments, bureaucrats and national
economists still chase after the chimera of an infinitely
expanding economy in this, a finite world. Their logic is
the logic of money... But money is not the currency of
nature. Money can never measure the worth of a life. Our
civilization will only survive if authentic moral
responsibility returns as a vital component of our
economic and political discourse.«
Freda Meissner-Blau was one of the moving spirits at
the World Uranium Hearing in 1992 – perhaps its most
graceful! And so we meet again in Salzburg – and this
time in her honor, this time to tell her, »thank you«.
--Claus Biegert (English version Craig Reishus)
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