Czechia – His friend Miroslav Kalousek, with whom he founded the centre-right party TOP 09 in 2009, announced it on X in the night of 11 to 12 November: “Karel Schwarzenberg has died… I knew it was coming, but it’s still a blow. He was one of the most important and kindest people in my life. May he rest in peace, the Czech Republic should be forever grateful to him for all he selflessly did for it.”

The former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg (85), who died on 11 November in Vienna, where he had been transferred a few days earlier in order to allow his children and grandchildren to be at his bedside during his final moments, was a well known personality in both Czechia and Austria.

Although German, his family took up the cause of Czechoslovakia

A descendant of one of Germany’s most illustrious princely families – one of his forebears, Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg, led the Austrian army at the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig in 1813, while another member of the family, Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg, called the „Austrian Bismarck”, was Minister-President of the Austrian Empire between 1848 and 1852 – Karel VII Schwarzenberg (1937-2023) was first of all the son of the Czechoslovak writer Karel VI Schwarzenberg (1911-1986), who, although German by birth, took up the cause of the Czechoslovak state and even initiated a petition to President Beneš in 1938 condemning Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland.

Exile in Austria (1948-1989)

After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, his family was dispossessed of all its property in the country and went into „exile” in Austria, where he grew up, first in the Salzburg region and then in Vienna. Later, in 1960, he was adopted by his uncle Jindřich Schwarzenberg, whose colossal fortune he inherited in 1965. After studying law in Austria and fish farming in Germany, he devoted himself primarily to managing his family’s assets. At the same time, he also chaired the International Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and kept an archive of literature banned in Czechoslovakia at his family home in Germany.

Political involvement in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution of 1989

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 was a major turning point in his life. Politically close to the Czechoslovak dissident Václav Havel, he returned to Prague in the autumn of 1989 and became head of the Czechoslovak, then Czech presidential chancellery under Havel’s presidency.

He was later a senator for Prague (2004-2010), then a member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies (2010-2013 and 2013-2021), and held the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of Mirek Topolánek (2007-2009), then in that of Petr Nečas (2010-2013), where he was also Deputy Prime Minister. In 2009, together with Miroslav Kalousek, former chairman of the Christian Democrat KDU-ČSL, he founded the centre-right party TOP 09 (Tradice Odpovědnost Prosperita = Tradition Responsibility Prosperity), of which he was the first leader (2009-2015).

Many personalities have paid tribute to Karel Schwarzenberg, including the Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen, for whom “his life and work were characterised by responsibility and clear-sightedness. Liberal, conservative, cosmopolitan and patriotic, as contradictory as these terms may seem, they came together in Karel Schwarzenberg.”