Karel Schwarzenberg, former Czech Foreign Minister and collaborator of former President Vaclav Havel, has died at the age of 85, his TOP 09 party announced on its website on Sunday. According to several Czech media, Mr. Schwarzenberg died on Saturday in a hospital in Vienna after a long illness.
Admired for his distinction, but mocked for his little dozes in public, including during sessions of Parliament, the bow-tied “prince” was an MP until his retirement in 2021. This polyglot aristocrat, pipe smoker and amateur of Whiskey also ran for president in the Czech Republic’s first direct vote in 2013, losing in the second round to Milos Zeman.
Karel Schwarzenberg was born in Prague on December 10, 1937 as Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena Fuerst zu Schwarzenberg. His family fled the country after the Communist takeover in 1948, which ushered in an era of persecution of the nobility.
After studying law and forestry at Austrian and German universities, without “never finishing anything,” according to him, he took charge of the family’s assets, including forests and the Schwarzenberg Palace with a hotel in Vienna.
Still in exile in 1984, Mr. Schwarzenberg became president of the International Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. He returned to Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism during the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989 and recovered a considerable part of the family fortune confiscated by the communists.
He cut his political teeth as head of the presidential office under Vaclav Havel, who was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the Czech Republic in 1993. A Czech and Swiss citizen, Mr. Schwarzenberg became a senator in 2004, then minister of Foreign Affairs, serving two terms in right-wing governments in 2007-2013.
“How stupid I am, I went into politics.”
Co-founder of the conservative party TOP 09 in 2009, he became an MP in 2013. “If I wasn’t stupid, I would have enjoyed a nice retirement, I would have gone into the forest to shoot deer, I would have traveled in the whole world, I would have appreciated good wine,” he once joked. “But because I’m stupid, I went into politics,” added the man who spoke six languages.
Karel Schwarzenberg had two sons and a daughter with his wife Therese, whom he married in 1967 and again in 2008 after a divorce in 1988.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala hailed Mr. Schwarzenberg as “an exceptional personality of Czech exile and Czech politics of recent decades.” “I respected him for helping Czech dissidents under the totalitarian regime and for deciding to selflessly serve our country after 1989,” Fiala said on the social network X (formerly Twitter ).