The Jolly Chancellor

A kind of European politician Americans rarely see, Leopold Figl, Chancellor of Austria, was on his way to the U.S. for a state visit this week. Figl is a simple man with uncommon pluck; he has managed for six years to preside over a little country full of scenery, ruins and history which is host to four occupying armies and is surrounded on three sides by Communist states. He has done it by combining American dollars with his Austrian courage and a Viennese belief in the effircacy of prayer, optimism and wine.

The State Department invited Figl because Austria is the U.S. bulwark in middle Europe and a thorn in Russia's side: in the East-West rivalry, the Germans may bargain and boggle, but Figl's Austrians are with the West in their hearts. Of the 7,000,000 population, some 80% support the stoutly anti-Communist Figl's peasant-business-socialist coalition--probably the greatest popular support of any regime in Europe. The Communists at the end of the war had 5% of the vote; their strength has not increased.

American Ward. Economically, Austria is a ward of the U.S. It lives well: the Viennese enjoy their castles of whipped cream and citadels of chocolate cake.

Reveling in the past, enjoying what they can of the present and disbelieving the future, the Austrians do little about the graft that corrupts the civil service, the entrenched cartel system, the inflation that is one of the worst in Europe.

Everybody in Austria makes fun of "Poldi" Figl, red-faced, horny-handed son of a winegrower. In the music halls, in cafes all around the Ring, in the Heurigen (wine gardens) of Vienna's cobbled suburbs, Figl's country manners, wine tippling, and his let-it-go-till-tomorrow administration are the butts of the people's jokes (and Figl's). They call him "Leopold the Last," but they love him.

Figl, who is 50, embodies the best and the worst in postwar Austria--the worst being complacency and resignation, the best being his stubborn courage. He also combines the simplicity of four centuries of Catholic peasant forebears with some of the acquired awareness (and tinsel knowledge) of Viennese sophisticates. In his well-tailored morning coat, he still looks the farmer, and he seems quite out of place as he sits in his lavish offices in Vienna's Ballhausplatz, under a portrait of Metternich, who manipulated Europe from the same chamber. Yet somehow Figl is not out of place: he knows little of crafty diplomacy but has, in the words of a friend, the nerves of a draft horse.

Twenty years ago he was the secretary of a Lower Austrian farm party, and made it into a center of anti-Nazi activity. The day after Anschluss, the Gestapo arrested Figl, threw him into Dachau. Ha was released during the war, but resumed politicking, was rearrested and was on trial for his life the day the Red army came.

Poldi, Freddi. Figl rose to leadership in postwar Austria. His strength of character had been developed in Dachau and the underground, and his anti-Communism appealed to the Austrians--who have not yet forgotten the first week of the Red army rapine, when women lay shivering on Vienna's steep roofs, hoping that the Russian soldiers would be too lazy to climb all the way up. He once told a Russian: "You can put me in jail if you want to; I was there for six years, and I'm not afraid to go back."

Recently he remarked: "We here in Austria can literally look across the Iron Curtain. We see how for miles behind the frontier they have razed every village. And we tell each other: Poldi, Freddi, Pepperl, we say, if this is the People's Democracy, then we are better off with what we have, even--" and he pointed to himself with a grin "--even if the government is no good."

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