Sigrid Löffler


Sigrid Löffler is an Austrian cultural commentator, arts correspondent and literary critic.

Life

Sigrid Löffler was born in Aussig in Czechoslovakia, at the height of the Second World War. As she later spelled out to an interviewer, she was presumably conceived while :de:Fronturlaub|her father was on leave from the frontline. Her mother's family came from the northern border region of Bohemia that had more recently become known as the Sudetenland. During the ethnic cleansing of 1945 her mother took her to rejoin her father in Vienna where he was rebuilding his peace-time career as a teacher. It was in Vienna - under military occupation till 1955 - that she grew up, acutely aware of her "outsider status" as a Protestant in a conservative city determined, during the 1950s, to recreate its catholic past. At the university she worked on English studies, German studies, Philosophy and Pedagogy, receiving a master's degree. Her doctorate followed in 1966.
Her father's wish was that she should follow him into the teaching profession, which briefly she did, teaching German as a foreign language in England during 1966/67. After this experience Löffler decided to pursue a career in journalism, working between 1968 and 1972 as a foreign political editor with Die Presse, a liberal centrist daily newspaper based in Vienna.
Between 1972 and 1993 she was on the editorial team of the Vienna based news magazine, Profil, ending up as head of arts and culture and deputy editor in chief. She was also working as arts correspondent for several major newspapers |Die Woche

Literary prize juries and more controversy

Sigrid Löffler drew strong criticism as a jury member for the Alfred Toepfer Foundation when together with fellow jury member Gertrud Fussenegger she voted to award the 1991 Franz Grillparzer Literary Prize to the politically controversial novelist Peter Handke. She has also been a member of the jury for the Leipzig Book Fair and for the Heinrich Heine Prize. In 2006 she announced her resignation from the Heinrich Heine Prize jury in connection with plans to award this prize to Peter Handke. In doing so she expressed her exasperation over fellow jurors whom she believed had introduced "unsubstantiated and damaging assertions into play". In 2007, when Martin Mosebach won the Georg Büchner Prize, Löffler went public with her view that Mosebach's reactionary views made him quite unsuitable to receive the highest literary award in the German-speaking world.

Awards and prizes (selection)