Stephan Templ


Stephan Templ is an Austrian writer and journalist who is best known as the co-author of the book Unser Wien that details how hundreds of Jewish businesses in Vienna were seized by the Nazis and never given back.

Biography

Templ was born in 1960 in Vienna, Austria and is a resident of Prague, Czech Republic. As a journalist, he has been the cultural affairs reporter for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Eastern Europe.

Works

He is the co-author of the book Unser Wien , published in 2001, which for the first time catalogued hundreds of Jewish-owned properties in Vienna that were seized under Hitler's regime and never returned to their owners. According to the New York Times what makes the book notable is not the history, which was broadly known, but rather the details in the second half of the book, compiled by Templ, called The Topography of Robbery which lists businesses, addresses and former and current owners.
Other books he worked on include Prague, 20th Century Architecture edited with Michal Kohout and Vladimír Šlapeta which was published by Springer in 1999.

Controversy

The book Unser Wien revealed long-held secrets about the Nazi era in Austria, and helped launch numerous restitution claims. Templ himself became involved in a restitution case in 2005 which evolved into ten years of legal entanglement.
In October 2015, Templ received a one-year sentence as punishment for having allegedly omitted the name of an estranged aunt in an application on behalf of his mother, Helene, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, for the return of property seized from his Jewish relatives in 1938. The BBC News notes that critics have suggested that the jailing may be linked to the author’s criticism of the government's restitution record.
At the end of 2015, Templ's legal team were finally allowed access to documents held by the Austrian state that proved Templ had informed them about the aunt's existence in 2003.