At 16th June 2007 an international symposium on one of the founders of the Friends-of-Nature movement took place at the Friends-of-Nature House “Dr. Karl Renner” in Berlin under the auspices of the current Austrian Federal President Heinz Fischer.

Still a law student, Karl Renner, among others, founded the Friends-of-Nature movement in 1895, convinced that members of the working class, who then where living under worst conditions, also had the right of a healthy life, recreation and leisure time. As a representative of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, he was in the front rank fighting for the eight-hours-day and a universal, free suffrage.

Chaired by IFN’s president Herbert Brückner, long-time IFN Vice-president Bruno Lampasiak highlighted the many milestones of Karl Renner’s life – who was Austrian Chancellor twice and lastly officiated as Austrian Federal President. Within the scope of the anti-war movement prior to World War I, Renner visited Berlin several times. These stations where traced for the symposium by Oliver Kerstin. Siegfried Nasko gave an impressive description on how Renner, still as a student, pursued a European concept of states, and that his often criticised proposition of an annexation Austria’s by the German Reich has to be seen only in this context.

Manfred Pils summarised Karl Renner’s importance for the Friends of Nature. Virtually as the founder of  a social democratic cooperative-movement, he put the idea of a society with many democratically self-organised institutions into action, and by that successfully created and accompanied the Friends of Nature as a democratic and social movement. Michael Müller, chairman of the German Friends of Nature, additionally outlined that Renner was an important mentor to the movement, and that his ideas prevailed despite of fascism and war.

Manfred Pils, IFN Vice-president

There is going to be a brochure on the symposium, which will be presented in time at this site.