August 1968, Australia/Prague

When in 1968 the Kremlin violently suppressed the democratisation efforts of the Prague Spring, Austria became the ‘centre of global information’. Under the directorship of Gerd Bacher, the Austrian broadcasting service ORF had strong links with Prague, partly thanks to Helmut Zilk, who later became mayor of Vienna. The ORF had already reported on the Czechoslovakian government’s initial steps towards democracy. When the situation escalated in August that year, ORF recorded the last images broadcasted by independent Czech and Slovak stations. The reports were passed on via Eurovision to numerous foreign broadcasters: in places as far away as Australia, people learned about this major Cold War crisis via ORF reports.