Full Name Hans Weiss Nationality Austria | Name Hans Weiss Role Writer | |
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Born 1950 Vorarlberg, Hittisau, Austria Occupation journalist
photographer
writer Books The Black Book of Corporations People also search for Klaus Werner, Abdul Qaiyum Rafiqi, Hans-Peter Martin | ||
Hans Weiss (born 1950) is an Austrian writer (fiction and non-fiction), journalist and photographer
Contents
Hans Weiss lives and works as an independent writer and photographer in Vienna, Austria. His books sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into seventeen languages.
Life and career
Weiss was born in Hittisau, a remote village in Austria. He studied psychology, philosophy and sociology in Innsbruck and Vienna and graduated in 1976 with a PhD. His thesis about the horrible state of care in an Austrian psychiatric clinic caused a scandal. After legal disputes and an internal investigation the director of the clinic was dismissed. The PhD-theses led to widespread reforms in the psychiatric services in Austria.
Hans Weiss completed his studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna with an MA in sociology in 1978. In 1977 he got a four-month scholarship from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to study psychiatric services in Italy. In 1978–79 he went to Cambridge, England, and London with a scholarship from the British Council to study the psychiatric services in England.
His first book Gesunde Geschäfte (Healthy Business – about the malpractices of the pharmaceutical industry), written 1981 in collaboration with three colleagues, was an immediate bestseller in the German speaking world. For this book he worked as a salesman for the pharmaceutical companies Bayer and Sandoz and collected thousands of highly confidential files. Healthy business describes in detail how pharmaceutical companies bribe doctors and use patients as guinea pigs.
His next book Bittere Pillen (Bitter Pills – risks and benefits of the most frequently used drugs), written 1983 in cooperation with the same colleagues as his first book, was an even greater success – with almost three million copies sold. This comprehensive reference work is updated every three years and is up to the present day used by patients and doctors alike.
Since then, he wrote more than twenty books, as author or co-author, fiction and non-fiction. His main topics are unethical practices of multinational companies ("Schwarzbuch Markenfirmen" – The Black Book of Corporations), tax evasion tricks of global banks and companies ("Asoziale Marktwirtschaft" – Antisocial Market Economy) and especially Medicine ("Korrupte Medizin" – Corrupt Medicine; "Schönheit" – The promises of the Beauty Industry).
Between 1982 and 1984 he directed TV-documentaries for the Austrian Broadcast Corporation ORF.
During the spring-term of 1989 he taught methods of investigation at the Institute for Journalism and Communications (University of Vienna).
For his often daring investigations he posed as a salesman for drug companies, as a consultant for big pharmaceutical companies, doctor, import/export-dealer, heir of a wealthy company owner, prison psychologist and patient.
Sometimes he is focussing his view on very small communities or on one person. For example, in the book "The People of Langenegg" (Die Leute von Langenegg), where he described life in the 1930s and 1940s in a remote Austrian peasant village.
Occasionally he writes fiction. For example, the novel Kulissen des Abschieds (Scenery of the goodbye), published in 1999 by Ullstein Verlag/Berlin. In his fiction work he intertwines personal experience with historic facts, for example in the book Mein Vater, der Krieg und ich (My father, the war and I), which was published in 2005 by Kiepneheuer & Witsch in Cologne, Germany. For this publication he used the secret diaries his father wrote during military service in World War II and during the holidays in his village. His father was a simple soldier with an anti-Nazi attitude, stationed in Norway at the Russian Front and captured as a prisoner of war in France.
His journalistic reports for the magazines Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit or the Austrian newspaper Der Standard often caused heated political debates, for example the illegal employment of a nurse in the family of the Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel in 2006 or the lush farm subsidies to multimillionaires.
In 1994 he moved to New York City and attended classes at the International Center of Photography. In 1998 and 2011 he completed courses at the Schule für künstlerische Fotografie (School of Art Photography) in Vienna. His photographs were on show in group exhibitions in the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2012, Rupertinum Salzburg (2012), Fotogalerie Vienna (2011), Saline Hallein (2010), Palazzo Zenobio in Venice (2009) and various other places.