Alois Mock

Austrian politician who snipped open the Iron Curtain with a wire cutter

Alois Mock, the Austrian foreign minister who snipped open the Iron Curtain with a wire cutter months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, died last Thursday. He was 82.

Mock gained international attention in the summer of 1989 when he joined his Hungarian counterpart, Gyula Horn, near the town of Sopron on the Austrian-hungarian border. Together the two men took heavy pincers to cut open the wire strung between the concrete posts of that part of the Iron Curtain. The gesture was emblematic of how Hungary’s reform-minded ruling Communist Party was already jettisoning what had become the standard authoritarianism of the Soviet bloc.

From 1990 on, Mock and the chancellor of Austria, Franz Vranitzky, worked to negotiate Austria’s entry into what was then the European Community. In May 1994, Austrians overwhelmingly voted to join what is now the EU.

Alois Mock was born on 10 June 1934 in the small town of Euratsfeld, about 60 miles southwest of Vienna. After graduating in law from the University of Vienna, he rose in the conservative Austrian People’s Party, which, along

0 Alois Mock (left) and Gyula Horn cut the Iron Curtain in 1989 with the Socialists, dominated politics in the country for decades.

In 1969, at 35, Mock became the youngest member ever to join an Austrian Cabinet when he was named education minister. He and Vranitzky, a Socialist, joined in a grand coalition that governed Austria from 1986 to 1997.

He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Edith. © New York Times 2017.