Felix Pfeifle

Felix Etiennne-Edouard Pfeifle (born September 20, 1969, Fort Collins, Colorado) is an American aesthete and designer best known for his role as principal subject of the documentary film FELIX AUSTRIA! (2013) directed and produced by Christine Beebe, co-produced by Robert Dassanowsky and Elfi Dassanowsky. His birth name was Brian Scott Pfeifle and he attended Fred C. Beyer High School in Modesto, California with actors Timothy Olyphant and Jeremy Renner.

Pfeifle graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where Humanities study allowed him to focus on the culture and history of the fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungarian Empire, which encompassed the opposed forces of the traditionalist Habsburg court and emerging avant-garde modernism in the realms of art, architecture, literature, music, and philosophy. In 1992 Pfeifle was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for study at the University of Vienna, where he focused on the works and theory of Austrian architect Adolf Loos.

While attending the Pratt Institute of Design in 1995, Pfeifle legally changed his first name to Felix, essentially naming himself after the country Austria, whose historical moniker is Felix Austria i.e. “fortunate” Austria, in Latin. (He would later add Etienne-Edouard, “Steven Edward” as homage to his father). Earlier that year Pfeifle inherited a trove of over 100 letters dating to 1937 from the last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Otto von Habsburg, which would form the basis of the film FELIX AUSTRIA! (2013). The film, in part, tells of Pfeifle’s quest to reach the aging Archduke, and to document a series of interviews with him for historical posterity. Its world premiere screening is at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto April 2013 [1] and its U.S. premiere at the Indie Spirit Film Festival in Colorado Springs in October 2014 where it was given the Colorado Spotlight Award.[2]

A result of this quest is Pfeifle's discovery that the grandfather of a friend, Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón, had given Otto von Habsburg and other members of the former Austrian imperial family visas in France to escape the invading Germans via Spain and Portugal. The Archduke was the only living (gentile) witness who could testify that Propper de Callejon had saved the lives of thousands of Jews during the Second World War through his humanitarian actions in Bordeaux at that time. In 2008 Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem recognized Eduardo Propper de Callejon as Righteous Among the Nations based on this new information.

Pfeifle maintains his own firm, Office of Cultural Design, devoted largely to the practice of architectural, interior, and landscape design, but also to any projects of cultural interest to him, such as FELIX AUSTRIA!, to which Pfeifle also contributed as Art and Research Director. He has taught urban planning theory at the New School for Social Research, co-founded Modern ARTillery in Los Angeles, a non-profit that promotes new works of opera, and has served on the Board of the Greater Los Angeles Fulbright Association. Currently in 2014, Pfeifle is completing a book exploring the layers of cross-cultural, cross-epochal textures in his journey with Otto von Habsburg, in addition to producing a children’s fairy tale book based on his “Archducal Dreams”, which are included in animated form in the film.

Pfeifle is also known for being the subject of numerous paintings and drawings by renowned Austrian artist Christoph Schmidberger, of which one portrait hangs in the Saatchi Gallery at the Duke of York's HQ in London.

References

  1. ↑ MovieWeb: "Felix Austria! Announces World Premiere at 2013 Hot Docs Festival"
  2. ↑ http://www.indiespiritfilmfestival.org/and-the-winners-are/

External links