Felix Pfeifle

Who is Felix Pfeifle?

Felix Etiennne-Edouard Pfeifle is an American aesthete and designer best known for his role as principal subject of the documentary film FELIX AUSTRIA! 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.. 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!. 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.