Stefan Schartlmüller
Stefan Schartlmüller was born in 1983 and has always held a deep fascination with the world and its people. After several years of travelling and working overseas he returned to Austria in 2009. Raised in a traditional inn in a small village, his initial plan to turn his back on gastronomy failed completely and he ended up with the opposite of his intentions. After a short social-economics interlude at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, he opened the Spirali restaurant in Linz with two friends in the autumn of 2009, followed by the Wirt am Graben in the summer of 2010 (social economy in its purest form). Self-employment, protest actions for uni.brennt and his growing interest in agricultural policy eventually lead to a deeper involvement in political and democratic activism. This involvement took shape at first through classic social networking, then through a brief engagement in the Online-Partei, until finally in mid-2012 the IG Demokratie (democracy syndicate) was formed, which evolved as a logical progression of this network.