He has been a reporter on cultural affairs in eastern Europe for the German newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
[2] Other books Templ has worked on include Prague, 20th Century Architecture, edited with Michal Kohout and Vladimír Šlapeta, and published by Springer in 1999.
[3] The book Unser Wien (Our Vienna) revealed long-held secrets about the Nazi era in Austria and helped to launch numerous restitution claims.
In 2005 Templ himself became involved in a restitution case that developed into ten years of legal entanglements.
[4] In October 2015, Templ received a one-year sentence as punishment for having allegedly omitted the name of an estranged aunt from an application he made on behalf of his mother, Helene, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor,[5] for the return of property seized from their Jewish relatives in 1938.