Otto Bauer
Otto Bauer was an Austrian politician who was one of the founders and leading thinkers of the Austromarxists who sought a middle ground between social democracy and revolutionary socialism. He was a member of the Austrian Parliament from 1907 to 1934, deputy party leader of the Social Democratic Workers' Party from 1918 to 1934, and Foreign Minister of the Republic of German-Austria in 1918 and 1919. In the latter position, he worked unsuccessfully to bring about the unification of Austria and the Weimar Republic. His opposition to the SDAP joining coalition governments after it lost its leading position in Parliament in 1920 and his practice of advising the party to wait for the proper historical circumstances before taking action were criticized by some for facilitating Austria's move from democracy to fascism in the 1930s. When the SDAP was outlawed by Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in 1934, Bauer went into exile, where he continued to work for Austrian socialism until his death.
Education and military training
Otto Bauer was born in Vienna, son of the wealthy, politically liberal Jewish textile manufacturer Philipp Bauer and Katharina Bauer, née Gerber. He completed elementary school in Vienna, and high school in Vienna, Meran and Reichenberg. In addition to German, he spoke English, French and, after his years as a prisoner of war, Russian. To fulfill his compulsory military duty, he enlisted as a one-year volunteer with the 3rd Regiment of the Tyrolean Rifle Regiment in 1902, completed his active military service after passing the reserve officer exam, and was transferred as a reservist to the Infantry Regiment Frederik VIII King of Denmark, No. 75. He went on to study law at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1906. His political interests were reflected in his university studies, where in addition to law, history, languages and philosophy, he enrolled in classes in national economics and sociology.In 1900 Bauer began to be politically active in the Social Democratic Workers' Party, as the Social Democratic Party of Austria was called before 1945, and became a member of the Free Association of Socialist Students. At the university he met the somewhat older Socialist Party members Max Adler, Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Renner, who was Chancellor of Austria immediately after both the First and Second World Wars. With them he founded the association Zukunft as a school for Viennese workers that was the nucleus for Austromarxism. He attracted attention when in 1907, at only 26 years old, he published the 600-page work Nationalitätenfrage und Sozialdemokratie. In it he attempted to apply the principles of cultural autonomy to find a constructive solution to the problem of nationality, which was particularly important to the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of its many nationalities.
Political career
Empire and World War I (1907–1918)
Member of Parliament
In the 1907 legislative election, the House of Deputies of the Imperial Council was elected for the first time under universal and equal male suffrage. The SDAP, which had been represented in Parliament for the first time in 1897 with 14 deputies, won 87 seats, the second strongest showing behind the conservative Christian Social Party. Otto Bauer entered the House of Deputies in the 1907 election and at the request of party leader Victor Adler became secretary of the Club of Social Democratic Deputies in the Reichsrat. In the years before World War I, Adler and the Social Democrats generally supported the existing state order.In 1907 Bauer co-founded and until 1914 was editor of the Social Democratic monthly Der Kampf, of which he remained co-editor until 1934. From 1912 to 1914 he was also a member of the editorial board of the daily Arbeiter-Zeitung, the party's central journalistic voice. During his career as a journalist, Bauer wrote some 4,000 newspaper articles, and among the Social Democrats he proved himself to be an impressive speaker and convincing debater. The historian Friedrich Heer spoke of Bauer's "marriage of German and Jewish pathos".
In 1914 Bauer met and fell in love with , a married academic and journalist who was ten years his senior. After she divorced her husband in 1920, the two were married in the Stadttempel, Vienna's main synagogue; a civil marriage was not legally possible at the time.
War service and captivity
In August 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Bauer was drafted as a reserve lieutenant of infantry. He took part as a platoon commander in the heavy fighting at Grodek, saved his company from being wiped out at the battle of Szysaki, for which he was awarded the Military Cross of Merit 3rd Class, and on 23 November 1914 was taken prisoner of war by the Russians during a "spirited" attack that he had ordered. As he wrote to fellow Social Democrat Karl Seitz, who sent him money through friends in Stockholm, he was able to work on a comprehensive theoretical treatise during his imprisonment in Siberia. He was also allowed to read Russian, English, and French newspapers due to his privileges as an officer, and he did not have to engage in physical labor.As a result of intervention by the SDAP, Bauer was able to return to Vienna as an exchange invalid in September 1917, less than two months before the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia. In February 1918 he was appointed first lieutenant in the reserves and in March placed on leave from active military service in order to work on the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He was formally in army service until 31 October 1918. His contacts with Menshevik functionaries while a prisoner of war had made him a staunch supporter of the "Marxist center" that the Mensheviks represented. In Austria, however, his views placed him among the left wing of the SDAP.
Rise to leadership in the SDAP
The SDAP's left wing had gained in importance at the party congress in 1917 because the plight of the civilian population that was going hungry due to wartime food shortages. The assassination in the fall of 1916 of the unpopular imperial Minister President Karl von Stürgkh by Friedrich Adler, son of SDAP chairman Victor Adler, also spurred on the opponents of Burgfriedenspolitik, a political truce under which the parliamentary parties refrained from challenging the Empire's war policy. Following Stürgkh's assassination, the SDAP began increasingly to distance itself from the government's wartime course. The Russian October Revolution once again increased the importance of the left wing when it was assigned the task of preventing Austrian workers from moving over to the Bolsheviks.After Victor Adler's death on 11 November 1918, the 37-year-old Otto Bauer, seen as the young and dynamic leader of the SDAP's left wing, was brought into the party's leadership. As a counterweight, the leader of the SDAP's right wing, Karl Renner, was given the position of Chancellor on 30 October 1918 in the first government of the new state of German-Austria, which declared itself both a republic and part of the German Republic on 12 November 1918.
Post-war (1918–1934)
Foreign Minister and the question of union with Germany
On 12 November 1918 the party proposed that Bauer succeed Viktor Adler as Foreign Minister of German-Austria. He was then appointed to the position by the State Council. In the election for the Constituent National Assembly on 16 February 1919, the SDAP won the largest percent of the vote and entered into a coalition with the Christian Social Party, which had come in ahead of the SDAP in the previous election.After the end of the war, a union between German-Austria, including German Bohemia, and Germany seemed a self-evident goal to many, especially urban Social Democrats who had seen their German political counterparts become the governing party in the Weimar Republic. Like other nationalities of the fallen monarchy, Austrian Germans claimed the right of national self-determination. In addition, the Austrian Social Democrats were expecting to see a socialist revolution take place in Germany. Otto Bauer was one of the most outspoken proponents of the belief in a future with Germany.
At the SDAP party congress on 31 October and 1 November 1918, Bauer stated that from the national standpoint as Germans and from the international standpoint as Social Democrats, they must demand union with Germany. In Parliament he said that opponents of Austrian unification with Germany were high traitors to the nation. The Provisional National Assembly voted in favor of the union on 12 November 1918, and on 25 December Bauer addressed a note verbale to the victorious powers saying that union with Germany was the only and correct way forward.
He conducted confidential unification negotiations from 27 February to 2 March 1919 with German Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, whose representatives in Austria warned internally against joining Germany with the small bankrupt state. In mid-April Bauer was advised by a British officer in Vienna to avoid the subject of unification as much as possible in the peace negotiations. Bauer did not inform his government colleagues of the warning until weeks later and initially nominated Franz Klein, who was known to be an ardent supporter of unification, as head of the delegation to the peace talks at St. Germain. As word of the British warning belatedly spread, the delegation leadership was transferred to Karl Renner before negotiations began.
On 7 May 1919 the Allies of World War I handed the German delegation at Versailles the draft of the peace treaty, which revealed that the victors would not permit Austria to unite with Germany. Since his policy of unification was considered to have failed, Bauer resigned from the government on 26 July 1919, and Chancellor Renner took over the Foreign Office. Bauer nevertheless remained a proponent of unification until 1933, stating later that "it was clear to every Social Democrat and every worker in Austria that we wanted unification with the German Republic, not Hitler's penal colony."