Otto Bauer tried to steer Austrian socialism between reform and revolution
At 26, Otto Bauer published a 600-page answer to the problem tearing at Austria-Hungary: how can dozens of nationalities share one state? He went on to write roughly 4,000 newspaper articles, serve as foreign minister of a newborn republic, and try, unsuccessfully, to merge it with Germany.
Bauer was born in Vienna in 1881, son of a wealthy, liberal Jewish textile manufacturer. He took a law doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1906 while also studying economics and sociology, and had joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1900. With Max Adler, Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Renner he founded Zukunft, a school for Viennese workers that became the seed of Austromarxism, a current seeking ground between parliamentary reform and revolutionary socialism. His 1907 book on nationalities proposed cultural autonomy as a way through the empire's ethnic tangle.
That same year he entered parliament, in the first election held under universal and equal male suffrage, when his party jumped to 87 seats. He co-founded the monthly Der Kampf and joined the board of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, earning a reputation as a formidable speaker and debater. Called up in 1914, he fought at Grodek, won a military cross for saving his company, and was captured by the Russians in November. As an officer prisoner in Siberia he escaped hard labour, read foreign newspapers and wrote theory, and his talks with Mensheviks drew him toward the Marxist centre. A prisoner exchange brought him home in September 1917.
When Victor Adler died in November 1918, Bauer, then 37, stepped into the party leadership and the foreign ministry of German-Austria. He was among the loudest voices for union with Germany, arguing it followed both from cultural nationhood and from socialist internationalism, and held secret talks in Berlin's name with Brockdorff-Rantzau in early 1919. A British officer warned him to drop the topic at the peace talks, and he sat on the warning for weeks. When the draft treaty ruled out union, he resigned in July 1919. He later insisted socialists had wanted the German Republic, not Hitler's penal colony.
Critics blamed his refusal to join coalitions after 1920, and his habit of waiting for history to ripen, for easing Austria's slide toward fascism. When the party was banned in 1934 he went into exile, working for Austrian socialism until his death in 1938.
Source: Otto Bauer
