Otto Bauer

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Otto Bauer (German: [ˈbaʊɐ]; 5 September 1881 – 4 July 1938) 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 (SDAP) 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.

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Education and military training Otto Bauer was born in Vienna, son of the wealthy, politically liberal Jewish textile manufacturer Philipp (Filipp) Bauer and Katharina (Käthe) Bauer, née Gerber. He completed elementary school in Vienna, and high school in Vienna, Meran and Reichenberg (the latter two at the time part of Austria-Hungary). 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 (SPÖ) was called before 1945, and became a member of the Free Association of Socialist…Citește mai mult

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In the 1907 legislative election, the House of Deputies (Abgeordnetenhaus) of the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) 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 ('The Struggle'), 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 ('Workers' Newspaper'), 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…Citește mai mult

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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 (now Horodok, Ukraine), 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…Citește mai mult

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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.

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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 (Staatsrat). In the election for the Constituent National Assembly on 16 February 1919, the SDAP won the largest percent of the vote (40.76%) and entered into a coalition with the Christian Social Party, which had come in ahead of the SDAP in the previous (1907) election. After the end of the war, a union (Anschluss) 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 (cultural) Germans and from the international standpoint as Social Democrats, they must demand union with Germany.…Citește mai mult

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Early party work From March to October 1919 Bauer served with Ignaz Seipel of the Christian Socialists on the socialization commission appointed by Parliament. Its most important result was the draft of the Works Councils Act passed by the National Assembly on 15 May 1919. The move towards socializing private enterprises, however, was quickly halted due to the divergent views of the coalition partners.

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Bauer and the leaders of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, Julius Deutsch and Friedrich Adler (the assassin of Karl von Stürgkh had been released from custody by the Emperor in the last days of the war) succeeded in keeping the workers in line with the party and stopping the communist putsch attempts of 12 November 1918 and 14 June 1919. His successes were also due to the fact that in the course of the post-war economic boom that lasted for about two years, the revolutionary fervor of the working class had diminished considerably. It was a period during which workers could find employment, earn a decent wage, pay hardly any rent, and in what had become known as "Red Vienna", were entitled to the first social benefits offered under its SDAP mayor Jakob Reumann.

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SDAP in opposition The postwar economic boom, which was based primarily on inflationary speculation, began to slow in 1920. Many working people and retirees fell into poverty due to the effects of high inflation. The dissatisfaction over living standards and the renewed solidarity among conservatives were reflected in the election results of 17 October 1920. The SDAP lost its relative majority, with the Christian Socialists 6 percentage points ahead (42% to 36%). The SDAP, at Bauer's insistence, left the coalition with the Christian Socialists. One result of this was that Secretary of the Army Julius Deutsch had to relinquish control of the Austrian Armed Forces, which 14 years later was to play a decisive role in the suppression of social democracy. The Social Democrats did not again participate in a government at the federal level until 1945.

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The breaking of the coalition with the Christian Socialists and its decades-long effects prompted the following comment from Karl Renner, who had spoken out against the move in the party executive committee: Otto Bauer, by his rigid attitude, by the weight of his personality ... made it impossible for the Social Democrats to enter the coalition except at the price of a party split ... Thus the experiment had the 'fortunate' outcome of declaring the republic, which had been founded primarily by the Social Democratic working class as a democratic republic, a purely bourgeois republic.

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In 1926 the SDAP adopted a new party program to replace the one that had been adopted in 1901. The original push for a new platform had come from Otto Bauer, who was also one of the main participants in its development. He presented it to the party membership in a fiery speech at the SDAP's 1926 convention in Linz, from which the program took its name. The program contained features from Marxism and the ideology of class conflict, and it provided the theoretical basis for political confrontation with the Christian Social Party and the paramilitary Heimwehr, which at the time were becoming increasingly clerical-fascist. It criticized the fact that the bourgeoisie, through economic power and tradition, still held sway over social institutions. Possible cooperation with them was described as a temporary condition at best, since class antagonisms were irreversible. Democracy was to be placed in the service of labor in order to expropriate big capital and large landed properties and to transfer the means of production and exchange to the "common property of the whole people". Bauer's revolutionary rhetoric, which used Marxist ideas to define the transition from capitalism to socialism as an inevitable historical necessity, largely overshadowed the…Citește mai mult

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Collapse of Austrian democracy Bauer, with the approval of Seitz and Renner, rejected coalition offers by the Christian Socialist Chancellors Ignaz Seipel in 1931 and Engelbert Dollfuss in 1932. It soon came to be considered a fatal mistake. Kreisky wrote, "In my opinion, it was the last chance to save Austrian democracy."

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On 4 March 1933 Bauer and Seitz sent party secretary Adolf Schärf to Karl Renner with the advice that he resign as first president of the National Council, due to what came to be known the rules of procedure crisis. Following the resignations on the same day of both the Christian Socialist second president and the Greater German People's Party third president, Chancellor Dollfuss two days later declared the elimination of Parliament and prevented it from reconvening. Although it was mandatory in the SDAP's party statutes for a general strike to be called if Parliament was not allowed to sit, no strike took place. Bauer did not allow himself to be pushed into action until the operational plans of the Republikanischer Schutzbund ('Republican Protection League') – the SDAP's paramilitary arm established in 1923 to counter the right-wing Heimwehr – were already in the hands of the Dollfuss government and it had cleared out a number of the Schutzbund's weapons caches. In early February 1934, Theodor Körner, who had been a general during World War I and was at the time Chairman of the Austrian Parliament's upper house, was asked at the last minute to take command of the Schutzbund. After…Citește mai mult

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Brno In February 1934 a series of skirmishes known as the February Uprising broke out between Austrian government forces and the Schutzbund. It ended in a socialist defeat and the outlawing of the SDAP. On the second day of the four-day uprising, Bauer, Julius Deutsch and other members of the SDAP leadership fled to Czechoslovakia. When he arrived in exile in Brno, he accepted the consequences of the failure of his plans and the criticism he faced from his own ranks by announcing that he would continue to be available to the party as an advisor, journalist and administrator of the party's saved funds, but that he himself would no longer assume any leadership positions. He supported the Social Democratic underground with his Foreign Office of the Austrian Social Democrats (Auslandsbüro der österreichischen Sozialdemokraten, or ALÖS) through both his words and his actions. His work helped establish the Revolutionary Socialists of Austria under Joseph Buttinger as the successor to the SDAP in 1935. It took the organizational form of a conspiratorial cadre party.

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In 1938, with Nazi Germany's Anschluss of Austria, Bauer emigrated to Brussels, where at the end of March his foreign office merged with the leadership of the Revolutionary Socialists, which had fled Austria, to form the Foreign Mission of the Austrian Socialists (Auslandsvertretung der österreichischen Sozialisten, or AVOES). Joseph Buttinger led AVOES, while Bauer was a prominent member and the editor of the newspaper Der sozialistische Kampf ('The Socialist Struggle'). Bauer always praised Germany as a "haven of spirit and progress". In his political testament written in Paris in 1938, he again spoke out in favor of an all-German revolution (including Austria), since he did not believe that a socialist revolution in Austria alone was feasible. When Karl Renner declared in favor of the Anschluss with Germany because he thought that Nazism would be temporary and no worse than Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg's authoritarian system, Bauer thought that he was correct. Kreisky noted that Bauer always considered and felt himself to be German. On 5 July 1938, at the age of 56, Otto Bauer succumbed to a heart attack in Paris. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery opposite the monument to the fighters of the Paris Commune of 1871.…Citește mai mult