Otto Bauer

Otto Bauer: The Theorist Who Waited Too Long

At twenty-six, Otto Bauer published a six-hundred-page treatise arguing that nations were not going to dissolve under socialism, and that Marxists who assumed otherwise were building on sand. It was a heretical thing to say in 1907, and it turned out to be right. Thirty years later, having been foreign minister of a country he did not believe should exist, and having spent a decade advising Austria's workers to wait for the correct historical moment, he died in Parisian exile with the moment still un-arrived.

A Viennese Education

Bauer was born on 5 September 1881 in Vienna, the son of Philipp Bauer, a wealthy and politically liberal Jewish textile manufacturer, and his wife Katharina. Money bought him an unusually wide education: elementary and secondary schooling in Vienna, Meran and Reichenberg, then the University of Vienna, where he took a doctorate in law in 1906 while also reading history, philosophy, national economics and sociology. He added English, French and Russian to his German. The breadth mattered later; Bauer's writing is that of a man who has read the historians and the economists rather than only the pamphlets.

The Book at Twenty-Six

*The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy* appeared in 1907 and remains the most durable thing he made. Orthodox Marxism held that national feeling was a bourgeois residue that proletarian solidarity would dissolve. Bauer, looking at an Austro-Hungarian Empire visibly tearing along ethnic seams, argued the opposite: national consciousness among workers would persist under capitalism, and a socialist movement that pretended otherwise would simply be blindsided by it. He proposed cultural autonomy — nationhood as a personal and cultural attachment, detached from territory — as a constructive settlement for a multi-ethnic state. The book made his reputation. The same year he co-founded and edited *Der Kampf*, the Social Democratic monthly that became the house journal of Austromarxism, and served as secretary of the party's parliamentary club.

Siberia

He wrote the party's pro-war manifesto in 1914, then went to fight. Drafted in August as a reserve lieutenant, he earned the Military Cross of Merit 3rd Class and, on 23 November 1914, was captured by Russian forces during an attack he had himself ordered. He spent more than two years in Siberia. Officer status brought privileges: he read Russian, English and French newspapers, wrote a comprehensive theoretical treatise, and — decisively — talked at length with Menshevik functionaries. That contact pushed him permanently toward the Marxist centre, the position between reformism and Bolshevism that would define both his thought and his paralysis. Victor Adler negotiated his exchange as an invalid, and he reached Vienna in September 1917.

Foreign Minister of a Country That Did Not Want to Exist

Adler died on 11 November 1918. The next day the party proposed the thirty-seven-year-old Bauer as foreign minister of the new German-Austria, and the State Council appointed him. He became the loudest advocate of Anschluss — union with Germany — on grounds that were simultaneously national and revolutionary: Austrians were Germans, and a socialist revolution in Germany would carry Austria with it. He told the party congress that opponents of unification were traitors to the nation, and conducted confidential negotiations with the German foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau over four days in early March 1919. When the Allies killed the idea at Saint-Germain, he resigned on 26 July 1919. He spent the rest of his life distinguishing what he had wanted from what arrived in 1938: "we wanted unification with the German Republic, not Hitler's penal colony."

The Theory of the Revolutionary Pause

Bauer's mature politics was an elaborate argument for patience. Objective conditions, he held, determined what was possible; a socialist majority would come, inevitably, and until it did the party should consolidate rather than gamble. "It is not the great geological catastrophe that has reshaped the world," he wrote in 1928; "no, it is the small revolutions in the imperceptible." Red Vienna — its housing, its schools, its municipal socialism — was the proof of concept and the foundation stone for the eventual socialisation to come.

He was the principal architect of the 1926 Linz Programme, which he presented at the party convention: Marxist in its class analysis, democratic in its methods, explicit that coalitions with bourgeois parties were temporary expedients. Conservatives and German nationalists mined its rhetoric for the spectre of "Austrobolshevism," though the party's actual practice in Vienna was resolutely reformist. Meanwhile Bauer had, after the electoral setback of October 1920, insisted the Social Democrats leave the coalition with the Christian Socials. They did not enter federal government again until 1945. Karl Renner said the decision turned a republic founded by the working class into a purely bourgeois one. When Ignaz Seipel and later Engelbert Dollfuss offered coalitions in 1931 and 1932, Bauer refused. Bruno Kreisky called those refusals the last chance to save Austrian democracy.

February 1934

Dollfuss shut down parliament on 5 March 1933. Party statutes required a general strike; Bauer hesitated. The Schutzbund, the party's paramilitary wing, was under-armed and unprepared, and on 11 February 1934 the military expert Theodor Körner begged him not to fight, predicting certain defeat. The rising began anyway, lasted four days, and ended with the party crushed and outlawed. On the second day Bauer fled to Czechoslovakia with Julius Deutsch.

In Brno he gave up formal leadership, conceded failure, and set to work building what could still be built: the Foreign Office of the Austrian Social Democrats, support for the underground, and the Revolutionary Socialists under Joseph Buttinger. After the Nazi Anschluss of 1938 he moved to Brussels and edited *Der sozialistische Kampf*. He died of a heart attack in Paris on 4 July 1938, aged fifty-six, and was buried at Père Lachaise opposite the monument to the Commune.

Why Otto Is Called a Genius

Bauer's claim rests on a single, unusually clean act of theoretical prediction. In 1907, when the entire Marxist tradition treated nationalism as an epiphenomenon due to evaporate, he looked at the same evidence and concluded that national identity was durable, that it operated on workers as forcefully as on anyone else, and that a movement organised around its disappearance would be wrecked by its persistence. The twentieth century vindicated him comprehensively. The intellectual quality involved is a specific one: the willingness to follow observed evidence against the doctrine that made his own career possible, and the analytical stamina to build a full alternative rather than merely register the objection.

The contemporary verdicts are worth quoting because they cut precisely. Wilhelm Ellenbogen called him a dazzling theoretician, eloquent, but lacking the intuitive political judgement that distinguishes genuine political genius — an explicit denial of the word, from a comrade. Kreisky, more generous, ranked him among the great intellects he had known "despite some misjudgments." Joseph Buttinger's 1953 critique is the most damaging: Bauer's framework, by making everything a matter of objective conditions, ended up sanctifying whatever existed as historically necessary, so that the opposite of revolutionary politics could be justified as revolutionary if it matched circumstances. That is the honest charge. He theorised the correct moment so rigorously that he could not act until it came, and it never came. His party was outlawed within a year of his last refusal to compromise. Call him a first-rate theorist and a catastrophic tactician, and note that Ellenbogen said so at the time.

Legacy

Bauer's remains were brought back to Vienna in 1948 and reinterred with honours in 1950 beside Victor Adler and Karl Seitz. Norbert Leser observed that dying in 1938 spared him the postwar reckoning over Austromarxism's failures and turned him into "a dead icon who was invoked on holidays but denied in everyday life." Kreisky commissioned a nine-volume edition of his collected works from 1975. The nationalities theory has outlived the politics: it is still read wherever multi-ethnic states try to reconcile cultural identity with common citizenship, which is to say almost everywhere.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Vienna
• Worked as politician, diplomat and philosopher