II
This almost pathological striving after truth and after a way out from the present state of distress, and the attempt to grasp the one path through the myriad influences and interests that surround one, create in their wake unreconcilable opposites that are themselves projected upon the working class.
—Karl Renner, “Problems of Marxism,” Der Kampf
10
World War I disrupted Austrian culture, as war disrupts any culture. The complexity and range of everyday activities is truncated, and the inherent supports that social norms give to individual growth are lost in the poverty of the emergency environment. In Austria in this dearth, individuals whose prewar actions were guided by principles shaped by their own deliberation tended to remain balanced and consistent in their personalities. One’s essential self came to the surface in everyday encounters of coping with social chaos. There were ersatz norms, just as there were ersatz products. There was chauvinistic passion in the early war years and hopeless cynicism in the later years. Individuals who normally found their identity in norms outside of themselves fell prey to several waves of behavior and emotion between 1914 and 1918.
The radical change in norms during wartime can heighten a person’s sense of individuality, for the fabric of everyday life that has been taken for granted is threatened with dissolution. One is forced to question his peacetime values and principles and to arrive at new organizations of thought and action. The Austro-Marxists were thinking persons, yet they were also individuals with large areas of unconscious character. The change in the social reality and the tempo of everyday life thrust them into contact with dimensions of their person that were repressed in the normal environment but manifested themselves in a time of uncertainty. It was a time of self-confrontation for the Austro-Marxists. The war, indirectly, was a radical therapy. Each man had the opportunity to express his repressed desires and even to exercise his competencies toward either achieving these desires or understanding the implications of the fears and joys that swept over him in the face of long-repressed dimensions of himself. But therapy is not normal life. The patient may make strides within the analyst’s office, but he must transfer his gains to the world outside. Self-realizing insights and activities occurred among the Austro-Marxists during the war, as well as activities that came frustratingly near to growth but were distorted or diverted by a failure of will or understanding. After World War I, with the gradual reestablishment of the normal social reality, the Austro-Marxists lost some of the gains they had made. Nevertheless, each man confronted himself during World War I and came to moments of truth that brought maturation.
Even though on the surface Karl Renner seemed much more satisfied with the pre-1914 state of affairs in Austria than his Austro-Marxist compatriots, some of his prewar articles bear seeds of a will toward violence. His pride in the German essence and suspicion of the enemy that lurked on the borderlines of the German soul were manifested in an article written in January 1909 entitled “Sympathien und Antipathien.” Renner justified the annexation of Bosnia along with German expansion into Africa in the light of the imperialistic conquests of England and France. He states that in contradistinction to the anti-imperialistic sentiment in Austrian Social Democracy, the western European nations were much more greedy than the Germans, and moreover, the Germans brought education (Bildung) to the lands they influenced. In the same article Renner quoted Ferdinand Lassalle’s comment made in 1859 at the time of the Austrian intervention in Italy to the effect that Austria was the greatest hindrance to the victory of democracy in Europe and added, “Whereas that might have been true before 1866 or 1905, for today and for the whole future of Austria it is false, exactly the opposite is true.”1
But in peacetime such sentiments raised the eyebrows of the socialists of principle, and in later prewar articles Renner wrestled with his German nationalism, trying to find room for it within the pattern of life to which he was compelled to conform. A good example of the sparring with himself in which he was engaged before 1914 is provided by an article written for Der Kampf in January 1912:
The socialist places internationalism against nationalism because he is against militarism and war, therefore every expression of chauvinism is looked upon as a barbaric abomination, a sin against man; for the socialist the so-called patriotic virtues are seen merely as particularism. And this particularism is just as reactionary in the time of a world economy and a world culture as that of Bavarian or Hessian or Oldenburgian was designated a hundred years ago.
Yet now the shallowness of the thoughtless represents itself, and cries: What do you want [with this internationalism], a cultureless conglomeration of peoples, a disgusting mixture of white, yellow, and black, the inevitable decline of every individual quality, the road of socialist “equalization” and the other banalities connected with such notions!2
The “shallowness of the thoughtless” represented an argument that Renner appropriated after August 1914; with the “Day of the German Nation” he no longer had to sublimate his personal shadow with such rhetoric.3 He was at first eclipsed by his shadow but then extended his consciousness to the areas inhabited by dark forces he formerly could not admit to himself. These areas included personal and public dimensions of himself, for Renner found his identity within the affairs of the state as well as in individual capabilities. Renner desired to assume a leadership role in the Austrian Social Democratic party and in public life. He was forty-four years of age when the war began. The party “fathers” were in their sixties and prepared to pass the baton of leadership to their Nachwuchs.
Renner identified strongly with his uncle, Leopold Habiger, who possessed an enviable domain. He wished to overcome the dependency he inherited from his father and reverse the fortunes of his youth by taking and wielding authority. In such an assumption of power, he would cease to be a servant of his own fantasies of geography and would become the owner of territory. His extroverted personality and German Catholic background gave him the credentials of an Austrian German political leader for the majority of his nation. The war allowed him to assert himself, for he no longer had to be ashamed of his German chauvinism; his preference for an ordered state, which restricted diversity of opinion, was the norm during World War I. The patriarchal control of social policy toward which he aspired was the order of the day. Moreover, the inextricable constellation of his ego with the public world and the mechanisms of the state flourished in a society in which he need not apologize for national expansion.
Thus in his first major article of World War I, in which he defended the war and rationalized Social Democratic support of it, he used the psuedonym Josef Hammer.4 Hammer means “powerful man.” Charles Martel, who began the Carolingian dynasty, in which the personality principle was developed, was called Karl der Hammer.5 Hammer was also the brand name of the bread factory (Hammerbrot) developed by Austrian Social Democracy, with the entrepreneurial guidance of Karl Renner, for the benefit of the party members’ financial situation.6 In “Was ist Imperialismus?” he introduced the notion that imperialism was a blessing to the worker. Using Rudolf Hilferding’s Das Finanzkapital7 as a basis, he pointed out that the industrial state no longer existed, that the economy could now function only through international cartels, supereconomic states embracing several lands, and that the standard of living and wages of workers were dependent upon the growth of such larger capitalistic organisms. Just as the capitalist gains a new image and body through this process of international economy, so the state must assume a new body. A war of imperialism necessarily dissolves the existing order and means of relating to one’s environment. In the wake of such a war, society advances to a higher stage of economy.8 What Hilferding had designated as an inevitable direction of economic development, which would create through its giant monopolies a class-conscious proletariat large enough to bring about the social revolution, was used by Renner to compel the worker passively to obey the course of events.9
A month later Renner turned to the question of international socialism in an article published under his own name. The bogey of international brotherhood must be dealt with if he was to find peace of mind as an Austrian Social Democrat supporting the German-Austrian war aims. Renner called the international organization of socialism that existed before the war a naive cosmpolitanism that had no basis in the reality of the nations it represented.10 The only basis for an international organization of socialism, he said, was the actual state of economic life. The Second International previously had no real basis because economy was basically limited to national boundaries, but with the transformation to a truly international economy, it was justified but would have to assume a new form. This form could come after the imperialist war, when the new body of Europe was established.11
Meanwhile, each nation should concern itself with its own cultural values and development. Renner felt that the German culture must prevail within the European community because of the superiority of its ideas and education. In an article entitled “Was Siegt im Kriege?” (What is victorious in the war?),12 Renner juxtaposed the “illiterate” culture of the Russian masses and the other nations east of Austria with the superior German culture of “Middle-Europe” (Mitteleuropa):13
German Volksschule build the intellectual capacity of the masses for the living of their lives. Other nations have Volksschule, though none that nourish the youth as wholly as ours. Not only the mechanical skills of life, but . . . the thorough Bildung of conceptual thought is also decisive, as strange as it may seem, in the hour of battle. When the German officer gives the order to his men to occupy a certain terrain, his men can fulfill this order in a third or a tenth of the time required by the Russian soldier because the German has learned to represent the state-of-affairs in a clear general picture and translate this picture immediately into action. When the intellectual capacity of the common soldier has reached such a height that he knows not only the meaning and goal of every movement of the war, but also the meaning and goal of the entire world conflict, a consciousness is created that brings with it discipline that continues from the first to the last day of the war, without any need of special compulsion by the authorities.14
Turning to the culture to the west of Germany, especially that of France, Renner developed further his understanding of German Kultur as the decisive factor that must lead to a German victory:
It is strange but many socialists and Marxists allow themselves to be deceived by the cultural lies of western European bourgeois culture. They should realize that often in history the small governing clique of a so-called barbaric land (Germany) is far more civilized than the governing class of an old culture (France). The so-called Latin culture is a noble culture and thereby distinguished in some respects, but it is a bourgeois culture. In this respect the Germans stand without a doubt higher than the Latin: The farmers and proletariat masses of Mitteleuropa are far more cultivated than any Latin land. The division between the two cultures is manifest in the distinctions of sensation and temperament, reason and feeling: In sensation and temperament the Latins lead, but in reason and feeling the Middle-European is out in front. The method of the Latin is the aesthetic, the aesthetic of the Middle-European is, however, methodology in all things. One may argue over which is best, but in our time without a doubt methodology determines the winner.15
Since the late spring of 1915 Renner had employed the term Mitteleuropa synonymously with the German culture. Yet in its inclusion of the Habsburg lands it also embraced non-German nations. And as Renner developed the concept of Mitteleuropa from the fall of 1915 to the fall of 1916, it became an even larger organism that was to extend from the Bosphorus to the North Sea.16 The concept of Mitteleuropa was borrowed from the German National-Socialist Friedrich Naumann, whom Renner quoted in an article written in October 1915:
He who wishes to remain small and alone will nevertheless remain dependent upon the changes of conditions among the major powers. This is inevitable within a generation of . . . centralized technology and large armies. He who is not allied is isolated; he who is isolated is endangered. In this period of union between states into large mass states, Prussia is too small and Germany is too small and Austria is too small and Hungary is too small. Such isolated states can never win a world war. . . . Today a Middle-European state is not a contingency, it is a necessity.17
Renner added to Naumann’s statement that of course such a state could not result from conquest; there must be a positive aim, which he identified as socialism.18 With such a positive justification for expansion, Renner’s dream of the organic state of Mitteleuropa knew no boundaries: “Everything seems capable of being united, the boundaries of possible communities of interest are infinitely wide. When the Germans can be united in life and death with the Turks and the Arabs of the Near East, should a union between the Germans and Poles . . . the Germans and the Czechs . . . the Germans and the Magyars and Romanians for the future be unimaginable . . . but one understands these things daily in the trenches.”19
In the same article Renner praised the German nation for sending teachers to Turkey and Arabia to spread the German Kultur even during the war, making obvious the nature of the future organic culture of Mitteleuropa.20 Just as the organic unity of this superstate would know no bounds, Renner’s eloquence and excess knew no limit. Leaving all Marxist theory behind, Renner wrote of “nation” and Mitteleuropa: “Over the lands of Mitteleuropa for the last thousand years . . . infinite storms have blown, yet the national communities have only become more solid, and have changed increasingly less in the last few hundreds of years showing that the attempts of denationalize [Entnationalizierung] these communities are futile. . . . The basic function of national life fulfills itself beyond the state, for the final causal forces of national becoming [Werden] and life lie outside of the state, outside of political willfulness [Willkuer]: The nation is before the state and after it.21
Renner’s affirmation of nationality as preexistent to superstructure is an obvious corollary of his personal road to engagement in the state and politics. His German hearth was a ground upon which his parents’ suffering and dispossession prompted his incorporation of the threatening presence of the state into his identity. The Habiger Scholle (family soil) was the model of the homogeneous German community that the state should echo. German hegemony should be present in every relationship with other national communities.
During this period of the war Renner seems to have found a perfect symbiosis for his personality in the service of the German-Austrian state. Yet he was continually frustrated that his Social Democratic background caused those in power to ignore his intellectual assistance.22 Renner bemoaned publicly his lack of recognition by the Habsburg government; he complained that in other lands men who had devoted their lives to the details of particular government problems and whose names were identified with those problems were called to government service in times of crisis involving those problems.23
Failing to find a position in the Habsburg regime that complemented his new patriotic mien, Renner became increasingly sensitive to criticism of him within the Austrian Social Democratic party. He had to remain in his first political house, and so he attempted to care more for the opinions of those with whom he must dwell. By 1916, however, Renner’s Austrian Social Democratic home in Vienna was a nest of hornets. Any Social Democrats who still attempted to maintain contact with the prewar slogans of Marxism considered Renner as anathema. Friedrich Adler and Max Adler wrote barbed diatribes against Renner as the archetype of chauvinistic and class perfidy.24 Renner was disturbed by the relentless criticism of those Social Democrats. He collected his articles into a book, hoping that his arguments supporting his passionate conviction would open the eyes of his critics; he titled the work Oesterreichs Erneuerung (Austria’s renewal). In the foreword to this work he appealed to his comrades as Austrians, not simply as Social Democrats: “The work of renewing Austria can only be accomplished by the cooperation of all nations and all classes . . . the reconstruction of the state is in the interest of all classes and all nations. In this sense I do not speak merely as a man of party or a party comrade.25
Although his arguments had little currency with his party associates, his zeal for Austria finally got the attention of the heads of the Austrian state. Renner was given the opportunity he had desired for his entire life to be a political authority in the state hierarchy. After the assassination of the minister-president, Count Stürgkh (by Friedrich Adler), in October 1916, he was invited by the new minister-president, Count Koerber, to head the Ministry of Food.26 The assignment was probably prompted by Renner’s success in keeping the Hammerbrotwerke, the Austrian Social Democratic bread factory, alive and successful and his management of the Austrian cooperative association.27 Renner devoted himself to this office until June 1917, when the Austrian Social Democratic party forced him to resign, deeming it unfit for a party member to participate in the war government.28 By June 1917 the trial of Friedrich Adler, the February revolution in Russia, and the prolongation of a losing war had created a wave of sentiment that left chauvinists like Renner stranded upon a deserted beachhead. Whereas men such as Friedrich Austerlitz changed their tune with the times, Renner, who had reached almost full flower with his dual position within Habsburg service and the Austrian Social Democratic party, remained steadfast to a principle that truly expressed himself—a state socialism that preserved the German cultural hegemony.
The power of Renner’s personality and persuasion won him gradual control of Austrian Social Democracy and its program. Although he was the scapegoat for the Austrian Social Democratic conscience from the spring of 1917 to October 1917, after the Parteitag of that month he again became the mouthpiece for the majority sentiment. Renner was able to make the German cultural desires in Austria palatable in the face of the new state of Social Democracy in Europe, for he was, above all, a master juggler of concept. His defense at the Parteitag in 1917 gives an indication of the spirit in which he spoke and wrote for the duration of World War I:
They say that I am a state fanatic. I am not. . . . But I say: Let us not speak in terms of abstraction, but of facts. The worker demands that the state shall stipulate the eight-hour day, protect the producer in the workshop in every regard, insure him against illness, accident and old age . . . protect the mothers, take care of the babies, ensure the health of children, do all that is possible for education and science, further agriculture, do away with anarchy in production, end the war. “The state shall!”—that is the solitary, every-recurring, proletarian imperative . . . In order to do all this it must be rich and strong. How could it succeed otherwise?29
To a war-weary Social Democratic rank and file Renner’s argument made eminent sense. Yes, the state was necessary to bring back order, for their passivity that had encouraged the war was a quality that needed a state to act for them. Thus although the majority of the Austro-German socialists at the Parteitag of 1917 condemned the “ministerialism” evidenced by Renner and urged a peace without annexations as speedily as possible, most joined with Renner in desiring the maintenance of a strongly centralized state that preserved the prewar unity of nations.30 Renner’s position was aided by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia (which occurred shortly after the Parteitag of 1917). The violent, unorganized nature of the November revolution in Russia, coupled with the manifest threat to the eastern lands of the Austrian Empire by the Bolshevik demand for self-determination of all nations, destroyed the influence of Russian Social Democracy in the minds of most Austrian Social Democrats.31 Moreover, the spontaneous uprisings in Austria during January 1918, encouraged by Bolshevik-oriented communists, forced the party intellectuals to realize that a social revolution could run its course without the planned development of their theory. Nothing good could come from such a state of affairs. Even the element within Austrian Social Democracy that opposed Renner’s desire to maintain the unity of the Austrian state joined him in condemning the Russian way to socialism.32
As the separatist tendencies among Austria’s nationalities became stronger during the spring and summer of 1918 and the Russian example of encouraging every nation to make its own choice of future affiliation influenced more and more Social Democrats in Austria, Renner’s hatred of Russia increased, and he reached deep into his bag of concepts to maintain his authoritative role in the party. Not only did Renner have to contend with the Left and its advocacy of the self-determination of all nation-states but with those on the political right of Social Democracy who held that all non-German lands should be allowed to go their own way and that German Austria should make an Anschluss with Germany.33 Renner contributed an article to Der Kampf in June 1918 in which he returned to the economic agruments of the organic superstate in trying to prove that the Donaureich was indivisible. Renner mocked the theoreticians who wished to divide up the multinational empire according to abstract theory, stating, “Space in itself, as a geometric concept, may be divided up as much as one likes, but one cannot do this to an economic space.” Then, however, he spoke of the economic unity of the Donaureich in language that recalls the topographical-abstract images of his autobiography—the language of a man seeking to preserve his identity:
The middle Donau basin is in its western outlet (area of Vienna and Pressburg) the geographical knot of myriad lines of commerce which are dictated by economic necessity. This basin is unqualified inland . . . it lies in the center of Europe. The commercial highways, which extend in all directions of the compass and connect to the seas, are for all those who live in and adjoining this area economic necessities of life. . . . Thus the main highway of Vienna-Trieste is such a commercial artery, built by the Empress Maria Theresa, also the network of highways between Vienna-Prague-Dresden, and Vienna-Olmuetz-Weisskirchen-Ostrau built in the Josephinian and Francisian time. The so-called Emperor roads were also military creations, but not merely for those ends. The increasing internal commerce, and with the victory of world economy the world commerce brings about, necessitates, the creation of throughways. These were built in the beginning by capitalist entrepreneurs, then later were taken over by the state. Today no one can dispute that the system of nationalization [Verstaatlichungsystem] has succeeded. Great throughways are to be created by the state and to be administered by the state, as routes from Vienna-Adriatic, Vienna-North and Baltic Sea. . . . Therefore, no future order of the world, no modern economy is conceivable without a Donau basin that is connected with the two seas . . . and thus the problem: How is it possible to maintain a unified route of travel and a unified administration to control travel despite the four nations (of the Donau basin) and the colorful mixture (of peoples) within the areas crossed by these arteries?34
If Renner were writing strictly about Austria’s railroads or commercial highways, one might hold that he was attempting to give a partial history and prognosis of those entities; but the title of the article in which this topographical excursion appeared translates as “What Must an International Program Accomplish?” and it was presumably written as an aid to creating a future policy for Austrian Social Democracy’s economic and social relations with the various nations of the Austrian state and other nation-states.
The emperor of the Austrian state ended Renner’s dream of a Donaureich temporarily on October 16, 1918, when he published a manifesto that gave all Austrian nations the initiative to form their own legislatures. Although the emperor intended that the nations remain within a Habsburg multinational structure, the nations used this manifesto as a mandate to separate from the former union. On October 21, 1918, in the face of a dismembered empire, Renner and other German-Austrian delegates to the former Austrian Parliament met in the Lower Austrian Landtag to determine what would become of the territories of German-speaking peoples that remained. They called themselves a Provisional Assembly empowered with the right to draw up a new constitution that would plan for the future government of German-Austria (Deutsch-Oesterreich). Karl Renner was called upon to draft a constitution for the new state.35
Renner’s dream of being the architect of his own state had been realized after all. Taking no chances that it would be frustrated again, he sought to please every possible element within German Austria. On October 30, when Renner addressed the Provisional Assembly with his proposed constitution, he was careful to point out that it did not contain the words “democracy,” “republic,” and “monarchy,”36 Renner wished the support of the monarchists and socialists, for he did not intend a revolutionary regime, merely one that was stamped with his own character. The essential provisions of the first constitution of German Austria were that the Provisional Assembly was the only legislative body; the assembly elected from its members an executive body that possessed all rights previously exercised by the emperor; the three presidents of the State Council, the director of the chancery of the council, and the notary of the council were to constitute the executive directorate of the State Council; and the State Council appointed the ministers of state. Although some political commentators have called Renner’s proposal “extremely democratic,”37 one must realize that its immediate character was authoritarian; it took all action out of the hands of the people, robbing the proletariat in particular of the opportunity to establish a socialized state. While other Social Democratic lands established socialist, communist, or republican regimes in the wake of the lost war, Austria, under the guidance of men such as Renner, merely prolonged the centralized, essentially nondemocratic hierarchy of the past regime.38 Renner had no intention of discarding the emperor unless the majority of the coalition so willed.39 When Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany stepped down from his throne on November 9, 1918, so that a German republic could be proclaimed, Renner warned the Austrian Provisional Assembly that its existence was threatened.40 He predicted that the Austrian proletariat would demand a republic, too, thus unleashing “a catastrophe” for the balanced coalition government of bourgeois, farmer, and worker that was Austria’s only hope to avert “civil war.”41 Despite Renner’s attempts to normalize conditions, the majority of the population demanded a republic, and on November 12, 1918, Austria became a republic. The Provisional Assembly, with Renner as chancellor of the State Council, completed the last stage of the Austrian “revolution” by executive decree and only barely averted a real social revolution.42
Karl Renner had helped to bring the ship of state into a safe harbor. He was the patriarch of the Austrian Scholle. The astounding sequence of events that elevated him to a position equivalent to that of emperor must have been difficult for even his imagination to grasp. The assumption of real power seemed to bring Renner to a more balanced, tolerant view of political realities. Although more conservative than those of the Social Democrats in that social change was not sought, his plans for the provisional government included representation by all parties of the political spectrum. When in power, Renner exercised a traditional Austrian view that all political voices had a legitimate role in the decisions of the state. This position is also evident in his ideas for the provisional government of Austria in 1945.43 With his great respect for the law of his forefathers and the established norms of the society, perhaps Karl Renner was the best man to be the conservative buffer for any transition from the old to the new in a time of social chaos.