11
The day after the German nation declared war upon Russia, Otto Bauer was called into service in the Austrian infantry regiment No. 75 in which he had served as a reserve lieutenant during peacetime.1 His regiment was sent to the Russian front, so Bauer had at last the opportunity to confront his archenemy in physical conflict (for Bauer’s antipathy to the Russians, see Chapter 5). Bauer’s correspondence to intimates in the first few months of his war duty tells a great deal about his reaction to the war he had so long predicted and contrasts with his behavior after his return to Vienna in the fall of 1917, when he assumed leadership of the antiwar sentiment.
Bauer, like Renner, joined the Austrian cause enthusiastically and immediately sought to find a Marxist excuse for the spontaneity of his passions. In a letter to his wife in August 1914, Bauer developed a rationalization for his participation in the imperialist cause that followed the same path Renner took:
In the past three weeks I have learned quite a lot . . . I have come to know war in almost all its forms: advance and retreat, attack and defense, victory and defeat. The most worthwhile thing in the world to me . . . is the extension of my psychological insight, an improvement for which I have this campaign to thank. The war is the most powerful of all mass actions, and someone like myself would otherwise have no such chance to live so intimately with workers, artisans, and farmers, to learn to know them in the field where an officer eats, sleeps, and dies with his men. . . . It is much easier to bear the adverse circumstances when one realizes that millions of men are now in the same situation as myself and that all this mass suffering is an instrument of historical progress.2
This letter was reproduced in the Arbeiter-Zeitung and served Friedrich Austerlitz as an example of the way a Social Democrat should react to the war. The catharsis offered by the immediacy of life in the army and physical contact with the proletariat he had never known before was impressed into the service of his Marxism and his childhood identity. His decisions were listened to and obeyed. As a visible agent guiding the lives of others, he was able to see the consequences of his decisions. His dramatic propensity to manipulate meanings was transformed in the “theater” of war into actual strategy. Moreover, the dialectic of history became evidentially present. In a letter to Karl Kautsky in October 1914, Bauer, after reporting his military “successes,” stated that he still had time in the day to reflect upon the big picture of the war.3 He identified the war’s progress with Kautsky’s blueprint of social revolution as outlined in Der Weg zur Macht (The Way to Power), which predicted an expansion of capitalism that would necessitate conflict between nations and would generate an international socialism.4 In Bauer’s mind this seemed to create a Marxist justification for his support of the German imperialist cause, for in his defense of the homeland he was protecting an economy that would lead to socialism.
No matter what excuse Bauer found for his active involvement in hostilities with the Russians, however, his engagement brought him the sense “of being a whole man.” It opened new vistas as a consequence of physical contact with his environment. Moreover, Bauer had assumed responsibilities that produced tangible effects; his successes as an officer in more than seven campaigns before his capture by the Russians earned him a promotion from reserve lieutenant to Oberlieutenant and eventually command of “four other officers and three times as many men as a captain commands during peacetime.”5 On November 13, 1914, when ordered to hold a position against the attacking Russians, all but four of Bauer’s men deserted; although Bauer was forced to surrender, his battalion commander, Major Daubek, reported that Bauer had encountered the enemy with such “exceptional energy” that he was awarded the Gold Cross for his efforts.6
Bauer was sent to Siberia, first to Berezowka, east of the lake of Baikal, and then to Troizkosawsk on the border of Mongolia. Bauer’s confinement was extremely difficult for him, particularly the mental suffering caused by his sudden lack of involvement with others. His letters to former Social Democratic associates clearly articulated the psychological stress of a man on the run suddenly left alone with himself: “I am further removed from the world of my wishes than ever before.” And “I am healthy but I can hardly bear with my circumstances in other respects . . . one must be imprisoned to understand what impatience and yearning are.”7
To escape from his aloneness Bauer turned to mathematics, a pursuit he at first reported to those at home as “a useful and pleasant occupation”; but after a time this interest palled, and he began his Marxist history of philosophy, which also failed to fill the empty hours sufficiently: “It is a bitter pill to rely solely on my theoretical work so that I may bear with this complete isolation from the world.”8
After the February revolution in Russia in 1917, Victor Adler obtained Bauer’s release from Siberia through the intercession of the Scandinavian Committee of the Socialist International, which at that time was in close contact with the Russian soldiers, workers, and Farmers’ Assembly preparing for the first international conference of socialists since the war began. Bauer, who was to be exchanged for a Russian captured by the Austrians, went to Saint Petersburg in July 1917 to await completion of the transaction. At the beginning of September 1917 he traveled with other exchanged prisoners to Galicia, where he was temporarily stationed awaiting further orders.9 Although he spent only two months in Russia outside of Siberia and possessed a reading knowledge of Russian less than one year old, Bauer was considered an expert in Russian affairs.10 He assumed a position in the Austrian Foreign Office after October 1917 as an adviser on Russian policy.11 Bauer returned from Russia a convinced Menshevik-Internationalist, which he remained until after the Bolshevik revolution, when he temporarily became a Bolshevik.12 Bauer’s theoretical vacillations after his return from Russia led Karl Renner to compare his political personality to the moon in that his political opinions reflected whatever light happened to strike him at the time.13 Bauer’s changing opinions of Russia during the last year of the war did have some method to their turnings. He followed whatever wind he throught would carry him to the leadership of the Austrian Social Democratic party. The last illness of Victor Adler created a power vacuum that was first filled by Karl Renner; Bauer sought to challenge Renner’s position.
During the war years before Bauer’s release from Russia, Renner had constantly used him as an authority on social imperialism. Renner quoted passages from Bauer’s Die Nationalitaetenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie to illustrate the necessity of an organic union of Danube states as well as the necessity of an imperialistic expansion through colonialism.14 Renner’s major apologia during the war, Marxismus, Krieg, und Internationale, had been dedicated to Bauer. Bauer was embarrassed by this attention, especially as Renner was at the zenith of his disrepute in September 1917, when Bauer arrived in Vienna from Galicia.15 The star of Friedrich Adler and antiwar sentiment seemed to be on the ascension, and although Bauer had written all that Renner imputed to him and had supported the war until his capture, he found it necessary to repudiate his connection with Renner’s ideas. Bauer, however, was a tactician concerning questions of power. In the months that followed his return to Vienna, he managed to play a double game, currying the favor of Victor Adler and the party oligarchy that shared Renner’s views, while gradually assuming the leadership of the opposing left wing of the party created by Friedrich Adler, known formally as the Karl Marx Verein.16
Bauer’s contact with the Karl Marx Verein, an organization whose adherents opposed the war from its inception, had resulted in his drafting a statement of principles called the Program of the Left, through which he attacked Karl Renner at the Parteitag in late October 1917.17 The five major points of the program were (1) recognition of the Independent Socialist party of Germany (the fraction of German Social Democracy led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, who had voted against the war budget and consistently voiced their protest over participation in World War I), (2) priority of the class struggle over the fight against the foreign enemy, (3) condemnation of the “ministerialism” of Renner, (4) a call for the creation of independent national assemblies among the Austrian nations (though not necessarily outside the multinational framework), and (5) a call for an energetic fight against the chauvinistic socialism of Renner.18 Bauer’s military service prevented him from reading this statement at the Parteitag; this honor went to another member of the Karl Marx Verein, Gabriele Proft.19 As a result, Bauer was able to maintain an illusion of not being connected with the radical tenor of his own statement. A curious deception was promoted wherein the party fathers and the radicals both claimed Bauer as their ally. This deception was furthered by Bauer’s habit of self-contradiction, which enabled his political personality to hide until events allowed a more definite committal. After the Bolshevik revolution, when other moderate socialists complained of Bauer’s growing radicalism, Victor Adler said that “one can rely on Otto not to commit excesses to the right or to the left for he is clever enough to be more of a politican behind the scenes in private conference than in his public statements.”20 Bauer thrived in this period as a diplomat and potential healer of “family” conflict. The skills he had acquired as an adolescent in reasoning with conflicting adults and with his sister were brought to bear on the social chaos of the party. Underlying the positive skills, however, was the “counterwill,” which temporized and equivocated, postponing political actions that would heal the divisions between the opposing forces who looked to him as an ally.
Because the Program of the Left failed to be carried by the majority at the Parteitag in October 1917, the radicals wished to form a separate party within Austria based on the model of the Independent Socialist party of Germany. Bauer was urged to lead these radicals in open rebellion against the party fathers. Bauer pleaded with the radicals, in a curious argument, that no action should be taken that might divide the party. He held that such a division would be justified only if the majority of the party were in a position to make compromises with the bourgeois elements of the state. Given such a condition, an independent socialist body might exist to prevent reformism. Because this political condition prevailed in Germany, the Independent Socialist party of Germany was a valid movement; but political conditions in Austria allowed no possibility of compromise among political parties, so the left and right wings of Austrian Social Democracy must remain united. As if appalled by the enormity of such compromising casuistry, Bauer attacked the wishy-washy politics of many Austrian Social Democrats who had the habit of agreeing someone to death and then taking the opposite course: “In German Social Democracy principle stands openly against principle. It is otherwise in Austria. . . . We see the genuine Austrian trait of covering up contradictions rather than exposing them, hiding differences of will and attempting to decide them through ‘smoothing over’ [Ausgleich] rather than deciding them in battle.”21 Bauer’s popularity and success with members of both left and right wings of Austrian Social Democracy lay in just such a quality of avoiding conclusive showdowns. His charisma seemed to flow from his ability to serve as an archetype of Austrian compromise and passivity to events.
Bauer’s reaction to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia typified his ability to use verbal and behavioral equivocation as an instrument for political success among his comrades. Bauer was genuinely impressed with the Bolsheviks’ effectiveness in taking control of their country. In a letter to Kautsky on December 17, 1917, he expressed awe of Lenin and Trotsky, “who showed far more skill in carrying out their affairs” than he had expected. He admired their attempt to change the course of the war through their desire for peace as expressed in their conduct at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany. In regard to these peace efforts, Bauer stated that he was “in great suspense” and “especially curious about the results [of the peace talks] on the internal conditions of individual nations.”22 Here we see the emergence of his permanent concern with conflict, peace, and internal change in regard to his own person. The Bolsheviks assumed a role in his psychic drama, as had the Czechs, the Albanians, and other nations before the war. He credited them with forceful action that changed history and could bring peace. He brought a passionate conviction to his interchange with fellow Social Democrats in behalf of the Bolsheviks that stirred radicals in the party. Yet as Victor Adler knew, Bauer would never take similar action himself. Bauer was able to act out a revolutionary fervor in print, while consolidating his political influence with all dimensions of the socialist spectrum.
On January 4 Bauer wrote to Kautsky that he was pained by the attacks on the Bolsheviks by his fellow Austrian Social Democrats (presumably the majority of the party oligarchy); he defended their “dictatorship of the proletariat” in its nondemocratic manifestation as a form of control that was “temporary” and “necessary” to ensure the success of socialism in the Russian state; he objected strongly to the Russian Menshevik accusation that the Bolsheviks were the Jacobins of the Russian revolution. To be sure, he would have preferred that the revolution take a less violent form, that it be more democratic in its realization and continuation, but because of the reactionary directions followed by many compromising Russian socialists after the February revolution of 1917 the Bolshevik solution was the only one possible.23 By March 1918 Bauer’s support of the Bolshevik way was even stronger. In an article written for Der Kampf he stated that the Bolshevik understanding of a dictatorship of the proletariat, in its absolutist control of the state by a few trained revolutionaries, “is necessary in every state where the proletariat is still a minority of the population.” Only by such methods could the “still unclear, not yet goal-conscious majority” be educated to the truths of socialism. Of course, by the end of this article he contradicted his justification of the Bolshevik method when he stated that “although we must support the Bolsheviks it does not follow that we share all their illusions or agree with their methods or must adopt their theories” such as government “by tour-de-force.”24
Yet in facing the workers’ strikes in Austria in January 1918, Bauer did an about-face, and one views it with more compassion than annoyance. Bauer was caught up in wonder at a nation (Russia) that had become socialistic even though a minority of the people were proletarian. Yet when the Austrian proletariat, also a minority, attempted to adopt the Bolshevik way and force their leaders to do the same, the Austrian Social Democratic oligarchy supported the existing government, and Otto Bauer, through a conspicuous silence, affirmed the suppression of the nascent revolution.25
In a study on the failure of the Austrian revolution of 1848 written before World War I, Bauer placed the blame for the collapse of the republican constitution on the liberal intellectuals’ fear of arming the workers: “Above all the bourgeoisie feared the armed worker; in the debates over the national guard [the liberal intellectuals] did not allow that weapons should be possessed by the workers. The sweetest secret of bourgeois liberalism was expressed [by one of their number] when he said: ‘Rather a return to absolutism than the danger of a complete freedom of property.’”26 This “sweetest secret of bourgeois liberalism” of 1848 was extant in the recesses of Bauer’s personality in 1918. Complete freedom of movement for the worker would endanger the role of his own personality in the world. If the worker was capable of determining the fate of his own person and property without awaiting the scientific directives of socialism, then Bauer and Austro-Marxism were beside the point. As Bauer phrased this feeling in the spring of 1918: “Marxism within the workers’ movement has another task than to share all the errors and illusions expressed by the contemporary atmosphere of proletariat opinion. Against the particular interest of the worker in one land it holds the general interest of the proletariat of all lands. . . . Marxism seeks to interpret the direction of historical development and defend a political tactic against the seduction of [proletariat] illusion.” With these words Bauer placed the guilt for the war enthusiasm in 1914 upon the workers and the passivity of some party oligarchs who followed the false path of this enthusiasm.27
In October and November 1918, Bauer again pointed out to the workers that their illusions countered the true path of history. When the Austrian Social Democratic members of Parliament, guided by Karl Renner, effected a coalition with the bourgeois parties of the state in the last weeks of October, Bauer quickly joined them. The true path of history for Bauer was to be where the most important politicians were, for it was the adults who were in charge who made history, not the unappeased will of those dependent upon the leaders. As a child, one advances only by moving one’s parents, not by avoiding them. When militant workers and soldiers sought a leader from the Austrian Social Democratic hierarchy to give official recognition to their desire to overthrow the Provisional Assembly and provide them with direction, Bauer avoided assuming the Bolshevik mantle he had admired in print.28 On November 1, 1918, Bauer read before the Provisional Assembly a statement he had composed entitled “Proclamation to the Germans in Austria” in which he urged the people to preserve order, abstain from violence, and respect the new government.29 Apparently as a reward, Bauer was named foreign secretary of the German-Austrian republic on November 12, 1918.30 As with Renner, fate had bestowed upon him the highest rank within the state that matched his dreams—for Renner it had been the “father” of the Austrian German hearth, for Bauer it was the diplomat who could heal all conflicts.