13

Friedrich Adler Encounters His Fate

On the day that Austria began to mobilize for war against Serbia, July 27, 1914, Victor and Friedrich Adler traveled to Brussels, where the Second International had called an emergency meeting to decide upon a course of action. Victor Adler told the assembly that no resistance to the war was possible by Austrian Social Democracy; the mobilization and the war regulations precluded any action against the government. Friedrich Adler later said of this moment when he listened to his father describe the impotence of the Austrian Social Democratic party: “I had for the first time the strong sensation that I stood in contradiction to the conceptions of my father.”¹

The time had come for Friedrich Adler’s overt challenge to his father’s authority. His father, who was described as having aged ten years for every day of the crisis, at the end of July 1914, was on the brink of collapse.² Thus when Austrian Social Democracy made known through the “Day of the German Nation” editorial that it would physically and theoretically support the Austrian and German war goals, Friedrich resolved to begin his own war. Upon reading Austerlitz’s editorial, Kathia Adler, realizing the betrayal by her father-in-law’s party of every principle her husband believed in, proposed to Friedrich that they both commit suicide.³ Friedrich, however, was ready for a new life. At first, he thought of waging an “underground” war against the Austro-German Social Democrats and the Habsburg regime: he considered resigning from all party functions that would bind him to the official channels of party obedience and of bringing out his own militant organ.⁴ By the second week of August, however, he decided that it would be best to wage his war within the party structure.⁵

On October 8, 1914, the Austro-German Social Democratic oligarchy began a secret conference to debate the party’s position on the war.⁶ During these meetings Friedrich Adler challenged his fathers with force and conviction, showing more strength and self-confidence than ever before in his party life.⁷ During the months of October, November, and December 1914 Friedrich’s struggle with the party and especially with his father sharpened. His father hastened to assure others that the battle involved only principles, but the emotional pain he suffered evidenced the real ground of conflict. Victor Adler wrote of his son to Karl Kautsky:

You may imagine how happy I am to speak with you; you are so good to me and seek to strengthen my declining self-confidence—moreover, I’m so lonely! The political conflict with Fritz is personally not so bad, he is and remains my most intimate friend—but I suffer under the fact that I see him subjected to fanaticism, and thus fear that he cannot perform the services for the party that I expected from him—My hope is that in more quiet times his understanding of facts will return and the idolatry of the rectilinear which he calls “principles” will disappear—but it is not a “family tragedy,” for that I have no talent; it only seems like one to people who look for touchy situations and who take everything personally.⁸

Friedrich Adler, too, sought to keep the attack on his father and his father’s party devoid of personal connotations. Although mentioning other Social Democrats by name in his polemics in the fall and winter of 1914, he was conspicuous in his compunction to touch his father’s person.⁹ Only in allusion and allegory did he express the actual basis of his struggle with the party oligarchy. Upon this fratricidal ground Friedrich deployed two major theoretical forces: the specter of the Second International, which had collapsed when all the member European socialist parties chose social imperialism in its stead, and the Independent Socialist party of Germany, a revolutionary group whose members had separated from their parent body to incorporate the ideas of the Second International in their lives.

For the first year since the outbreak of the world war Friedrich Adler attempted to restore unity among the socialist parties in Europe through letters and articles.¹⁰ Before the war these bodies had given Friedrich a platform of authority that aided him in his separation from the dominating presence of his father; their loss left him with no other choice than to find his unity in Vienna. The inexorable pull of Vienna and the necessity of approaching freedom through the hell and purgatory of his parent party are evidenced by the limits he set on his admiration of the Independent

Socialist party of Germany. His respect for this party, first manifested in an article published in January 1915,¹¹ grew from its members’ courageous adherence to principle. It is noteworthy, however, that Friedrich did not follow their example and seek to establish a party outside the boundary of the majority expression. Rather, he followed a personal conception of unity that always won first place in his mind, sometimes complementing, sometimes contradicting the outer trappings of his Marxist creed. Thus when he was called into the Austrian army in February 1915,¹² he did not object on conscientious grounds, a logical step in the light of the antiwar principles he professed. Instead, he obeyed the call to duty, saving his martyrdom for an expression more personally meaningful than pacifism.¹³

Freed from the army because of his heart after only a few days’ service, Friedrich reentered his conflict. His will somewhat weakened by his defeat at the hands of the majority in the fall and winter of 1914, Friedrich considered for a time leaving Austria to conduct a literary campaign against the war from Switzerland. He had been offered an editor’s position on the Volksrecht in Zurich.¹⁴ On the surface there seemed little reason to remain in Vienna; his wife and children had gone to Switzerland after the outbreak of the war, and there was little hope of success in the party, as evidenced by the outcome of the secret conferences a few months before. Nevertheless, Friedrich chose to remain in Vienna. In discussing this decision, he articulated the extraordinary emotional valence that linked him with the other Social Democrats in a love-hate bond of life and death: “I had . . . uncommonly intensive private talks with my party comrades in April of 1915. They all wished me to remain in Vienna; not only my father, but above all Seitz and Renner urged me to stay in Vienna, for they insisted it was important to the party that the Left wing be represented. Even Austerlitz wished me to remain, and in a meeting that took place [of the party oligarchy] only Pernerstorfer felt I should be allowed to go to Switzerland.¹⁵

Even though one might suspect some exaggeration of others’ concern by Friedrich, who suddenly was in the limelight, it is not difficult to imagine that some such concern did exist among the party oligarchy. After all, Friedrich’s presence gave their cause meaning; he understood and reacted to their language. Encouraged by these talks in April, Friedrich sought in the Reichkonferenz of Austro-German Social Democracy called for May 1915 to impress his antiwar policies upon the majority. This second attempt to take power within the party also met with defeat. He was disheartened, and his psychosomatic disease recurred, forcing him to take a five-week rest cure in the mountains. In April, shortly before his talks with the party oligarchy, Friedrich had purchased a revolver with the thought of committing a political assassination in order to awaken the proletariat and Social Democrats of Austria to the possibility of direct action. After his second failure within the party his thoughts again turned to a personal act of violence, a demonstration that would be evident to the eyes of the world. Friedrich later stated that he hesitated in carrying through is plan before October 1916 largely because he could not decide on the proper target—a man whose death would properly stir the Austrian public to action against the war.¹⁶

Friedrich had not yet given up the possibility of winning power through the party organization, as is evidenced by an article he contributed to Der Kampf in January 1916 entitled “Suenden der Minderheit oder Suenden der Mehrheit?” (Sins of the majority and sins of the minority?). The article stressed the importance of unity within Austrian Social Democracy in spite of tactical differences:

All party activity consists in common action toward the realization of the party program. Every individual act rests on the majority decision of a solidary community. Two dangers threaten the party, one from the side of the majority and one from the side of the minority. The majority is always in danger that its decision does not correspond to the party program, that it contradicts the basic principles of the whole movement which it represents, the principles that give the party meaning. The minority is in danger of destroying the community of action, of not complementing the majority, of going its own way and thereby disturbs the majority decision.¹⁷

The omnipotence of the written word, the torah of the spiritual fathers, continued to exert its magic over Friedrich’s personality. Its abstract majesty absorbed his own will. His longing for solidarity, the union of his intellectual and emotional natures, was still projected onto the body of his fathers. Not until he realized his intellectual and emotional selves as being uniquely his own, freed from the metaphorical prison of his past, would Friedrich have the wholeness for which his being strived. In this article Friedrich used the word “solidarity” [Solidaritaet] no less than forty-two times in five pages. Friedrich’s use of italics paralleled the allegorical use of image in providing a psychic text of his struggle for a whole personality. He italicized ten expressions within five pages, almost all of them reflecting states of division, states of wholeness, and types of consciousness relating to these states. When he was tired of the image of Austrian Social Democracy as an archetype of wholeness, Friedrich turned to the specter of the Second International, which he introduced as a body that before the war “lived with all its energy the solidarity of feeling and thought.” Then he stated that although sins against the spirit of the Austrian workers’ party were possible by both the majority and the minority, the majority was the bigger sinner because of its violation of the higher solidarity present in the Second International.¹⁸

Often the Austrian Social Democratic party and the Second International contended within his mind for the right to represent the potential unity of his person. A good example of this expressionistic syndrome that turned all principle into a mass of contradiction is provided by an article Friedrich wrote a few months before the act that would free him temporarily from such parasitic abstractions. The article was formally addressed to the Belgian Camille Huysmans, secretary of the Second International in the Hague, who was attempting to bring together the socialists of all European nations once more into a peaceful cooperation. Adler both attacked and supported Huysmans:

You know from before the war how valuable not only the idea of the International is, but also the embodiment [Verkoerperung] as an organization. You also know how much meaning I gave to the functions of the International Bureau during the war, and remember that I attempted to counter the unjust attacks against the executive [of the International] by the German and Austrian party comrades. . . . Therefore I feel that I am not only authorized, but obliged, to express my opinion without reservation over your last proposal (the invitation to discuss international cooperation), and the theoretical basis from which this proposal emanates.¹⁹

Friedrich Adler thus began a curious argument wherein he blamed Huysmans for attempting to bring a peace between European socialists that hid insoluble contradictions which had necessitated the war: “You see . . . always only a problem of diplomacy and therefore have sought to hide the essential problem of inner contradiction withn the International instead of bringing it to consciousness. . . . No one can deny that we have learned in this war that the argument of defense of homeland is purely and simply only a theoretical abstraction, and that in the reality of the present, the struggle for the existence of nations is inalienably bound up with the struggle for the goals of an imperialist power politic.”²⁰

Adler identified the Social Democratic movement in all European countries as an inalienable part of each nation’s economic organism; a future international brotherhood of socialists was not simply a problem that could be solved by the will to cooperate. Thus Adler’s recognition of the “inner contradictions” between European peoples that must be brought to consciousness countered the admonitions he had directed to Austrian Social Democrats since the outbreak of the war, namely, that there was no excuse for Social Democratic participation in the war and that the Second Communist International must be maintained at all costs. To Huysmans he claimed: “The political content of the principle ‘defense of homeland’ is that alone which can build the heart of a socialist program for peace talks, thus also the program for a future international.”²¹

In making what he called a “theoretical abstraction” on a previous page the “heart” of the socialist program for peace, Friedrich Adler manifested his enslavement to metaphor. “Defense of homeland” was a chauvinist abstraction in the mouths of those Austrian Social Democrats who opposed the unity inherent in the Second International, but it became an organ that gave life when challenged as a concept by the secretary of the Second International. Why? Perhaps because the higher unity of the Second International was real only as long as it was Friedrich’s personal cause; as soon as it was promulgated by someone else and became possibility, Friedrich withdrew his energy from its “embodiment.” Friedrich attached himself to any organizational image that had no possibility of success. This syndrome made sense in one who sought a personal union that could never be resolved simply in the formal coming together of bodies outside himself. As long as the metaphors of the Second International or the Austrian Social Democratic party could permit the picture of internal strife, he might dwell in their polemics. Should this strife be resolved, Friedrich must either seek a new abstract basis for his own conflict or become truly conscious of his state.

When Social Democrats such as Huysmans made more and more concrete efforts for an end to the war and a reunion of European socialists, Adler’s mental state reached a critical tension. He was ready for a personal act that would prove his reality as an acting presence, an act divorced from any organization outside himself that might rob him of this realization of his person. In the month that preceded this act, Adler’s theoretical writings exposed a man who knew that a former condition would come to an end. His attention was inevitably caught by expressions that voiced the apocalyptic possibility. As an example of this synchronistic syndrome, Adler reviewed a book by Paul Lensch in September 1916 entitled Eine Sozialdemokraten Ende und Glueck (The finish and fate of a Social Democrat). Lensch’s position was similar to that of Karl Renner in that he saw the war bringing a new evolution of socialism. Friedrich Adler found the title of this book strangely provocative; he stated that only when Lensch was viewed as a man who had ceased to be a Social Democrat could one make sense of the title: “His end as a Social Democrat seems to be his fate (or happiness). At least this is the only way the mysterious title of his book . . . can be plausibly explained.” Then, as if to show the error and mortality of Lensch and his view of socialism (yet really as an erection of a personal monument to the end of one state of existence and the pregnant vision of a new one), Adler punned the Nietzschean paean to self-overcoming, Lenzchliches, Allzulenschliches (human all too human).²² This word play and selection of theme was the product of Adler’s monomaniac intuition of what lay before him. Further evidence of his intuition appears in a second book review in the same issue of Der Kampf of Max Adler’s Zwei Jahre . . . .! Weltbetrachtungen Eines Sozialisten, (Two years! reflections on the world war by a socialist), which discussed the death of martyrs. Friedrich Adler wrote: “In a beautiful chapter on the death of martyrs the special meaning of conscious dying for an idea is portrayed. Again and again appears the conviction that the class war stands higher than the war of nations. . . . Only the problem concerning the employment of force in the struggle of the classes remains to a certain extent open, and we hope that the author will find the opportunity to express himself on this problem at a future time.”²³

Of course, Max Adler was vague about the question of actual force, but Friedrich Adler did not wait for someone else to articulate his position. The will to action awaited only the release of a trigger taut from months of resolve. Adler’s last publication before the assassination sounded as an ejaculation from the lips of a hunter who has sighted his target. On the eve of the second Reichkonferenz of Austro-German Social Democracy, Friedrich Adler announced to those who could read between his lines that he would no longer tolerate inaction:

The untiring and clearly conscious work of the opposition in the party has consisted and still exists in the awaking of the proletariat from their fatalism. One must bring them to an awareness of the necessity of their emancipation from the government by their creation of an independent politic. The essence of the great struggle over the political standpoint of the working class is debased with the expression “party conflict.” An active politic of the proletariat is only possible again if the consciousness of their necessity in the party wins a dominance in their own thoughts, if the ideas of the opposition seize the masses. They must become the subject of this politic before they can exercise their presence as an object. And therefore all work of the opposition is aimed at winning fellow warriors, i.e., a struggle for the brains of the party comrades themselves.²⁴

What had held back and was holding back his party comrades from decisive action? “The reason lies . . . in the lacking necessity of autonomy [mangelnden Beduerfnis nach Selbstaendigkeit] of the party comrades themselves, who are too accustomed to their life in the state so that in the party they are most comfortable with this state of affairs. They trust too readily in the wisdom of their leaders and conceive of independent thought as a waste of energy.”²⁵

On October 18 Friedrich Adler faced the party fathers for the last time. In a sitting of the Parteivorstand he engaged in an explosive exchange of opinions with Karl Renner and his father that led to his father’s cry: “You are deliberately provocative, you obviously want someone to throw you out!”²⁶ He had, indeed, asked for this challenge. On October 21, 1916, Friedrich fired three bullets into the head of Count Stürgkh, prime minister of the Austrian war government. Count Stuergh was unfortunate enough to have perpetrated a particularly symbolic piece of authoritarianism two days after Friedrich’s confrontation with the party fathers—he forbade the public meeting of a group of university professors who wished to debate various issues concerning the war, an act of paternalistic absolutism that marked him as the target for violent retaliation that had become inevitable.²⁷

What of the act itself? How can we assert that this deed of violence liberated Friedrich Adler, if only temporarily, from the chains of the past? Of his state of mind immediately before the act Friedrich told his judges: “I thought in this moment only on the sacrifice of my own life . . . now my life is at an end! . . . Then came the thought: How would it be if I simply gave up my plan. No one would be any wiser.” But he quickly discarded these seductive thoughts, reflecting: “There would be nothing but shame if now when you are so near to your goal you leave the thing undone and go away. . . . I had the distinct feeling that if I did not carry through the act that I felt to be a duty [Pflicht] an intolerable condition would result for my self-respect.”²⁸ After perpetrating the deed, when he was assured that he had indeed been successful in the assassination, Friedrich experienced “a condition of complete spiritual peace and satisfaction,”²⁹ a condition that remained with him for months afterward in prison. Friedrich Adler, a man with a psychosomatic heart condition, was released from all anxiety and felt whole after an act that meant certain death for himself.

As we read of the moments of the act itself, we can see more clearly the link between the assassination and Friedrich’s effort to encounter his personal father and party “fathers” in an expression of political independence: “I stepped up to Count Stürgkh and as far as I know fired three or four bullets in his head. I then cried loudly: ‘Down with absolutism, we want peace!’ I had decided on this slogan for my act as I sat at the table. I definitely cried out this slogan for I remember the physiological effect of its expression. This cry cost me a great deal of energy. Then I went to sleep and did not do anything more that was active.”³⁰

The killing of Count Stürgkh may be seen as a symbolic destruction of both the cultural fathers of his party and his personal father, for Friedrich did not remember the physiological process of pulling the trigger that resulted in the murder of Count Stürgkh, but rather the sensation that accompanied the slogan. “Down with absolutism, we want peace!” may be considered a genuine political articulation, but also a personal plea for freedom from the tyrants closest to him. It was in this outcry that Friedrich expressed his act of possessing all that his father had kept from him—the right to think and act as an autonomous person. Friedrich had described his passion for life as he sat in the restaurant preparing for that act of personal liberation in a phallic sense: “Side by side with the thought that it was my duty to execute the assassination was the full fury of my second soul, that entity which exists in all men, that in its lust for life holds to the world with clutching organs [klammernden Organen].³¹

When Victor Adler was told of what his son had done, he exclaimed as if in a dream, “Come on, that can’t be,” and laughed good-naturedly. Victor had been told within twenty minutes after the event. Having grasped the reality, about six o’clock that evening he went to the offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. On entering, he told the first person he met: “This is the time when fathers lose their sons.” To Friedrich Austerlitz he said: “I believe Fritz’s act will not hurt the party.”³²

In the long run, Victor was right, although for the next year the party’s utterances turned toward the Left. Victor sought to counter the impact of Friedrich’s act by proving it was the deed of a man who was mentally ill, an attempt ostensibly to save Friedrich from the death penalty when he came to trial but actually a conviction held by Victor from the time of the assassination. As Victor wrote to his brother-in-law two weeks after the act:

This is the first letter that I have been able to send through the censors to Germany, it is to you. Only a few words. The thing which we both do not wish to believe and still seems like a fairy tale [Maerchen] has hit us as you might imagine. For the time being only the news: Emma behaves like a heroine which is the most important thing to me, her sleep has not suffered; Fritz is so far unchangeably maintaining his ground, does not show the slightest depression, which seems to me to be a pathological euphoria. When he is not being questioned by the authorities, he occupies himself without a pause and with tremendous zeal in problems of epistemology and Ernst Mach. A decision in his case will not be reached for a long time because of the psychiatric investigation.³³

Friedrich was reading not only Ernst Mach but also Faust and Hamlet.³⁴ Indeed, he was in the calm state of mind his father depicted, upset only by his parents’ insistence on seeing his act as that of someone mentally ill. He wrote to his mother on November 11, 1916:

Yesterday when you visited me I had the impression again that you see my whole situation and everything that relates to me completely differently than it actually is. . . . You see me as being unhappy, which I am not nor ever in life was. Naturally my life might have taken another course than it did, but I am not in any aspect unsatisfied with the way it has turned out. The length of life never was important to me, only the content of life. And I am completely satisfied with the way in which I have lived my life. . . . You are always quick with your explanations of my behavior which are based upon pathology, and I see now that many of your assertions in my affair reflect such belief. . . . I hope the time comes when you are able to conceive of me as being a healthy man. I never have worried myself with a concern how my actions would affect those immediately around me, indeed such considerations I have always viewed as being immoral. I also do not believe that my act was an attack on the life of those persons who care for me. I, at any rate, do not have the slightest symptoms of remorse.³⁵

In spite of this request, his parents, especially his father, continued to consider him mentally unbalanced. At the trial on May 17 and 18, 1917, father and son stood dramatically opposed. Friedrich gave a six-hour defense of his act and his historical person which portrayed his act and his life as the rational culmination of socialist principle,³⁶ and Victor undermined his son’s oratory with insinuations and testimony regarding his son’s insanity. The power of Friedrich’s defense, however, had the day; he was sentenced to death³⁷—a living death, unfortunately, for the abstract words he employed so well for self-justification at his trial blinded him permanently to the real goal of his struggle.

Of July 2, 1917, the Emperor Charles commuted Friedrich’s death sentence to eighteen years imprisonment.³⁸ The emperor’s words on this occasion were symbolic of the feelings within Austrian Social Democracy toward the painful meaning of Friedrich’s act³⁹ and may also serve as the epitaph to his battle for personal clarity:

The politics of hate and retaliation, nourished by unclear condition, which unleashed the world war must after the war’s end be replaced in every way and everywhere by a politic of reconciliation. This spirit must also dominate within the state. With this sign of reconciliation I exercise my duty as ruler under God’s understanding, and will thereby be the first who walks the way of charitable toleration, spreading over the unfortunate political mistakes which occurred before and during the war that often lead to criminal acts the veil of forgetfulness [den Schleier des Vergessens].⁴⁰

At the height of the Austrian “revolution” of November 1, 1918, Friedrich Adler was released from prison by the will of the emperor.⁴¹ He met his father on November 2 and spent the duration of the war at his father’s side.⁴²