2
Karl Renner’s tribute to Marx in 1908 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death can be seen as the credo of Renner’s life:
The worker who wished to understand his relation to Marx must, as I do, think back to his father, his grandfather, and his ancestors as far back as they go—then he will encounter men who were not industrial workers or proletarians, rather fathers of families [Hausvaeter] . . . who lived in their own homes and exercised an iron rule over their children and domestics. One never spoke to one’s father and mother in the familiar “thou,” for one’s parents were authorities [Obrigkeiten] who were the highest authorities next to God and the emperor. . . . And the despairing words “I do not know why I was born” were seldom heard and considered wanton. Nothing appeared more taken for granted than “where one came from and where he was going.” “We have come from our fathers . . . we will become fathers ourselves, and then return to our fathers from whence we came.” . . . And on this path of life man enjoyed much happiness and suffered much pain, but he lived his own life among men of value—he was indeed a person. But then a magical upheaval came to the world and threw our ancestors and grandfathers from their homes into the street. A person on the street—it makes no sense! How can a man play his part of father of a family in the rubble of the street? Is that a home? . . . A man who lives in the street, where does he come from? Where is he going? No one knows, least of all himself . . . and if he dies in the street, how does he then find his way to his father’s home and his father’s grave for his burial. . . . Thousands have asked themselves from the graves of the streets: “For what purpose am I in the world?” And found no answer. Those workers, however, who have conceived the whence and whither of this capitalistic world according to Marx, win back their world again.”1
Eventually, Karl Renner was to take Karl Marx as his grandfather, Victor Adler as his father, the Austrian Social Democratic party as his ancestral home. As he wrote to Victor Adler in 1909: “As far as my knowledge of myself goes, I know: I do not belong among those who must outdo the next man; I have no incentive to compete. . . . My so-called ‘ego’ wants nothing. Rather, as far as socialism concerns me, I would like to use the proud words of the Nazarene: ‘In my father’s house there are many rooms.’ There are so many spiritual areas [Bezirke] opened to us by it, so many still not built.”2
Once within the patriarchal domain of socialism, Renner found a peace his life had lacked; he transferred mental and emotional bonds to his family developed in his childhood to the party fathers of Austrian Social Democracy. Transference is the concept used in psychoanalysis to explain how and why emotional and mental conflicts that were experienced and unresolved in childhood are lived out with the analyst. Transference, however, is not limited to a psychoanalyst’s office; it can occur in any human situation that provides the individual with a person or persons and an environment that are conducive to reenacting parts of the past that cry out for understanding and resolution.3 By transferring past conflicts to a new situation, one can recapture the emotional depth of childhood and overcome psychic obstructions to growth by reentering, and conquering, the conflict situation in the new environment.4 Unless one realizes that he is inappropriately treating the present environment with past emotional values and relations, however, he will approach the demands of the present inadequately and use people and events metaphorically, as representatives for a past psychic struggle. Renner never fully recognized his inappropriate associations of a personal past in his relationship to the Austrian Social Democratic party, and as a result, he treated the party structure as a home to be enjoyed and used for many primary needs other than those of representing the working class in a social struggle. “Otto Bauer once said about Renner that just as there are occasional drinkers, so also there are occasional theoreticians and occasional politicians, and the typical example of this was Karl Renner. . . . In later years, when the demanding cares of his life were conquered, Renner loved ease, comfort, sociability, relaxation, and amusement. Those qualities often led, indeed, to idleness.”5
His transference of deep personal needs to the Austrian Social Democratic party enabled Renner to be a productive party member, but at the relaxed pace of what his idea of a proper family life should be. His instinctual needs and value imperatives became concentrated within the party and its Marxist mission. For Renner, his association with Austrian Social Democracy was a primary bond, rather than the secondary relationship that most individuals have to their employment or broader social commitments. The primary relationship to a group is usually reserved for one’s personal family; it is an association of total emotional and psychic commitment. In a secondary relationship there are clearly defined emotional and mental limits to one’s investment of energy. A work group can become primary, especially for political revolutionaries or individuals who derive a deep satisfaction from their employment and link significant personal and social values to that activity. When the emotional and mental commitment usually reserved for one’s immediate family is given to a larger cultural organization, it is termed sublimation—the transfer of instincts such as aggression, sexuality, nourishment, or other instincts into the service of cultural practices that will benefit the entire society. Service for the society demands that one love what one does and sacrifice for it, but still one cannot live his full interpersonal life within its locus. Sublimation can be a solution for an individual whose personality requires total dedication to public values, or it can be an escape from the balance and completeness of a variegated interpersonal existence.6 When one seeks to realize his entire instinctual life within a sublimated role of cultural service, his behavior will show characteristics of transference.
Renner and the other Austro-Marxists sublimated instincts in behalf of social democracy; however, each man in some degree brought emotional and mental needs that were beyond the ability of a large, secondary organization of individuals to solve. Perhaps the structure of the party and the ambitious nature of its mission encouraged that sublimation, for the goal of Austrian political parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century was a new existence that only the party could bring to society.7 The process of civilization demands sublimation of instinct in behalf of the whole society, but the society often creates institutions that either demand too much or too little sacrifice of instinctual energy; a healthy society is one that establishes sublimated activities that still permit an individual freedom to realize personal needs in private channels.8 Karl Renner and the other Austro-Marxists each brought a special set of problems to Austrian Social Democracy, which were to distort the Social Democratic mission as each man imposed his design on its political life. Renner’s transference had largely to do with the loss of his childhood home and the search for a father who could guarantee security. He wrote: “A child that is born to a family of winegrowers experiences the gradual dissolution of his family’s economic security as a result of their many children, agricultural depression and inflation of land prices, and then experiences the final shock of the auctioning of his family home [Vaterhaus] and is driven into the proletariat, into the place away from home [Fremde] with his brothers and sisters.”9
The socioeconomic overtones in this autobiographical statement from the 1940s demonstrate the continuity of his identification with Marxist conceptions of reality over his lifetime. Renner’s political, legal, socioeconomic manner of describing himself and his setting was fixed in his youth. In 1890, he described himself in these lyrical lines:
Through incurred debts
House, Court, and Field were auctioned off
The young ones were driven into the world
And the old ones into the poorhouse.
For a goodbye said the father:
“God will help you further in life.”
And so when I was twelve years of age
I nourished myself and was my own guide.10
The roots of Renner’s sensitive appreciation of the reality of public institutions in the life of individuals did not come in 1890 or even in 1882, when he was dispossessed; it came in the initial development of his ego, when he first knew the world and his relationship to it. This process, during which a person distinguishes between his own thoughts and person and the objects and individuals beyond himself, is called introjection.11 The child’s ego has its own characteristic patterns of perception and its own sense of the significance of things in its world. The degree to which external or internal realities are important to the child, called introversion and extraversion, is constituted within the process of introjection. Thus introjection is central to the development of early character, giving distinct emphasis to the child’s individual and social experiences.12 Often, the child will identify with persons or objects of the environment so strongly that they are introjected as part of his ego, either as an association that becomes integral in all his dealings with the world or as an element of his own identity. These close identifications with others are fundamental to the forms that his future relationships will take.13 Renner’s introjection of certain family realities, mainly those that hinged on insecurity and loss, became the source of his inclination to structure his identity and to direct his life choices within the constructs of the public world.
Karl Renner was born as a twin on December 14, 1870, in Unter-Tannowitz, a German cultural pocket in southern Moravia. Sixteen children preceded the twins. His insecurity began with his place within the family: “The eternally similar course of the every day, the normal, makes the brain sleepy and the heart sluggish. The conditions of my birth . . . were not the usual and may awaken wonder in the present generation: I was the youngest child of my mother, and never sure if I was the seventeenth or eighteenth child.”14
Armbands of different colors, red and blue, were placed on Renner and his brother Anton so they could be distinguished at the baptism. Karl, the youngest, wore the red armband. Immediately after the baptism the armbands fell off. Renner’s statement implies that he was unsure if he indeed was Karl, for the identity of the twins was based on the judgment of one of his sisters. Because his twin died shortly afterward, the doubt was reinforced by the sense of loss that must have developed as he grew more conscious of his origins.15 Renner ends the story of his birth and baptism by reflecting: “No one could know what deep meaning the red network of fabric [Masche] would win for my entire life.”16 He obviously means the symbolic red of socialism. At the deep emotional level, which reinforces more rational choices, the congruence of socialism’s red and the primal proof of his identity may have had some significance in his choice of a political home, but more concrete reasons for his being a socialist stem from his family development, youthful experience, and values. These reasons are incorporated in Renner’s choice of the word Masche as a synonym for the small ribbon (Bändchen) he introduces into the story. Masche can also mean a link of mail (in ancient armor), a net used to catch fish, or an expression of understanding (untangling the threads). Austrian Social Democracy provided all three alternative meanings for him: it was a defense against the uncaring, ordinary world of which he speaks when he introduces the conditions of his birth; it embraced the missionary character of early Catholicism, the socialists being “fishers of men”; and the social science which was its basis helped Renner to understand the fate of his family.
His membership in a large family contributed to his receptiveness to a close-knit party structure in which a “family” of decision makers controlled Austrian Social Democracy. His early experience as a member of an interdependent whole in which each person helped to fulfill the needs of the group, predisposed him to similar associations as he matured. But his ego development was not simply one of ease and joy with such associations, for in many ways his family organization introduced problems into his life. He was one among many, and no one had time to give him special attention. In this large family that struggled to keep the homestead together socially and economically, the interdependence was one of constant movement and change that seemed to have no clear purpose. His mother had to work even if she was sick or on the day of childbirth. Pursuit of a living took his father away for weeks at a time. His parents did not seem to enjoy their activity. The economic imperative of his lower-middle-class position and the threatening institutions to his family security were felt but not yet seen. He felt them in the anxiety of his parents, in the clumsy, frightened pace of his father that earned him the public ridicule of the townspeople, who nicknamed him Schlunkermatz (Matt Renner, who runs around like a ship without a rudder, caught in a storm).
Certainty was gained by linking himself to the invisible but omnipresent public world that he felt in his parents’ emotions and actions. That is the world of which he speaks in his tribute to Karl Marx in 1908, when he voices his childhood pain: “A person on the street—it makes no sense! How can a man play his part of father of a family in the rubble of the street? Is that a home? . . . A man who lives in the street, where does he come from? Where is he going? No one knows, least of all himself.”18 Perhaps if he could grasp the world that so disoriented his parents, gain knowledge of it and power in it, he might bring happiness and security to himself and his family. In his youngest years, however, there was an intuitive yearning toward the force and authority of that world that might appease his emotional hunger and answer the silent questions of purpose and order that his developing ego required. In his autobiography he speaks of the sources of order and authority that he found in that world beyond his parents:
A child from religious parents, himself filled with a deep religiosity and wholly enmeshed in the myths and legends of the Catholic church, experienced during his years of study at the Gymnasium (into which he had gained admittance only through inexpressible hardships), the world of the classical age. This experience freed his thought and led him to the school of modern science and philosophy. It enabled him to learn at the university the science of state and society, and thereby, through his own study and acquired knowledge of socialist thought to come to the teachings of Karl Marx.19
The first organizing source of the public world was the Catholic church, not in its organizational hierarchy but in its stories that illustrated the meaning of everyday experience and gave hope for miraculous solutions to impossible situations. Renner was to become a constant teller of stories; his writings from the autobiographical to the most technical theory reflected the devices of story. He identified with these early stories, making himself a hero with a sense of place and purpose that the inattention of his family denied him, and appropriated the art of storytelling so that he could inform others, thus becoming a powerful person not only in story but in reality. In the early years of ego development, he discovered a form of power and personal identity by identifying with the aggressor, a behavioral ploy which psychoanalysts say enables a child to gain autonomy in the presence of threatening people or situations.20 The aggressor was the invisible authority that controlled the emotions and attention of his parents; the authority of the church was appeasing in its stories that gave significance and order, but it was also threatening because it had answers whereas his parents had none. Another source of his propensity for storytelling, also associated with the behavior of identifying with the aggressor, was his imitation of his father, whose limited contact with Karl was as an educator and storyteller. Freud tells us that in the Oedipus complex between father and son, the son wins power with the weapons of his father; for at three years of age, when the son begins to express his genital autonomy, that is, his integrity and separateness from others, he has only the model of his father as a male.21 He seizes his father’s sword, as it were. His father told stories that were often self-demeaning or were nonsense tales (schnuerrige Geschichte). Karl describes his father as a knowledgeable man (kenntnisreicher) who lacked seriousness.22 Karl’s stories were the opposite—serious discussions that nevertheless functioned as stories.
Karl Renner’s stories were implicit in his structuring of a factual account of events. Through the use of an artful juxtaposition of facts and hyperbole, everything that he said took on a multiple meaning, so that the simplest statement seemed to suggest several realms of experience. An obvious example is his rationale for writing his autobiography; by juxtaposing his individual person to World War II, with a dash of hyperbole, he suggests that by understanding his life we may also understand the causes and development of the struggle between fascism and democracy: “Events of special importance in the course of the past five years have given me courage to publish the memoirs of my youth, and present to the public the evolution of a single individual. My extraordinary career in extraordinary times, under extraordinary civic conditions, gives a vivid picture of the origin of these conditions in which we live and work today.”23
A less obvious example may be seen in the sentence with which he introduces his birth, a story construction that harbors a deep insight into his view of the public world and how one may effect change in it. By describing ordinary reality as “the eternally similar course of the every day, the normal, [which] makes the brain sleepy and the heart sluggish” before the report of his birth, whose conditions were “not the usual and may awaken wonder in the present generation,” he creates in the reader the expectation of something that has more than ordinary meaning. For Renner and for the analytic listener, the articulations of his life in these lines affirm the unique time and space of the Maerchen or fairy tale. “Once upon a time” (Es war einmal) occurs to us as we see that the day of his birth is at first related to all days that occur eternally, days that are common and deadening and in need of the extraordinary. His birth is also given a special meaning that occurs in fairy tales, that of mistaken identity, that of the youngest son, and that of twins separated from birth—universal themes in folklore.
The public world for Renner was always this twofold space—one was mundane, monotonous, and unchanging, and the other was a miraculous appearance within the ordinary world of a person or event that altered the former. But the unchanging world was never changed too much, and the force of the change was a passive miracle, the force of traditional elements making an almost predicted appearance. Renner approached political life with this view: the changes needed in society were to be ordinary outcomes, and the force of the change was to be the customary methods. The miraculous quality of the custom was in its heroic implementation by a protagonist who exemplified the qualities of a German burgher. His contemporaries were often aware of this quality in the presentation of his arguments. Oskar Helmer, an Austrian Social Democratic associate, commented on this trait in his recollection of introducing the young political aspirant Renner to the critical appraisal of a Social Democratic nominating committee in the provinces: “All opposition to Renner was dissipated as soon as he himself spoke, creating a picture of his own personality. It sounded like a fairy tale. Indeed, the good fairies had given humanity, courage, and truth to the child in the cradle of the poor farmer’s family. But close by loomed the dark specter of misery.”24 Story, then, was used as a way of linking his identity to the power of tradition, the conventional plot, the customary hero; his identity became magnified in his own eyes, and he met each situation in life accompanied by the charm and confidence his connection to traditional outcomes gave him. The social changes which Austrian Social Democrats expected of his leadership were to be obstructed by his half-conscious identification with tradition. History could not change culture too much because it harbored stories that had fixed patterns, and thus his handling of events remained metaphorical because he dealt not only with objective situations but with the elements of story that undergirded them.
The second major source of authority that helped to organize Renner’s world was education. His love of learning and the security that he derived from it began in his home. Although neither of his parents had time to oversee the children’s schoolwork, their verbal encouragement gave him direction. “My father owned a thick book, a topography of Moravia,” he writes. “As soon as I learned to read, this book became my favorite reading matter. Before I had set foot out of my immediate neighborhood, I knew the name and location of most of the cities and monasteries of our homeland. The surrounding world where I grew up had in this manner become an integral part of my mind.” Renner’s absorption with topography, his ability to locate himself in geometric space, reflects his hunger for a public world that could provide him with the security his childhood world lacked. By knowing the names of the towns and their distances from one another, he could know where his father was during his long journeys and accompany him in imagination. That knowledge of location gave him a sense of control over his life and the habit of linking issues and events to an abstract geography. We see in an account of his father’s business an indication that the obtrusiveness of his topographical thinking functions in a metaphorical manner:
My father took over the wine trade from my grandfather and was required to travel by horse and wagon to Silesia, thus remained away from home for long periods. This situation did not alter, even when the railroad extended itself to northern Moravia. The distance Vienna-Bruenn, which by Brannewitz (two and one-half hours of travel away) approached our location, was already opened; the distance Bruenn-Olmuetz had been finished in 1851; in 1854 the railroad was extended further northward; in 1868 there were on the soil of old Austria 4,533 kilometers of track, in 1875 10,336 kilometers of track, and by 1890 20,000 kilometers had been built. In spite of that my father’s business was transformed in 1870 from a transport business to that of a wine merchant.25
Renner’s reflections upon persons and issues in the world often reflected this quality of abstraction as if he wished to affirm his ability to measure the thing and define its place and thereby demonstrate control of the physical reality. To some degree, all learning served that function for Renner; as a youth it was a definite compensation for an uncertain environment:
On the day after I knew of the loss of our family home, I lay in bed with a light fever. But youth! . . . On the second day I took my school bag and went [to the Gymnasium]. . . . I went to my desk and sat down. Professor Zelenka came in and began to describe, in a wonderful voice, the double-sexed life of the algae, this wonder of the pond-ooze, this harbinger of the highest development of organic life. I was immediately his prisoner. And Professor Kornitzer came and lectured on Livius, enchanting me with ancient Rome with its stories of heroes. And over the gaping chasm of my thought spread the magic of a thousand years of science and art—the healing cover of forgetting.26
The third source of authority and order Renner discovered in his search for an explanation of his life was the science of society. He was to arrive at this science slowly over the course of his education, but the scientific attitude began as early as his loss of his family home. He was forced to compare his situation in the world with that of others his age. Comparison is the root of all knowledge. When he spent summers at the home of his maternal uncle, Leopold Habiger, in northern Moravia, he would attempt to compare the life situation and cause of the Habigers with those of his parents. The Habiger household became the prototype of the ordered state in Renner’s eyes: “What deliberation, what constancy, what decisiveness in comparison to the conditions of my place of origin.” Using metaphors that suggest its social significance and profound importance in his life, Renner praised the Habiger household and environs: “Impressive was the fact that the whole property of the Habigers was laid out in a single, undivided piece that extended from either end of the main house, which itself was built four-cornered, in the four directions of the compass . . . my place of origin (on the other hand) had streets where the houses were stuck together and the neighbors continually saw and heard one another, whereas in the case of my father’s house the building itself could be divided in the middle into two families.”27
Renner called the inside of the Habiger house “another world” and detailed the layout and furnishings of each room. The house had been built in 1648; the Habiger family was among the first waves of German settlers in Moravia after the German victory over the Czechs at White Mountain. The house and family seemed to be a living symbol of German culture in the Austrian state. The atmosphere of the family, as depicted by Renner, seemed to be an archetype of Ur-Germanentum: “One did not refer to Herr Habiger as father; everyone, even his wife and daughter, call him ‘farmer’ [Bauer], ‘Farmer’ designated in the wholly patriarchal sense ‘father’ and ‘master of the house.’ He had an authority over all the inhabitants of the house that was quite unknown in my homeland. His wife was called ‘woman’ [Frau] and behaved as one who is much lower in status. The domestic servants formed a regular hierarchy.”28
Renner’s transference of the paternal role to Herr Habiger began after his first summer there, just before his physical separation from his immediate family’s house in Unter-Tannowitz. Renner contrasts his feelings upon preparing to leave the Habiger household with those at his return to Unter-Tannowitz:
Never in my life had I been able to carry on my studies in such a secure state of mind, in such leisure and in such a state of physical well-being. . . . Physically, I had grown so that the clothes I had come in were too small. My uncle allowed me to have a suit made with the village tailor—its cost and pattern were in no way expensive, but at least it was big enough. My uncle took me in his wagon to the train at Zwittau, bought me a ticket, pressed two Gulden in my hand, and put me on the coach. And so I returned, not without a certain melancholy and not without apprehension for my immediate future, to Unter-Tannowitz. With a feeling of dread I entered the house of my father. There I found no one [niemand] home except my mother and father, my eldest brother Matthias and my sister Anna. Mother and father were depressed with their grief and misery. Matthias was sick and thin as a skeleton, Anna . . . obviously tortured by a secret burden. Hour by hour my anxiety grew.29
The world of his parents, and what it represented, was to be a constant presence in Karl Renner’s life, for it was the bedrock insecurity of reality. To deny that reality was to deny the source of family love, as difficult as living that love was, because of social-economic pressure. Renner’s lifelong involvement in social issues was to correct the pain he knew as a victim. The world of Uncle Habiger often tempted Renner to leave the distressing realities of society for a private security. When he was older, he almost entered the Habsburg administrative system because of the social and economic certainty it would provide. Uncle Habiger was a force that did leave a permanent imprint, however, upon Renner’s thought and actions. The Habiger household formed an integral part of Renner’s superego, those rules and images that constitute the invisible voice of authority in what should exist in behavior, what is right.30 He experienced the Habiger household in the years immediately before and during puberty, a time of the formation of this element of the ego, in what may be called a second phase of introjection.31 The child psychologist Jean Piaget refers to these years as those of formal reasoning, when the youth begins to form values and ideas that relate him to all mankind.32 The conservative values and lifestyle Uncle Habiger represented promised decisiveness, order, continuity, freedom from loss, a secure state of mind. Although socialism promised alleviation of his parent’s situation, the way socialism would order the lives of its citizens took on the look of the Habiger reality when conceived by Renner. The traditional German character of Uncle Habiger’s mores reinforced Renner’s earlier ego trait of relying upon custom and the stories of the public culture to determine meaning.
Whenever he left the “healing cover of forgetting” that the Habiger household or his schooling provided, he faced the insecure reality of a state where inequities and lack of opportunity reigned: “As I left the closing ceremonies, after taking my leave of my teachers, with the Matura certificate in my hands, I didn’t think of the conditions under which I had entered secondary school, or the troubles, suffering, and humiliations of my young years and still less on the triumph I had won and surely had earned—a sudden emptiness filled my soul, an infinite anxiety [ewige Bangigkeit], almost a torturing anguish [qualende Angst]. I should leave a surrounding [Lebenskreis] that had filled me so completely and had so satisfied me and saw before the void [das voellige Nichts].”33
Renner had also known fear and emptiness upon the loss of his inherited faith in Catholicism. His soul-searching at that time revealed the well of abstraction from whose waters Renner would always find nourishment. Renner turned to the symbolic treasures provided by his Bildung to find some other universal paternal cloak for his nakedness:
I read Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and the tale of the three rings thrilled me. . . . It was true without doubt that each of the rings was equal in value to the other. But the ring is only a symbol—the same truth can appear in many, different symbols—but what is it in itself, what is the truth? And what is it in the story of Lessing that cloaks itself in the symbol of the spiritual and wise father? In the full moon of an Easter night, following my loss of religious faith, I wandered alone up the holy mountain . . . seated myself on a stone in front of the church and brooded. . . . “The time has arrived, when a new religion must come into the world, a religion which by means of science can bridge the gap between the Jewish, Arabic, and Indian heroes’ tales and unite the three rings into one. Probably somewhere the founder is already born.”34
In truth, the founder in Renner was already born, having emerged from the pond-ooze of the Gymnasium equipped with the intellectual tools that would soon create a unified personal world within Austrian Social Democracy. But upon his graduation from the Gymnasium, the most obvious medium to fill the personal vacuum was the state. And so Karl Renner turned to the haven of the Austrian military service. He enrolled as a one-year enlisted man (Einjaehrig-Freiwilliger), deciding to fulfill his obligation to the state before entering a university, where he would again have to face the world as an orphan struggling alone for his existence. Renner, moreover, felt that now he was a young adult and that he must come into contact with the state and gain knowledge of it. In the summer before he entered the military, he prepared himself for this direct encounter with the adult world in the same manner that he had once employed in defending himself against the voids of his childhood world of Moravia. He translated the approaching world of the state and its obligations into a palpable abstraction: “To become acquainted with the state seemed the most important thing at this time. So in the second half of my vacation I began to visit the office of the mayor of Kunzendorf, and often walked to Maehrisch-Truebau to stare at the outside of the district commissioner’s office, the tax office, and the district law court.”35
As Renner matured and moved into the world, his fascination for topographical abstraction was at times replaced by seeing the presence of the state in its artifacts. The invisible whole was in the part. His relation to custom was similar. Practicing the customary act made one a protected member of the institutional whole. He seldom neglected custom, and his participation gave him peace of mind. Thus he relates that on his graduation from the Gymnasium, “we remained sitting together for a long time even though the atmosphere had long since dissipated, and drank a great deal more beer, which was our duty, because the custom so demanded.” Likewise, he became a member of the Austrian military, “the custom of my homeland demanded that the recruit give himself ‘a good day’ on the evening before his enlistment. I allowed this to happen.”36
In September 1889 Karl Renner left for Vienna to serve in the main supply depot of the army. He was to spend his next fifty years in Vienna, where the customs of this German city rounded out his identity—the customs of the “good old Viennese families, whose classical literature and music, liberal mode of thought, social graces, and a moderate national consciousness sought to keep alive the old traditions.”37
His post appealed to him; it was suited to the conceptual talents he had developed through his adolescence. Only now instead of the topography of Moravia, the entire Austrian state became his passion. And instead of the geometry lessons of the Gymnasium, a new spatial presence absorbed his attention. The supply depot was Renner’s introduction to mass economy and mass organization. His one year of duty was to introduce him to his future state:
Gradually, my partial knowledge [of the supply depot] became a knowledge of the whole organization, and this became my sole interest: The machinery of supply for a garrison in peace and an army in the field is an economic activity that in its magnitude and through its organizational interplay of wheels and spokes is quite impressive. . . . So it was that in the supply depot I first became inclined to political thought; basically this is not so astonishing, and it will always be the case. For the military service is the most exclusive and at the same time the most serious requisition the state makes on the citizen, and must awaken in those who are capable of thinking at all, political thought. In this service, one not only deals with the various forms in which life can be molded, but also one has the duty to die for the state. Only the thoughtless and superficial nature can serve his time without concerning himself critically with the state.38
At the end of his year in the military, Renner decided to attend the University of Vienna, in the faculty of law, and carry on his study of the state. Characteristically, Renner found in the idea of his future study a vehicle that would serve to embrace all life: “One had to study political economy and law in order to understand the state in its individuality—that was what one needed in order to accomplish something in the world. My decision strengthened not to study philosophy, rather law. Only thereby could one grasp and form living essences.”39
The legal and organizational antecedents of the Austrian state and of Western culture in general were to provide a synthesis of all the previous moments of Renner’s self-definition. Through them he would acquire a context of identity and a lexicon for self-assertion that would be a permanent crust over the former abyss of self-doubt. An example is the historical treasure of canon law: “I attended lectures on canon law given by Gross. The subject was strange to me for some time, I couldn’t get at its inmost essence, until I recognized in it the organizational art of a world power: I learned to admire their art of adapting to the thousandfold changing forms of state from the Roman Empire to the laws of family of the early Middle Ages, to feudalism, and up to the state of the present day.”40
His seminar in constitutional law with Eugen Phillipovich, one of the leading academic socialists of his day,41 introduced Renner to the ideas that would be the beads of his Marxist rosary for the remainder of his life under the Habsburgs—the problematic of nationality contra state as formulated by his “liberal” predecessors in constitutional theory (see Chapter 2). The eventual theoretical formulation of Renner in the area of nationality and state that Oscar Jaszi has termed a “brilliant solution” to the problems that plagued the Austrian state proves on closer study of its historical antecedents to be more a work of “biblical annotation” in the spirit of his fathers than a creation of something new.42
It is consistent with Renner’s character that the first socialist writer to impress him was Ferdinand Lassalle rather than Karl Marx. Lassalle sought a symbiosis of state authority and German socialist ideas, a union of Bismarck and Kultur for the masses.43 Renner described the joy of his discovery of Lassalle in his first years at the university:
Here was a goal, a purpose in life, a task which intoxicated me immediately. Wasn’t I too from the depths of the people; hadn’t I sought too in the dark the way to science? And here sounded the call above, from the heights of the collective Bildung of the time, a call that would raise me to its heights so that I never again would go under. Science and the people, science and the worker! . . . Even the most callous reader, who through disappointment in his early development has become a skeptic, will appreciate the intellectual and moral force such a goal might have on a young man whose intellectual development had taken the course that mine had.44
Lassalle dealt in areas of conceptualization that were much more sympathetic to Renner than the epistemological and psychological implications of Hegelian Marxism—the brand of Marxism that Renner heard from his University of Vienna contemporary, Max Adler. Renner met Max Adler in 1893 and formed with him part of the small nucleus of students interested in socialism, who called themselves the Free Association of Socialist Students (Freie Vereinigung Sozialistischer Studenten). The group existed in a quasi-political relation to the Austrian Social Democratic party under the immediate sponsorship of Engelbert Pernerstorfer. They met at a local coffee house called zum heiligen Leopold in Leopoldstadt, a district of Vienna; it was there that Renner was first introduced to the socialist world through a Gymnasium student of the Sperlgymnasium in Leopoldstadt whom he had been tutoring. Renner was to participate with his new comrades in a “systematic study of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, the belles lettres of socialism, and the famous journal of Kautsky and Mehring, Die Neue Zeit.”45 But the philosophical-revolutionary perspective of Max Adler and the other Jewish intellectuals who made up this group was at odds with Karl Renner’s respect for the concrete constitutional value of the traditional forms of state. For Renner, the state was not in the Hegelian sense an idea that constantly found a new embodiment; rather, it was a set of institutions whose basic elements were eternal building blocks. In this respect he stood close to the English constitutional thought of Burke, and indeed, Renner admired English constitutional ideas throughout his life.46 Renner counterposed the ideas of John Stuart Mill to the Hegelian dialectics nourished by his Austro-Marxist fellows. Writing in his autobiography as though the Austro-Marxist contributions of Max Adler and Friedrich Adler had never existed, Renner states: “I find it deplorable that the socialism of Karl Marx, whose whole teaching is a powerful induction from the facts of economic life . . . even today is still interpreted in the abstract-destructive (sic) sense of Hegel, and that no one has yet translated Marx into the John Stuart Mill style of the concrete inductive method.47
Although most of the major questions of existence were gradually allayed by the university Bildung and the promise of Austrian Social Democracy, Renner still experienced the anxieties of his adolescence when faced with solitary day-to-day existence in Vienna. In 1891, when he first entered the university, he spent much time walking the streets of Vienna: “As often as I passed a house, whether it be a palace or a cottage, I had the desire to see how the people inside lived. All during my life that has been a burning curiosity with me.”48
The public world provided Renner with the tools and rationale for life. The uncertainty but warmth of loved ones still provided the necessary emotion. Renner saw his internal needs reflected in the homes that he passed, and in that year he formed a lasting relation with Luise Stoisis, a young woman whose family resembled the Habigers: “There was an intimacy of family feeling that [my wife’s family] shared with the people of the land [Voelklein] at that time . . . a singularly deep emotional life and a devotion to the ancient customs [uralten Sitten]. Passionate feelings united the sexes and a bountiful blessing of children was the rule. The parents even enjoyed a great respect with their adult children.”49
Luise was to provide an emotional depth as well as a family that satisfied Renner’s longing for a stable household. Adolf Schaerf, an Austrian Social Democratic contemporary of Renner, wrote that he would have been lost without the constant support Luise provided him. Schaerf described Luise as a classic German Frau in the mode of Frau Habiger, who practiced submission (Hingabe), the spirit of sacrifice (Opfermut), and the willingness to be neglected (Hintanstellung) while Renner pursued his career.50 Without this emotional support and private domain, Renner would have brought more energy but even more problems to the family of Austrian Society Democracy. Renner’s relaxed acceptance of Otto Bauer’s assumption of party leadership in the early 1920s reflects emotional balance or perhaps the lassitude of which Bauer accused him.51 An emotional solution made at the expense of others can never be healthy, however, and the way Renner organized his family was reflected in his politics: the activity of others had to be within his policy. Immanuel Kant’s warning about the debilitating effect of “self-incurred” tutelage must be the regulative idea in considering the health of Karl Renner’s family solution to emotional balance.52
Renner did not marry Luise at first in a recognized ceremony because by 1891 he had already formed socialist ideas and was repelled by the thought of establishing a bourgeois marriage. He may also have been hesitant to commit himself to a family because of the memory of his parents’ failure to realize a stable household for their children. Not all aspects of the bourgeois life were abhorrent to Renner, however, for he accepted the security of state employment throughout the 1890s. While a tutor in the early 1890s he articulated that hesitation that would keep him from joining the bourgeois with a formal commitment: “Would I be able to be a divided man, externally an accommodating teacher without the privilege of his own opinion and internally a burning brand of revolutionary ideas, who must stand apparently in a society of people in complete contradiction to the ideas I would live?”53
This seed of dissonance which was nourished by his anger and pain of childhood deprivation, sublimated to the cause of all who had and did suffer in a similar manner, kept him moving toward the commitment to Austrian Social Democracy. His respect for authority and order and his fear of economic hardship, especially when he became a father, however, kept him linked to the bourgeois world: “For the time being I would have to win for myself a secure economic position in society from which I then could be effective [for the interests of the proletariat].”54
Thus, while currying his Marxist contacts in the university and in the recently established Austrian Social Democratic party, Renner continued to make a place for himself in Austria. For instance, he sought to become an officer in the reserves—a position ordinarily held only by bourgeois of some means.
His zeal for a secure position in the bourgeois from which he might be effective also led to a post in the Library of Parliament, where he worked from December 1895 until 1906, when he ran successfully for a seat as a member of Parliament under the sponsorship of the Austrian Social Democratic party. Renner was proud of his position as civil servant in the Library of Parliament. His book of memoirs, An der Wende Zweier Zeiten (At the turning point of two epochs), ends at the moment he accepts the job. The title, in part, implies the end of youth and the beginning of manhood as he leaves the university world behind and finds his role in the state.55 The acceptance of the post at the parliamentary library necessitated several changes in Renner’s life, among them the impossibility of overt political action as long as he was employed, because “I must serve all political parties equally. Nevertheless, I decided to apply for the job immediately.”56
Renner also was required to make a legal marriage out of his hitherto common law relationship with Luise, a demand he seemed to fulfill with relief. He completes the account of the end of his youth with his interview with Baron Gautsch, the minister of the interior, who with tongue in cheek regarding Renner’s “moral” oversight, congratulated him on his entrance to state service: “His proud, noble [hoheitsvoll] appearance impressed me greatly, and he bestowed a few words to me with a smile: ‘Your appointment has caused a few difficulties! I expect that you will justify the trust of your sponsors.’ With this momentous act my youth was ended, and this wish ‘from the mouth of authority’ [aus hohem Munde] led me over to manhood.” He added a last comment on this moment of truth: “Who would be satisfied with me in the future, Phillipovich [a career in law], Pernerstorfer [a career in Austrian Social Democracy] or Gautsch [a career in the service of the Austrian state]? The future would decide.”57
The phrasing of Renner’s question, written many years after the event, shows the place of traditional story in ordering his universe. His division of the choices into three recalls Lessing’s story of the three rings, which Renner had pondered on the night he lost faith in Catholicism. But for Renner, the extrovert, there was no fourth realm beyond law, the state, or social evolution. Neither one nor the others but all three would prevail in a compromise whose fulcrum was in Renner’s freedom to shape his public and private life as he willed. Austrian Social Democracy was the viable vehicle for the amalgam, a Social Democracy that was legal, conservative, yet productive of change. Renner as an extrovert knew how to use the elements of his environment for his purposes. His abilities of adaptation had been consciously cultivated since his youthful years as a tutor for the wealthy: “Surely, nothing is so useful for the physical and intellectual development of a young man as the frequent change of environment and the conditions of his fortune. It not only enriches his experience, it heightens his ability of adaptation and powers of resistance, it strengthens his self-confidence so that even in the most trying of circumstances it will not leave him.”58
His adaptation was often close to simple accommodation, but slowly using the materials of society, he sought a social reality that he could believe in and that expressed the complexity of his person. He found himself able to adapt to all three modes of thought and action, which in the Austrian state was not so difficult as Renner would have it seem, disregarding even his talents of accommodation. During his service at the parliamentary library, Renner moved up on the civil servant’s ladder from the tenth to the eighth level and to the eventual salary of 3,600 Kronen a year, which provided a more than comfortable bourgeois existence. He also published ten books and articles under various pseudonyms, dealing with topics of the state and society. The pseudonyms were a polite official evasion, for the milieus of Gautsch, Philippovich, and Pernerstorfer all knew and admired his publication. Of the reception of his Der Kampf der osterreichischer Nationen um den Staat (The Struggle of the Austrian Nations over the State), published in 1902, Renner wrote:
This book brought me into contact with the highest levels of the bureaucracy (Koerber, Bilinski, Baernreiter, Franz Klein) and the highest military authorities like Schoenaich, Auffenberg and others . . . .
It brought me into contact with the leading men of all the Austrian nations, as Kramar and Masaryk, Vajda and Hlinka, etc., and also well-known foreign writers as the Englishman Seton-Watson and the Frenchman Louis Bisenmann, who had written many valuable books on Austria. This work of constitutional law caused Professor Bernatzik to suggest that I use it as an inaugural theme [Habilitierung] that might gain me admission to the law faculty of the university.59
In spite of the favor of these various other interests—such as academia or the Austrian bureaucracy in which he had such a good beginning—Renner chose in 1906 to embrace a career within Austrian Social Democracy. Why? The answer must be sought in a correlation of Renner’s background and personality with the archetypal personality projected by the Austrial Social Democratic patriarchs and the institutional pattern developed by the Austrian Social Democratic party. Renner had discussed his possible future in the party with Victor Adler as early as 1894 and had since that time proven himself to have the qualities Adler desired in a party oligarch. Renner’s doctoral degree in law, which he acquired in 1896 shortly after his employment in the parliamentary library, his meritorious service at the library, and the many scholarly works that he produced before 1906 were the proofs of a responsible maturity. Moreover, men such as Adler and Pernerstorfer served as spiritual mentors who gave a meaningful goal to his own development;60 and the structure of Austrian Social Democracy, a party in its first flower (yet with a truly Austrian stem), would allow Renner to explore the many rooms of his father’s house, some of which still needed an interior designer.
Thus Renner was nominated in 1906 to represent the Austrian Social Democratic party as a delegate from Neunkirchen in elections for the Austrian Parliament. He was successful and represented Nuenkirchen through two parliamentary elections, holding this office until the end of World War I. Renner also served as a member of the Lower Austrian Landtag as a Social Democrat from 1908 through World War I. As an active member in the educational offices of the Austrian Social Democratic party, Renner contributed as an editor and journalist, teacher and speaker. He was one of the editors of Der Kampf from 1907 until 1919, wrote regularly for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and participated in the various Austrian Social Democratic Bildung associations in Vienna.61 In all these functions Renner brought to the workers, bourgeoisie, and intellectuals of Austria the echo of his own life theme: Return to the well of your fathers. Recognize by means of Bildung provided by your German Kultur the potential of the Austrian state with its vanguard the Austrian Social Democratic party to achieve a progressively higher civilization. Then your dispossessions will be at an end.
Of revolution, Renner spoke not at all. The conquest of the state, the proletarian revolution, was to him a process of legal osmosis. Renner was to tell Friedrich Adler in 1937 when asked to join the underground resistance movement against the Nazis: “Illegality is unavoidable, it is necessary, even though it has little value now. It cannot, however, be perpetrated by people who have aged in forty years of legality. If I am not capable of a certain kind of action, then I remove myself from it.”62
It seems odd at first glance that Renner chose the ideas of Karl Marx as a framework within which to develop his language of adaptation, his language of national resurrection—Marx, who exposed the temporal egotism of legality and the state, who rejected the metaphors of nationality as a limited consciousness of man’s true relation to society. Had another mode of thought been predominant in Austrian Social Democracy at the time of Renner’s contact with it, he probably would not have been an Austro-Marxist.63 But as we examine his Austro-Marxist creations, we will discover that Marx proved flexible enough for the world of Karl Renner; Marx, after all, was a German and a product of the same Bildung.