4

The Party as Family for Otto Bauer

Otto Bauer was born September 5, 1881, in Vienna, the oldest child of a German Jewish family. His only sibling was his sister Ida, fourteen months younger than he. Bauer’s father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, one uncle on his father’s side was a prominent Viennese lawyer, and another was a well-known physician. Although spending most of his youth in Vienna, Bauer attended the upper classes of the Gymnasium in Reichenberg in northern Moravia, where his father had moved to open a textile factory. Thus, like Renner, Bauer experienced the cultural complications of a German minority in a territory dominated by Czechs. (Bauer’s relation to the nationality question differs from Renner’s in that Bauer was an assimilated German, for his grandparents on both sides were Jews from eastern Europe, so although he strongly identified with German Kultur, in his approach to the question of national minorities differed from that of Renner’s strongly ethnic biases.) Bauer returned to Vienna after graduating from the Gymnasium summa cum laude and began the study of law at the university. After his graduation from law school in 1906, which coincided with the success of his first book, Bauer was able to devote himself entirely to Austrian Social Democratic activities; he was the prime example of the Nachwuchs sought by the Austrian Social Democratic patriarchy. The German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky compared his sudden emergence and brilliant, unflagging activity to that of the father of them all: “When I think of the young Marx, I see him as Otto Bauer.”¹

Bauer was an archetype of the Austrian political leader of his generation. He was a university graduate, his roots were solidly in the middle-class norms of Vienna, and he was fluent both in conversation and in writing. His habits of mind and behavior, reflecting the Austrian mode of cultural denial—the styles of thought and human interaction into which a citizen is schooled by his society to avoid and to distort the facts of his existence which he cannot accept—were also typical. Bauer’s manner of handling facts and political problems subtly influenced others to regard him as a leader—like is attracted to like.

Bauer suffered doubly in his development as a political personality. Raised within the norms of German-Austrian culture, his political style was typical of the equivocating Austrian who sought always to avoid confrontation and achieve a compromise that left problems unresolved but the conflicting parties at their ease (durchwursteln). Otto Bauer’s equivocation was compounded by his personal development within his family: his inability to be decisive in moments of crisis and the lack of congruence between his stated principles and political behavior were the products of a family milieu that was not conducive to normal development. His mother, Käthe Gerber Bauer, tyrannized the family with obsessive-compulsive habits and anger, generated perhaps by the infidelities of her husband Philip. Bauer’s family has the dubious distinction of being preserved in history as the family of Freud’s patient “Dora,” the classic case of a hysterical personality.² Ida Bauer was Dora.

Hysteria is a defense against unbearable facts and emotions that cannot be given full recognition. The perpetual war between their parents forced Ida and Otto to comprehend actions that were incomprehensible to their young minds. In their daily life they were constantly exposed to intensified emotions and neurotic and evasive behavior—not the nurturing environment that supports normal mental and emotional growth.³ The children sought to help their parents as mediators but gradually withdrew into pained isolation as they grew older. Undoubtedly, Otto’s healthy attempts to relate to his parents and resolve their differences developed strong interpersonal abilities in him which became evident later, when he played the go-between among the warring generations in the Austrian Social Democratic party. The emotional weight of negotiating between their parents proved too heavy for the children, however, and both developed psychoneurotic defenses against the facts of their lives. Otto shared the hysterical symptomatology developed by Ida. Ida suffered more acutely from the illness, yet Otto, too, used the symptoms of the psychoneurosis as a character style.⁴ Although he was not overtly incapacitated, except for short periods, and not directly embarrassed by the effects of this psychosomatic illness, the psychic and emotional symptoms of the condition warped the manner of his activity and the nature of his achievement.

The hysterical symptomatology developed by Ida and Otto was similar in many respects. Although all hysterical symptoms share common qualities, their particular combination and expression reflect an individual’s compromise between the emotional and psychic facts he wishes to avoid and the daily needs of the real world in which he must function. Thus a style of living emerges that allows one to be passingly capable among others yet secure in one’s defenses against those elements of self and environment that must be shut out. The psychosomatic symptoms, such as migraine headaches and catarrh, enabled Ida and Otto to be concerned with their own needs and translated their emotional pain into more tangible form.⁵ The aberrant cognitive and emotional symptoms they shared included extreme unsociability, depression, and a dwelling in states of expectation, a flight from present reality.⁶ Ida’s and Otto’s pseudo-historical organization of the facts of their lives, a form of rationalization connected to hysteria, is especially interesting to the cultural historian, as it is a customary trait of any individual or group that seeks to create a historical continuity to hide or obscure cultural facts in cannot accept.⁷ Otto Bauer’s pseudo-historical syntheses of his own and world affairs is a hallmark of his politics. Other cognitive habits shared by Ida and Otto in their attempts to cope with their home environment were a hyperintellectuality that resisted with emotional vigor any idea that did not suit its criteria of truth, and a propensity to see reality in a dramatic guise.⁸ These mental and psychosomatic defenses that the children erected to maintain some equilibrium in their parental household remained a part of their characters and were repeated in other contexts as they matured whenever the frustrations of their world became too much to bear.

Whereas Karl Renner found in the ideas of Karl Marx the security of a lost childhood home, Otto Bauer found in Marx a metaphorical promise that might free him from his original home and lead him to a new land. Bauer’s original home was a place of pain and irresolvable conflicts. Marx gave him a body of thought, and Austrian Social Democracy gave him a political home that enabled him constantly to defend himself from reality as it was, in the name of what might be.

A child normally begins to formulate the values and style of relations that govern his transactions with the world beyond his immediate family in adolescence. The development of a consciousness of the point of view of another person, which allows empathic decisions, and the sense of cooperative enterprises, in which rules can be made in common with others, are also accomplishments of the adolescent mind. It was at the inception of these critical years of mental growth that Otto Bauer wrote Napoleon’s End, a play that reflected upon the linkage between the politics of the world and the family concerns of public figures. The emotional and psychic tensions of his own family were captured in such scenes as that of Maria Luise begging Napoleon not to wage war on her father, the Austrian emperor, for the sake of their son, who shared the blood of both families. The family conflict is repeated between Maria Luise and her father, Emperor Franz I, with whom she pleads for her husband Napoleon’s welfare. Czar Alexander, who witnesses this scene between father and daughter, comments, “Whoever cannot comprehend Europe’s misery, cast your eyes on this scene.”⁹ The young author clearly draws a relationship between family disharmony and its consequence in public actions. In a moment in childhood when the child’s mind naturally opens to the complexity of human rules and relationships, Otto exhibited an intuition that might have steered him toward health and effectiveness in life. He might have stepped outside the play. The weight of his family, however, which continued to envelop him into his adult years, dimmed his insight, and he lived out in his own political life a metaphorical version of the play’s tragic polarities of potential family harmony and actual public discord.

Why did Otto Bauer choose politics at such a young age as the analogue for his family situation, a model to be overcome or followed? An adolescent is naturally a political scientist for it is the time when he constructs conceptually and emotionally his place in the polis. Moreover, Otto Bauer was extroverted in his psychosocial development, and the events of his immediate and broader public world would serve as examples as he deliberated on the meaning of his life. The extroverted attitude opened him too vulnerably to his family’s problems, however, constraining his development of a subjective, private world that might have been a buffer between him and his parents’ strife. Bauer chose politics as an analogue for his family discord for two additional reasons that emanated from this adolescent exposure. He was cast by his parents as an arbitrator beyond the pale of family loyalties, a demand that created political acumen in him but distorted emotional proportion. He attempted to reject the role of arbitrator, but the essential fairness characteristic of this period of adolescent development impelled him toward that role. The second reason was his family’s public involvement with others, as indicated in the relations with the K. family in his later teenage years.¹⁰ His father seemed to expose the family members to a world outside of their private circle as a matter of course, opening the children to intimidating violations of their privacy that must have been almost unendurable and certainly made the family context into more of a league of nations than a separate society. We may infer that Otto was compelled to comprehend this style of manipulation and to emulate it in an identification with the aggressor.¹¹

Drama became an integral element in Bauer’s conceptualization of the world and in his manner of interaction. Whereas Renner would create an illusory picture of stability and stasis in society, a soporific that forestalled change, Bauer would create the impression of a constant conflict of issues and events, in such a dramatic guise that practical involvement in political realities was discouraged and conflict that might be resolvable was allowed to continue. The dramatic is a distortion of the flow of reality. The fictive action and closure of the dramatic perspective enabled him to manipulate the facts of world events into highly personal “histories.” His personal life shaped his public perception and action; the personal appeared in the public as a distortion of the public into metaphor. With such a mental strategy Otto Bauer sought to sustain a perpetual equilibrium of forces in the Austrian state and to be a middleman between the various conflicting forces in Austrian Social Democracy, inciting and pacifying in turn, recreating to the extent of his powers the psychic and physical environment of his childhood home.

There is in each of us a seed of health whose presence announces itself in the midst of our activities, just as there is a seed of sickness that also has calling cards. Out metaphors serve to suggest paths to health, as well as serving as vehicles of escape into pathology, if illness seems to be our only way of coping. A neurosis is a compromise with an unresolved problem that allows us to perform in everyday reality. Drama for Bauer was an indicator of health as well as illness; health was using theater to recognize motive and plot, illness was assuming a role in the action. The closing thoughts of Napoleon in Bauer’s play, whose title, Napoleon’s End, stresses a reality-oriented perspective on the human dimension of history, poses the question of human fallibility, and exposes the illusion that one can remain permanently larger in human capacity than the people one will lead. Bauer has Napoleon say: “Man’s fate is inconstant. The whole of Europe trembled before my power. . . . I made France into the mightiest state, I was a God to my subjects, and a second Attila to my enemies. And now?”¹²

When a child is confronted with his parents’ struggle for power, he becomes in imagination, if not actuality, a political force who would control and shape the situation. If he is able to heal the situation among the warring adults, he gives himself evidence and motivation for leadership. We must infer that Bauer succeeded at times in ameliorating immediate situations; certainly, his sister looked to him for help, and in later years he took charge of his father’s affairs at his father’s request.¹³ Ultimately, however, he failed, as any child must fail to change the choices and personalities of his parents. Thus he recognized as an adolescent with his healthy consciousness that even for Napoleon, short-term victories could not maintain a permanent state that was against the actual nature of all the powers that be. Health would have been an adult recognition of such limitations. His mistake as an adult was to trust that he could support an entire political movement with his independent judgment, an error he was led to by the impulsion of his superego, which demanded such responsibility from him. As he evidenced in each of the major crises that preceded his final flight from Austria in 1934, he was incapable of developing a viable policy or program that would withstand the realistic challenges of Austrian Social Democracy’s political enemies, although he insisted on the right to make such determinations.

Bauer’s belief that he could manipulate Ignaz Seipel and the Christian Social party into improving the situation of Austrian Social Democracy after the tragic July 15, 1927, debacle typified his theatrical sense of his ability to steer history.¹⁴ Coupled with his hubris of decision was a “counter-will” that resisted the carrying out of decisions; most of his decisions involved not acting too assertively or postponing action. The “counterwill,” a hysterical trait, may be said to have arisen as a reminder that just as he could not solve the politics of his childhood home, he could not single-handedly solve the politics of Austria. He had imperfectly assessed his own strength, his ability to guide others in times of stress. Interestingly, Napoleon evidenced lapses in his career that were similar to those Bauer experienced in moments of political conflict. The individual flights from Egypt and Russia are called political opportunism, but they can also be seen as dramatic choices of the hysterical personality to salvage only himself. One may infer that as great a leader as Napoleon proved himself to be militarily and diplomatically, he probably engineered his downfall with the “expectational” fatalism, the pseudo-historical rationalizations, and the intellectual intransigence that Bauer was later to use in his own political self-paralysis.¹⁵

There are many parallels in the adult careers of Bauer and his childhood hero Napoleon. Both men rose to the top of their respective political arenas between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. The ability of both to articulate the tensions of their society in self-evident analyses won them immediate reputations as being politically astute. Both could balance the political dissensions within their locus of power. Of course, Napoleon’s military genius in planning and carrying out campaigns were talents conspicuously absent in Bauer, although Bauer had an equivalent genius in the tactical strategies that kept him a leader of the Austrian Social Democratic party for more than two decades without participating in radical social change. Bauer was able to justify suspension of public action of a socialist nature with such notions as “temporary equilibrium” of the classes.¹⁶ Bauer was an archetypal leader for an organization of individuals who thrived on the denial of cultural realities. In his hysterical symptomatology, he appealed to the habits of mind of his pre–World War I milieu that would rather not square their environmental activities with their professed principles.

Thus his meteoric rise to power within Austrian Social Democracy reflects the correspondence of diverse character traits, many abnormal, which gave hope to the abnormal expectations of the times. Bauer’s ideas were always more provocative than clear; they were stated in a dialectical construction that posed black-white polarities which were rarely developed beyond slogans. His discussions of political events were stimulating but less than thorough; he embedded selected facts of a situation within Marxist categories in a deductive manner that disallowed any counterexplanation. The culture of his Austrian-German intellectual contemporaries thrived on didactic, challenging formulations. They burned with the fever Robert Musil attributed to that age—a desire for the emergence of a new order.¹⁷ Nietzsche’s vision of a culture of uncompromising intellectuals who would radically change society according to a vision that eradicated the pitfalls of inherited values was an ideal that enchanted even the conservative party fathers of Austrian Social Democracy. Victor Adler had been attracted to Nietzsche’s historical writings, especially his attack on too much historicity in one’s approach to culture. Adler’s son Friedrich was named at least partly with Nietzsche in mind.¹⁸ The elder Adler thought highly of Otto Bauer, especially admiring his self-confidence in party interaction and his boldness of thought, which always stopped short of revolutionary action and thus could preserve the existing style of the party.¹⁹

Bauer’s thought appeared to crystallize the movement of reality, which seemed to be changing too quickly to allow more careful definition. His thought offered models that put societal forces in a dynamic juxtaposition and seemed to clarify the ferment of the times. Marx’s dialectical materialism offered Bauer an array of concepts and a way of opposing and resolving them that allowed him to live in a conceptual world of change, an escape from the unresolved problems of the present. Marx, however, built his concepts and the dialectics of change from concrete circumstances and based his study of capital upon careful research done over many years. Bauer used Marx metaphorically, not with a semantic definiteness that exposed the factual data that grounded his conceptual schemas. Marxist thought enabled Bauer to hide from his consciousness the concrete history of present and past “homes.” For within his present relationships, and in the childhood relations upon which the presents were built, were issues so complex that seemingly they could only be left behind by the changes of dialectical history, not resolved. In political reality one can form new states, resolving social complexities with new legal structures, but perhaps a truth we have learned in our psychological age is that one cannot apply the same methods in resolving one’s personal problems: one will recreate them again and again until they are solved.

In the airy realm of conflicting ideas and ideology, Otto Bauer burned as a Marxist meteor, a desert star that highlighted the mental theses and antitheses of his environment. The rigid polarities of Bauer’s language and the generalizations that obscured the facts it claimed to represent are seen strikingly in Bauer’s editorial introduction to the first issue of Der Kampf:

Struggle is the law of development for nature and man. From the teaching of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said that war was the father of all things, to the struggle for existence of Darwin, to the struggle of the classes according to Marx, the insight of mankind into this profound law of his own being and becoming has grown. Mankind: a formative-annihilating battle of the titanic powers of the inorganic; a selective-negative battle of countless millions of cells, from the gigantic mass of infinitely small pygmies of the animated! A destroying-creating battle of millions of brains and hands, from individuals, from organized masses, from competitive classes of the enlivened and conscious! An eternal, rising and falling life, never resting, becoming on the background of an unceasing dying, struggle over being and not-being, struggle for a better existence in a waterglass as well as on the hardened ball of fire in the universe that we call earth—what a drama!²⁰

The intellectual storm and stress of Bauer’s syntheses of Austrian politics won him early prominence. His study of the Austrian nationalities, written in his twenty-fifth year, elevated him to a leading role as a political theorist within Austrian Social Democracy. By his twenty-sixth year, Bauer was secretary of the Austrian Social Democratic faction in the Austrian Parliament, the editor of the foremost Austrian Social Democratic theoretical monthly, Der Kampf, and a doctor of law. In his thirtieth year, he was named editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, in charge of trade union affairs. Besides these responsibilities, Bauer was a teacher at the workers’ school in Vienna (a two-year course, with two meetings a week), and he spoke almost every evening at the Arbeiterheim, a social center for workers.²¹

Bauer’s rise to the top of his intellectual and social world, Austrian Social Democracy, was marked by an obsessive preoccupation with socialist theory and activities. His day literally existed only for the vision offered by Austrian Social Democracy and Karl Marx. One of his coworkers on the Arbeiter-Zeitung provided a glimpse of one of Bauer’s average days:

A typical working day for Bauer: He went in the late mornings to Parliament, and took a lively part in all the debates of the Social Democratic faction, read papers on political and economic issues, and helped draft and revise legislative measures for the afternoon sitting of Parliament. In the afternoon, he participated in all the affairs of the Social Democratic faction in Parliament, staying there until evening, and if there were no special committees he went home for a short time. As a rule, he then went about 9 P.M. to the editorial offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung . . . .There he discussed the lead articles with the editor-in-chief and his fellow workers, advising himself on the most important articles and reviews, and giving advice to others. . . . By 11 P.M. Bauer was usually finished with his article. He then went into the office of Austerlitz [the editor-in-chief] and discussed domestic or international affairs, or read a newspaper. In the meantime the proofs of his article had arrived; he read them thoroughly, and occasionally revised them. He never got to bed before 1 A.M., quite often later. Many times he sat with Austerlitz till almost morning. But this is only a rough outline of his daily productivity. How often he went to the workers’ school at 9 A.M. to give lectures on national economy for two hours before the sitting of the Social Democratic faction.²²

How was Bauer able to make the day so productive? He answered this question: “You know, the whole secret of my political activity is that I travel by streetcar and not by automobile, and second, every day in my room I walk back and forth for half an hour. That gives me the possibility to think everything over.”²³ The creation of pseudo-history, as well as dramatic tensions and strategies, is the fruit of such tense reflection. Bauer’s neglect of personal activities that would engage him in leisure with others, or any form of nonpolitical sharing or personal reflection, had to have repercussions in his emotional and mental life. We can assume that his needs beyond those allowed by his role as intellectual vanguard of the class struggle would announce themselves by linguistic intrusions into the theory he espoused and behavioral intrusions within his activities and action plans.

The great energy that propelled him through a day was surely robbed from the many domains of life that create a balanced individual. Bauer was restricted in his locus of power, although he did not realize it because he was rewarded constantly by his public family of Social Democrats. Bauer once stated that moral indignation gave him his power to fight for the worker.²⁴ Freud reminds us that hysteria is a moral disease, found only in well-educated individuals, who can turn emotional need through rationalization into a principled outrage at a person or event beyond themselves.²⁵ Bauer had much to be morally outraged over; besides his father’s behavior toward the family, aspects of his father’s textile business angered him. Bauer spoke of his contact as a youth in Bohemia and Moravia with the economically deprived classmates of the Gymnasium he attended, boys whose fathers were exploited by his father in the textile factory, and stated that this confrontration with the true source of his father’s wealth created a moral conflict that was healed only by his engagement with Marx and Marxist activity.²⁶

Bauer used as a pseudonym for many of his writings the name Weber, which in German means “weaver,” thus reflecting his sense of guilt or perhaps kinship with the exploited workers of his father’s textile factory. Bauer’s moral outrage did, of course, have legitimate grounds in a public political sense. The test of health is proportion, however, and his adoption of the pseudonym “Weber” is one sign of a lack of proportion in relation to his adolescent anger. Bauer’s kinship with the exploited workers in his father’s factory was also a symbolic kinship with the elements of his own life that were “exploited” by the model of selfhood he had cultivated in the home of his father, that of the isolated, iron-handed “boss” of his own existence. All human interaction was to be directed to the profit of the owner. When Bauer thought of Czech workers, for instance, he would evidence anger at their laziness and lack of responsibility; he manifested thus a displaced anger at his own emotional life that wished more freedom and self-expression. The Czechs and other non-German workers, such as the Albanians, became symbols for his own emotional debts. Psychologists call such displaced anger at self onto others in the world projection.²⁷

Otto Bauer’s political personality reflected his childhood and adolescent development just as did Renner’s. Bauer found a home in the Austrian Social Democratic party that fulfilled needs engendered in his youth. The party offered Bauer a basis for assimilation into the German culture in a leadership position; for Renner it was a basis for furthering the German culture among the Austrian nationalities under his leadership. The dominant place of language in the party, the emphasis on theoretical discussion, allowed Bauer to find security from an anti-Semitic public culture in a linguistic substitute for nationality. He experienced the insecurity and loss of esteem of all Jews in Austria as a daily tribulation. A political party that supported a revolution in society was a secure public institution that allowed him to redefine himself and his social reality. For Renner, the Austrian Social Democratic party was only an instrument for acquiring personal status in the status quo of Germanic cultural hegemony.

Bauer went through life in a purposeful haste, denying the angers, frustrations, and emotional warmth that he craved by dwelling solely on his plans and projects. His communication with others was always about the business at hand. He developed an intellectual arrogance that chilled and disturbed those around him. Julius Braunthal states:

Bauer appeared to other intellectuals very uncommunicative, in fact, repelling; he could, as had Marx, break out into a show of arrogance with the others if he considered the discussion unfruitful. His penetrating, critical, inexorable logical understanding rebelled against half-thought-through arguments, and if the discussion centered around matters which he believed had a deep meaning for the working class, he could put down his opponent with obstinate harshness. So he appeared to his fellows, as Friedrich Adler said at his burial, as a “severe man,” who “merely was concerned with the unconditional validity of the ideas that he held, ideas that he would use for the awakening of society.”²⁸

In matters of spirit or intellect, Bauer believed himself to be a purist. Theory was not a matter for idle discussion, for theory had a unique force with redemptive qualities: “Only theory frees us from the bewildering influence of the bourgeois environment, only theory straightens us out when the changing events of the day make us irresolute. Therefore, every theoretical contribution, even when it is understood only by the few among us, in its long-range effect, is a benefit to us all. For ‘theory too will be a force when it seizes the masses.’”²⁹

Whereas Renner found solace for his ethnic strivings through expressionistic theoretical creations, which sought always to justify the existing state of German Kultur and Habsburg hierarchy, Bauer’s peace of mind, if he ever had any, was approached only in the “expectational” products of theory, of future, nonexistent possibilities. Theory for Bauer expressed always the “not-quite-ready-yet,” the becoming of things. The present was always surpassed through the voice of the half-heard angel that freed him from the morass of the extant. The Marxist concept of social revolution was sufficiently vague in its future predication to permit all Bauer’s nameless expectations to reside within its boundaries.

As a student of law, Bauer gave himself fully to Marxist theoretical involvements. It was as if, having discovered Marx, he must translate every area of his immediate world into the projective renderings of a theoretical geometry that could subsume all his life needs.

Bauer wrote to Kautsky in 1904:

I am a law student in the third year. I became acquainted with Marx in the Gymnasium. Disturbed by the Bernstein discussions, I felt the need to win methodological clarity over the questions. Therefore, I devoted much time to philosophical studies, Kant and Hegel, and also familiarized myself with the discussions over the materialistic conception of value. . . . In order not to lose myself completely in questions of method, I have concerned myself at the same time with economic history, and with the modern manifestations of competition—banks, cartels, and so forth. In my involvement with the latter sphere, I came upon the problems of economic depression, and sought in the theoretical literature of this area a deeper understanding.³⁰

Although engaged in the architecture of the future order, Bauer sought at the same time to maintain contact with those masses for whom he would provide the New Canaan. Bauer’s exposure to the proletariat was in the role of pedagogue, a role as important to him as that of theoretician. He saw the need to develop two languages—one for the scientific pioneers of the socialism and one for the mass of humanity that would follow their footsteps. The creative realm of theory was inappropriate for common consumption: “For theory is a difficult matter that presupposes extensive Bildung. Theory must seek its readers in the circles of the learned, not in the masses of the people.” A special language and a special effort must be used to reach the people, to impart the truths won by theory, because the undistilled scientific phraseology was beyond their comprehension: “Social Democratic writers have the duty, not only to avoid foreign words for which another expression could be used, but also to accommodate their phraseology to the needs of the reader, who is accustomed to plain speech. . . . Naturally, this is a difficult sacrifice for us, the denial of so many means of expression; but we will be repaid for this renunciation with the handsome privilege of being able to take part in the education of our youth, to have a voice in the thought and will of the working class.”³¹

By slow steps the worker would be initiated into the mysteries of Marxist language and at some future time would be in a position to use the original sources of socialist research:

Quite often the worker takes a good, but difficult to comprehend work, whose comprehension the lack of a previous Bildung makes impossible; and disappointed, the worker despairingly lays the book aside and loses all desire to read. Therefore, it is not sufficient to suggest good books to the worker; we must tell him in what order he should read them; we must guide him in an organized reading program, so that he learns through his studies the simple and clear, and is able to prepare himself for the more difficult. For one must teach him also to read.³²

Bauer devoted a series of short discussions to this theme in the first issues of Der Kampf, suggesting specific reading lists on various topics. Then in 1910 he drafted the plans for a special school wherein “advanced” workers would be exposed to the full impact of Marxist method. Bauer’s plans for this school and the reaction of many of his students when the school was realized provide ironic commentary on the infinite distance between the inorganic figments of Bauer’s imagination, the proletariat, and the actual workers with whom he wished to communicate but whom he never really saw through the furor of his subjective dialectics. Bauer proposed a schedule for the special school that took on the aspect of his own average working day. The school would last one month; classes would meet six days a week. The mornings would be devoted to the four main subjects, political economy, theory of state, social politics, and Austrian law. One hour each day would be allotted to each subject, for a total of twenty-six hours in the month. Bauer conceded that these broad categories included too much for twenty-six hours of lecture, so he limited them as follows:

(1) Political Economy—The decline of manual labor. The development of small business. Capitalism and the capitalization of agriculture. The growth of industry. Stock-holding organizations, cartels, and trusts. Banks and the exchange. The protective tariff and colonial politics. The socialization of the means of production.

(2) Theory of the State—The origin of the modern state. The bourgeois revolution in England, France, Germany, and Austria. The development of the Austrian constitution, and its political parties since 1848.

(3) Social Politics—Theory and practice of unions. The basic principles and developmental goals of the worker’s insurance and protection laws.

(4) Austrian Law—Laws concerning the Austrian workers.³³

The afternoons were free for “recuperation” (Erholung). Then:

Two hours every evening will be used for seminar exercises. In the seminar, the teacher should provide the students with a general view of the literature of socialism. He should guide the students to the collections of agitation materials, and instruct the students in the sources and method of statistical tables. The students should learn to deliver lectures and to lead discussions, to give lessons on speaking, and to compose short reports on group gatherings. Perhaps, in addition to this, our experts in political organization will visit the seminar and lead a discussion on political organization.³⁴

For diversion, one weekend in the month would include a short trip into the countryside to a place of educational interest. In the second year of the summer session, this trip was to a nearby tobacco factory, a lead mine, and the local museum.³⁵

The effect of this titanic Bildungsarbeit was measured after every summer session in an article in Der Kampf. These articles, written, to be sure, by fellow members of the party oligarchy, provide a glimpse into what actually occurred in the program. We read, for instance, that at the first session Otto Bauer taught political economy and Karl Renner (of course) taught the theory of the state. Bauer’s lectures in political economy were praised, although the author of the article, Heinrich Wissiak, adds that the subject matter was so difficult and so vast that little time was left for discussion. Wissiak goes on to say, however, that Bauer’s teaching method did enable one to ascertain to some degree what was learned by the students. What was his teaching method? Bauer would have a student recapitulate what he had lectured on—the rabbinical method.³⁶ Thus we see the indoctrinary nature of the school, with its understanding of the classroom as a ground of absolutes to be learned by rote rather than as a creative area for mutual exchange. An article by Oskar Helmer, after the second year’s summer session, criticizes the quantity of material for stifling any opportunity for discussion and requests that in following years more seminar time be allowed because “the teachings in the classrooms clearly confuse a great many of the students. It is difficult to find one’s orientation. One doesn’t wish to disturb the lecturer, therefore the seminar should be available for these questions.”³⁷ Considering the quantity of additional Bildung expected of the seminars, however, one wonders how much time or attention could have been devoted to the students’ morning problems in the evening seminars.

The question that none of the critics ever raised was that of the basic assumption of the school that the task of education was memorization rather than mutual investigation. The implicit acceptance of the view that socialist knowledge was a body of unconditional objective information and method possessed by the oligarchic elite led to a syndrome of spiritual “inflation” in the possessors of the treasure.³⁸ Inflation manifested itself in a complete physical and psychic identification by the leading intellectuals with the theoretical products of their ideology. Thus a physical illness or psychic depression in the individual could be projected onto the whole environment and be seen as a sickness in the worker’s movement or a depression in the state of socialist activity. This psychic phenomenon is the key to understanding much of Otto Bauer’s later political behavior. For the world when viewed through the transformative screen of his projections became truly a stage on which he was producer and director. And so that his play might have a perpetual run, Bauer never forced a confrontation between his world of the abstract “becoming of things” and the world in its immediate reality. Thus Bauer’s critics, especially in the 1920s, when he was the leader of the left wing of the Austrian Social Democratic party, accused him of hypocrisy, underlining the fact that Bauer’s radical phraseology never corresponded to his actions, which were without exception compromise with the bourgeois world. Indeed, one critic went so far as to publish a pamphlet psychoanalyzing Bauer’s tendency to project his subjective state upon the world and thus involve him in the syndrome of violent words and nonaction.³⁹

Overt signs of a hysterical symptomatology affected Bauer’s physical and mental life particularly in times of political tension. In the years from 1910 until 1914, when the progress of Austrian Social Democratic principles in the Austrian Parliament was stymied because of the nationality conflicts that paralyzed parliamentary action, Bauer became subject to violent migraine headaches that forced a halt to his activities periodically.⁴⁰ Moreover, his conceptual relation to Austrian states of affairs became increasingly dramatic; revolutionary politics seemed the only reasonable option, as he projected his own condition upon the body politic. He wrote to Kautsky:

Nothing new with the party now. In general we are in a very unpromising situation. The complete breakdown in the internal and external political scene saps the courage of the people, and the workers think that nothing can be done in any direction in Austria, that all endeavor is hopeless, and thus fall back into complete indifference . . . thus, all in all, a very depressing situation. The most reasonable tactic now would be, perhaps, a propaganda campaign that would direct the workers’ hopes toward the dissolution of Austria. But that is not yet possible because a sudden break with the past by the party, and a consolation with the hope of not only far removed, but not too certain future, would not be readily accepted by the masses.⁴¹

Bauer’s family pressures had intensified by 1913, thus compounding the reason for a hysterical relationship to his environment. His mother died that year, and his father developed what Bauer asserted was an abnormal dependency upon him. Bauer wrote to a fellow Social Democrat that he usually perceived his family’s troubles as his own, “and therefore it occurs that I am pursued [verfolgt] by the misfortunes of my family which cause me to lose time, and destroy my capacity for work.” After his father’s death the same year, Bauer complained that even in death “the unfinished business of my father robs me of time.”⁴²

Bauer found solace in a marriage in January 1914. He married Helene Landau, née Gumplowicz, the niece of the sociologist who influenced the writings of both Bauer and Renner. She was ten years older than Bauer, was married herself when he began their relationship, and had three children. One might say that Bauer had found an ersatz mother, yet Helene Bauer was to provide the basis for a normal relationship that had been lacking in his life. Bauer’s statements concerning her indicate a deep emotional and physical sharing. He wrote to her after being captured by the Russians, after the opening months of the world war, “I build upon you . . . we will find each other again in the heat of our old passionate love.” Moreover, Helene Bauer was an intelligent partner who shared his Marxist theoretical interests. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk’s revisionist profit theory, which supplied a Marxist answer to Boehm-Bawerk’s criticisms.⁴³

The question remains: to what degree did this match create a home that might serve Bauer as a place of amnesty from his mental struggles? In the light of Bauer’s later writings and political behavior, the answer appears to be that his marriage did not completely free him from the furies that drove him into intellectual flight. Socialism remained for Bauer a choice of career that fulfilled the function he once wrote it served other intellectuals: “There are intellectuals who join the workers’ party because they are drawn by the great historical conception of socialism. What they wish is the social revolution. The working class to them is no more than a force which is called and capable of destroying the capitalist order, and realizing the socialist ideal of society; the working class is merely a tool for the realization of this ideal.”⁴⁴