5
Otto Bauer concerned himself with the same themes as Karl Renner—nationality and other tactical questions of Austrian Social Democratic policy. His extroverted nature inclined him toward the immediate events of Social Democratic politics. He had the ability to abstract issues and find organizing concepts that clarified the relationships of events to broader historical causes, but the emotional pressure of his life kept such studies in a deductive rather than an inductive mode. Inductive analysis of historical life requires the gathering of data and deliberation of alternative explanations. Bauer’s mind dwelled continually at too high a level of abstraction for such research. Moreover, even these deductive studies of events were interrupted with equivocations that prevented him from completing a study that had clear arguments and definite recommendations. Leo Por wrote of him in the early 1930s:
A leader of the so-called left wing of Social Democracy is the well-known Austrian politician, Otto Bauer. Often in his writing, and especially in his public addresses, he superabounds in radicalism, but then follows a reservatio mentalis with Bauer, wherein the positive radicalism is conditioned with short or long explanations, sometimes with historical parallels, then again with arguments derived from specific tactical considerations, and then finally with the devil only knows what exhalation like “but please, on the contrary” [aber bitte schoen, doch nicht]. There is no speech, no article, no study, no work from this man who writes and speaks so much, in which this ambiguity, this state of contradiction is not present.1
His first work, Die Nationalitaetenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy) (1907), reflects the strengths and weaknesses of his intellect and personality. The book, which was written in Bauer’s last year in law school, was lauded by his contemporaries as a brilliant study of nationality. Bauer’s incisive syntheses of diverse national expressions seemed to bring Marxist interpretative clarity to the present strife within Austria. Looked at more closely, however, the eclectic nature of the work is evident. Bauer borrowed his psychology and sociology of nation from Ludwig Gumplowitcz, as did Renner, and relied on Renner’s proposed solutions to the nationality question. The book was written in haste and for motives of fame as well as science. On January 26, 1906, Bauer had written to Karl Kautsky that he might “write sometime a few articles or a pamphlet on the nationality question; to be sure, I am interested in other things much more, but it will perhaps be necessary that finally a Marxist tells the practical politicians and journalists exactly what is the origin of it all.”2
Kautsky must have encouraged Bauer, for in February 1906 Bauer began to concern himself with the question that ten months later filled a book of 576 pages. Bauer’s capacity for work seemed boundless. One week before beginning the book he had passed his final doctoral exams in law, and in the months that followed, he studied until 2:00 P.M. every day preparing for his entrance exams to the Austrian bar.3 The book evidences an intensity of style that reflects his obvious passion for the subject and opens many secret compartments to his personality. One of these compartments contained the heart of his eclecticism. Bauer’s intensity expressed an element of haste born of the desire to be the first Social Democratic intellectual to contribute to a theme. This desire is evident in the letter to Kautsky and in others, such as the one he wrote to Kautsky before the publication of his “Marxismus und Ethik” (Marxism and Ethics), wherein he pleaded with Kautsky to publish his review as soon as possible, for others would soon publish on the theme, and he would be merely a “camp follower” (Nachzuegler).4 This haste prevented Bauer from ever treating a topic in depth; the words that first entered his mind seemed sufficient to render a topic completed, and these words inevitably were gleaned from men such as Max Adler with whom he had discussed the theme previously. Thus whereas other men arrived at a statement slowly from the history of a limited area which they had explored in depth, Bauer scooped the surface of their conclusions for his own purposes, considering the result an adequate original contribution. Indeed, his party fathers praised the universality of his interests; Kautsky wrote to Victor Adler in 1909: “We suffer from the “idiocy of specialization” [Fachidiotismus], which is unavoidable in many of the contributions of our intellectuals; but we need more people who are at home in all saddles, who create intellectual wholes that contain all the little pieces. Such a man is . . . Bauer.”5 The problem with such a mode of creation, which Kautsky also evidenced, is that whereas the works of specialization were consistent in all their parts, allowing the reader to follow the thinker through all the steps to his conclusions, the writings were filled with finished conceptions that when traced to their individual premises were often contradictory. Obviously, men like himself never challenged Bauer’s eclectic inconsistencies, and his work passed for genius because it contained all the latest theoretical slogans in a readily digestible form, admirably suited for men who were too concerned with the future to waste time in grounding their thoughts in the particulars of the present.
Bauer gives the reader three possible etiologies of national character—a genetic, a cultural, and a psychological. At times these three causal modes are united into one supposedly consistent theory, and at times they are separate and at odds. Writing on the genetic etiology, Bauer represents national character as inhering in the germ plasm: “One can read . . . how our organs reproduce in their genesis the history of our animal ancestors. Similarly we can interpret national character. In the individual characteristic that every individual has in common with his nation . . . is the history that his [physical and cultural] ancestors portrayed, his character is congealed history.”6
Bauer adds another etiology, however, that can be traced in the cultural history of economic development: “He who studies the nation as a national community cannot limit himself to studying a specific material—as the germ plasm inherited by the children from their fathers—and seek to make this the basis of nation; rather one must study the history of production, and the modes of distribution of goods carried on by our ancestors in their struggle for existence; only in this way can the inherited characteristics of the later generations be understood.”7
Bauer seems to reify the economic Marxist metaphor into a separate and competing mode of genesis that is not passed down in the germ plasm but in the language of the culture:
We have discussed two means whereby individuals are molded by the conditions of their struggle for existence into a nation. One way is that of natural inheritance. The conditions of life of the ancestors give the later generations their qualitative characteristics through the germ plasm, thus through natural selection. . . . But the character of the individual is . . . also determined by the inheritance of a traditional culture . . . the product of the inherited cultural products passed from mouth to mouth through the education that he enjoys, the laws that he is subject to, the morals by which he lives, the views of God and world, of moral and immoral, the beautiful and the ugly which he inherits through religion, the philosophy, the science, the art, the politics . . . above all by the manner in which his forefathers earned their living in their struggle for existence.8
Bauer saw a dichotomy between the products of body and mind, including the physical activity of making a living in the products of oral transmission. Bauer, whose life was based on the mind, conveniently ignored the determinism of germ plasm and the bulk of the oral tradition when discussing the Jewish nation, from which he was removed by only one generation of Germanized ancestors. When developed to their full implications, Bauer’s considerations would make him a quasi-German at best. Perhaps sensing this problem, Bauer included an escape clause that, although contrary to the development of germ plasm and tradition, permitted him entry to the German nationality on the strength of Marxist cosmopolitan theory: “National character changes. Community of character forms a nation during a definite period of time; the nation of today is in no way linked to the ancestors of two or three hundred years earlier. Where we speak of a German national character, we mean the common characteristics of the German during a specific hundred years or decade.”9
As if to avoid the inconsistencies inevitable in developing an example of one national character on the basis of these etiologies, Bauer tells the reader that he is not interested in showing how national character arises but in the way it develops culturally, in the “formal process of how a national character arises out of a cultural community, not . . . the derivation of a definite content with national character.”10
The tautology inherent in this task is obviated by Bauer’s belief in the formal laws of the dialectic that seem to stand outside the entity of national character, conditioning it yet not being part of it. Bauer used this distinction as a basis for developing a series of “laws” concerning national character, such as “every nation . . . which is based upon the common inheritance of their forefathers [Stammvoelke], carries within themselves the germ of dissolution [Zerfall], the inclination to divide into several nations from the one originally common nation.” These “laws” are used as a psychological introduction to why certain individuals leave the nation they were born into and join others or establish their own. The inclination of dissolution is the antithesis that lies hidden within the thesis of national character; certain conditions in a culture, such as a new economic development, will unleash the inclination toward dissolution leading to the creation of a nation on the basis of class. The original national character and community is called the community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) and the new one, such as class, is called the community of character (Charaktergemeinschaft): “One such community of character is the class. . . . Within all differences, the common class characteristics of the German and English, the French and the Russian, the American and the Australians shine through; the same joy of battle, the same revolutionary urges, the same class morality, the same political desires.”11
Bauer then arrives at a narrower definition of national character based solely on one’s inclination. National character “does not mean the whole of the physical or intellectual characteristics, which are part of a nation, rather it means merely the difference in directions of will, the fact that the same stimulus creates many different responses, and that from the same basic ground many different conclusions can be drawn.”12 Whatever the individual or group of individuals will is national character. Bauer had managed to clear the ground for a very important discussion: why the Jewish nation no longer existed and thus why Otto Bauer could be a vanguard in good standing of the German intellectual tradition, even more a German than the bourgeois intellectuals who did not believe in the proletariat or the socialist state.
If national character was determined finally by one’s will, then the next step was to identify certain people who exhibited no will at all, and they would not be a nation. Here Bauer ushered in Gumplowicz and the distinction between active and passive nationality (see Chapter 3). Obviously, Bauer could not ignore the germ plasm and tradition of ancient people such as the Jews on the basis of his definition of willful national character, for they did have a language and a history of physical and cultural inheritance; but he could say that as a passive nationality they no longer expressed these entities in their lives and that germ plasm and tradition lay dormant in their consciousness. When Bauer turned to his father’s generation of Jews, the categories of active and passive nationality seemed to be consistent with his definition of national character; that is, the Viennese Jews seemed to have no relation to the Jewish ghetto culture that immediately preceded them, and yet many of them had not with active consciousness fully adopted the German cultural tradition. One may object that Bauer’s father and uncles were respected Viennese professionals, but Bauer inserts an even narrower definition of national character that demands awareness of one’s historical identity and conveniently excludes them from German nationality: “National consciousness is the awareness that one shares certain characteristics, physically, in cultural products, in the individuality of certain desires, which differentiate him from others that do not share these particular qualities: looked at more profoundly, it is the awareness that certain people like myself have the same history. Thus national character in no way demands a mutual love for a nation, or even the will for the unity of a nation; it only identifies the consciousness that one belongs to a nation.”13
One must ask, however, how Bauer dealt with the Jews of the ghettoes of eastern Europe and movements such as Zionism that were contemporary with his writing. Did these not represent an active nationality? Bauer would answer that a distinction must be made between nations with a history and nations without a history (geschichtlose Nationen). The latter, though perhaps willing to maintain their identity, had been disinherited from the ranks of genuine nationhood. A nation with a history is one that controls its own territory and thus the means of production. Such a definition of history presupposes that one has a history only insofar as he is identified with the economic development of society. Hidden behind this neologism peeps the head of Bauer’s real nation and real home, the Marxist metaphor, which is given the power to reshape Bauer’s family tree. Thus when Bauer discusses how it was possible for the Jews to remain a nation for so many hundreds of years in Europe, he seems to forget that he has just called them a nation without a history and gives them a new history—an economic one. His somewhat confusing discussion of the Jews in Europe runs:
The Jews could become a historical nation, if they were able to remain a nation long enough; but the capitalistic society will not allow them to remain a nation. Here we use the shibboleth, the Jews cannot remain a nation while they have no territory on which to prove their identity. If one asserts this statement in the broadest general terms, namely that a defined area of settlement is the presupposition for the maintenance of a nation, then he goes astray. The history of the Jews, who for so many hundreds of years existed as a nation without a territory contradicts such a statement. But we know now how this was possible: The Jews, as representatives of a money economy within the older natural economy that formed the basis of the world at large, in spite of the fact that they lived in the middle of the other European peoples, had maintained a very loose contact with that world, and thus could maintain their identity as a nation.14
Bauer constantly exhibits in his writing the characteristic of attempting to hold onto the saddle of the horses that suddenly appear between his legs in midstream. The Jews, it seems, had a history once on the strength of their nascent capitalism, but no longer, for they have ceased to be spokesmen of the capitalist economy and as a nation can no longer go on without a territory.
Bauer also denies the Zionists the right to existence: “In the last decade a movement has begun that is inimical to the process of assimilation, one that desires to make the Jews again an independent historical nation. This new movement is driven by the same impetus that has awakened the cultural life of the other ‘nations without a history,’ that is, the social awakening of the lower classes of society, the awakening of their self-consciousness; the Jewish workers no longer feel inferior to the rich and educated Poles or the rich Jews who have assimilated Polish education.” Bauer here places the Zionists within the frame of the economic metaphor and identifies them with the proletariat; thus they could be sentenced and executed on the basis of the dialectic:
The German worker wishes the same for the Jewish comrade as he does for the Czech comrade: higher salaries, a proud self-consciousness, and the ability for international class warfare. In order to arrive at these goals, the German worker must allow the Czech in German territory to preserve his own national autonomy; but in the interest of the same goals, he must deny the Jewish worker the same rights. The rights of national autonomy for a minority nationality, while furthering the class struggle when we speak of the Czech worker, is only psychologically harmful to the class struggle in terms of the Jewish worker. This is because any maintenance of Jewish identity reinforces the mentality of the Jewish merchant in the worker, and hinders his assimilation into the modern class structure based upon modern industry.15
Judaism is wholly identified with the mercantile mentality of the archetypal Shylock; no other culture really existed as far as Bauer was concerned. Thus when Jews within the Austrian Social Democratic party demanded the right to parochial schools, Bauer had to refuse their desires because they had no culture apart from the peddler atavisms of the ghetto. Bauer’s definition at the beginning of his book of the traditional products of culture—the oral transmission of laws, aesthetics, morality, philosophy, science, and the manner in which one’s forefathers earned their living in the struggle for existence—became in the case of the Jews limited to the struggle for existence. But this was necessary, for when Bauer turned to the New Man, the German national of the future, he had to be free from the cultural ghosts of his past. His reconstruction of cultural history allowed him to deny his Jewish heritage and thus indirectly separate himself from his personal family. He used the economic determinism of Marx to dismiss the Jewish tradition as bastard capitalism, but he conveniently overlooked the success of his father’s industrial activity and the fact that his father represented a new class of upper-middle-class Jews whose economic activity demonstrated their permanent place in Austrian culture. Through a gap in his logic emerged the glories of German Kultur, somehow not a product of economic determinism. The society of the future, and the New Man, would be a union of the proletariat and the German intellectual tradition; the proletariat was an expression of the historical destiny of the Austrian nation, the fruit of the immediate economic reality, while shining through the economic substratum, which otherwise determined all culture, was the German mother tongue and its reflection on the shields of the Social Democratic vanguard:
Socialism carries within itself the guarantee of national unity. It will make the German language the unified national language, the greatest portal to our cultural products, which even yet is like a foreign language to most of the masses. The German language will become the mother tongue of all in the socialized society; it will be the determinant for the new community of character, and thus be the direction that must be followed by all who wish to identify with the new nation; it will make the cultural products of nation the possession of every German, and thereby make every German the creator of our cultural products.16
To initiate this new order, Bauer as a vanguard of the proletariat and the German intellectual heritage had a self-appointed social-pedagogical mission to fulfull—the education of the workers to their existence as proletariat and, their education to the treasures of German Bildung. As Bauer wrote in 1907, in a pamphlet entitled Deutschtum und Sozialdemokratie, “The greatness of a nation depends not only on its numbers, but also on the height of its morals and its culture. This greatness the German nation can boast of. Who will deny that German science, German philosophy, German poetry, and German art can stand their ground with any culture of any nation.” He added, “But what do our German workers know of Kant, what to the manual laborers know of Marx, what do the German farmers know of Goethe?”17 This hiatus in German greatness would be rectified by Bauer and his compatriots.
When Bauer speaks of socialism bringing the fruits of German Kultur to the people through the German tongue and of the New Man as being a worker who has the benefit of Goethe and Kant, one might suspect that he means only Germanic Austria. But Bauer laid a ground in his definition of national character that allowed him to include all the nations of the Austrian state in the Germanic heaven. Bauer calls the Czechs, Slovene, Romanian, and other nations of the Austrian state (with the exception of the German) “nations without history” but, in contradistinction to the Jewish nation, says that they can win back their history by participating in what he terms a “centralized unified state.” Of the Czechs particularly, he writes: “Nationally [the defeat at White Mountain] of the Bohemian nobility meant that the Czech nation was transformed into the inactive state of a nation without a history [eine geschichtlosen Nation]. Politically, it meant that the way was cleared for their development into a modern centralized unified state [zentralistischen Einheitsstaat].”18
What Bauer seems to imply in the term “centralized unified state” is that by losing their culture the Czechs were open to receive the economic and political gifts of the German industrialized Kultur. Therefore, as evidenced by Bauer’s later writings, they could be completely assimilated into the mainstream of German Kultur; even their language would be absorbed. The socialist development within the Austrian unified state would gradually transform all the differences of national minority groups, through common economic activity, into a united body that would speak one tongue. Of course, this conclusion was only implicit in Bauer’s arguments, for in his book he had upheld Renner’s personality principle and thus gave lip service to the preservation of distinct nationalities within a centralized administration. But when one examines Bauer’s other declarations of what the new community of character would be and how it is always conditioned by the economic order, which gives essence to all cultural artifacts (with the notable exception of the German), one cannot fail to follow the direction of Bauer’s thought toward a “Bauerization” of Austria. The impetus behind Bauer’s transformation of all other cultures into the intellectual culture of German letters and Marxist metaphor was what he called the “narrower definition” of national character, that is, the recognition that an individual’s will can draw original conclusions on the basis of a set of facts common to others. Bauer had created, in effect, his own national character and, in a projection à la Renner, made it the model for the society of the future.
But one cannot expect consistency in Bauer. When he thought of the German nation, culture was formed by language, and the other nations had an existence and a right to their language (except for the Jews). All one can understand from these shifting structures of explication is that images flowed through Otto Bauer’s mind, and he was forced to shape his momentary argument in the pattern of whatever images immediately transfixed him.
Bauer’s major article on the question of assimilation of nationalities, written in March 1912, contains just as many inconsistencies as his book of six years before, and the same images chase one another’s tails. The article, written to aid in the framing of a German-Austrian Social Democratic tactic in the face of the Czechs’ formal departure from Austrian Social Democracy the year before, was addressed to his fellow Social Democrat Ludo Hartmann, who had stated that there was no point trying to protect German culture in Bohemia or Moravia for the Germans there must in time by assimilated by the majority Czech culture.19 Hartmann argued that the Czechs should be allowed to go their own way and that the German-Austrian Social Democrats should turn toward Germany if the Austrian state were dissolved by the centrifugal pull of the nationalities. Bauer objected strongly to Hartmann’s pessimism regarding the preservation of German individuality in Bohemia and Moravia, asserting that if Hartmann really understood the laws of assimilation, which were an expression of the Marxist historical and economic dialectic, he would realize the Germans in Czech lands were not lost to German culture. Moreover, the Czechs themselves were not lost to Austrian Social Democracy, that is, German-Austrian-controlled Social Democracy, for in spite of present national differences, the industrial expansion of capitalism, and eventually socialism, must make all these neighboring nations brothers in culture. Bauer tried to establish why the German minorities would not be assimilated, whereas the Czech minorities, and eventually the Czech majorities, could be assimilated. Bauer lists twelve laws of assimilation, some borrowed from Gumplowicz’s theory of nationality, others based upon the economic dialectic, and others that seem based only in Bauer’s stream of consciousness:
1. The greater the minority, the smaller the attracting power of the majority; the smaller the minority, the more certain the assimilation.
2. The smaller the fraction of the majority in the total population, the easier the assimilation.
3. Assimilation is accomplished most easily where the minority is dispersed among the settlements of the majority; assimilation will be more difficult the more a minority settles together, and the more it separates itself from the community of the majority; assimilation is completely hindered if the settlement of a minority is completely separated from the majority and forms a language island [Sprachinsel].
4. National assimilation is easier, the more similar the majority to the minority in matters of race, culture, religion, and speech.
5. Assimilation of working classes [arbeitender Klassen] leads to little change in the oral tradition and morals of assimilated people; assimilation of a minority people by a dominant majority will create an amalgamation of the two people that will produce a new nationality with a new language.
6. If the social conditions of the majority change, then the conditions of assimilation of minorities to that majority also change: a) The governing class is assimilated to the majority nationality, where they are in constant contact with that nationality and allow that nationality a share in the governing. b) Nations that participate in a money economy, and exist within a people who are mainly adherents to a natural economy, will preserve their identity; they will only be assimilated in proportion to the proportion of people in the natural economy who change to money economy.
7. Slavery will never force assimilation; serfdom will promote assimilation.
8. Proletarian immigrants of the agrarian-domestic type assimilate to another nationality more easily than proletarian immigrants of the industrial-capitalistic type; the reason is that the higher the economic development of an immigrant’s home, the higher the qualification of his work, the higher the level of culture.
9. The greater a nation’s population, gross product, power, and culture, the greater its attracting power over minorities in its own area, the greater its resistance to the attraction of other nationalities if it is a minority in another nationality’s area.
10. Minorities only assimilate if within the majority nationality they find their class, professional, or cultural counterpart, i.e., the farmer can be assimilated only through the influence of another farmer.
11. Assimilation proceeds more rapidly the greater the increase in population of the majority in proportion to population increase in the minority.
12. All conditions that serve to bring the minority and the majority in contact with one another serve to further assimilation; all conditions that serve to hinder the contact between nationalities make assimilation more difficult.20
The potpourri of these “laws” witnesses Bauer’s manipulation of concept into the web of his own character. As a final stroke to his gerrymandering of the Czechs into the corner of his logic, Bauer added three “universal” categories wherein he examines the various genres of minority nationality, in the world at large, and in Austria:
1. The first group is assimilable minorities. As for example: the German minority in North America and in French Switzerland, the Czech minority in the German areas of the Sudetenland and the Alps, the Jewish minority in Galicia. The national assimilation of these minorities is an unavoidable process of nature. . . . We must not permit these minorities the right to their own schools, although we must protect these minorities against infringements by the majority nationality, which would only slow down their natural assimilation.
2. The second group would be the nonassimilable minorities: They are protected against assimilation by the size of their population (as the Czech mining colony in Northwest Bohemia) or through their enclosed settlements (as all genuine language islands) or through their class situation (as the German bourgeois minorities in the South Slav areas). These minorities must be guaranteed their rights, their right to live their own national life.
3. The third group make up the assimilable and nonassimilable minorities. To this group belong the Czechs in Vienna or the Germans in Prague. These nationalities should be given schools that teach in both the majority and minority language.21
Bauer stated that Ludo Hartmann’s desertion of the Germans in Czech lands would violate the natural laws he had outlined and that minority nationalities in Groups 2 and 3 of the above categories would be forced to assimilate against their nature, being deprived of the schools that would ensure their language. At the close of the article, Bauer adds to all the other “laws” an afterthought that seems to open new areas of ambiguity: “A great hindrance to assimilation is the difference in race. As soon as the Czech is assimilated into the German nationality his Czech origins are concealed [verdeckt] . . . but it is different in cases where the race of the minority is not similar to that of the majority. Thus the assimilated Jews are still obviously Jews according to their facial characteristics. Race instincts and race prejudices live on after assimilation.”22
What does Bauer mean by “race”? He seems to refer to elements of ethnic inheritance that affect physiognomy, feeling, and thought, if racial prejudice and racial instinct are assumed to be manifested in thought. Odd that once assimilated the Czechs’ racial differences are concealed or covered [verdeckt] yet the process of assimilation fails to hide something in the Jew. Facial characteristics cannot be concealed or covered; perhaps, then, Bauer refers to racial instincts that are concealed. These reflections on an apparent afterthought by Bauer are of moment for we will find that Bauer’s relation to the Czechs can be unraveled by following the delicate threads of his metaphorical addendum. Keeping in mind his reference to race and the Czechs, let us observe a statement of Bauer’s about Czech national character made six months earlier:
The Czech worker, who works on German soil, is not a pleasing présence for the German nation. . . . The whole manner of the Czech worker has a provocative strangeness. For the essence of the robust Czech proletariat who roams [continually through the German lands] in search of employment, having been driven out of the hunger-stricken land of Bohemia by the expansion of capitalism (Konjunktur), is quite different from the race of German worker who spends his life in the quiet, remote [weltfern] retreat of his mountain village dreaming and musing. For the German in this still corner of his existence [stillen Enge ihres Daseins], socialism is a profound inner belief, not a loud cry. In proletarian boldness and defiance the Czech outdoes the sedentary German. In the battle against the common foe, the Czech, therefore, is a wonderful comrade. But in questions of reason and policy, the Czech appears to the German as ignorant, rash, and unbridled. Thus it is difficult for the two nations to understand one another. And the kind of worries these foreign comrades have! The Germans think on the great promise [Verheissung] of socialism which will free mankind; the Czech interrupts him with national solutions, minority schools, the language of administrations [Amtssprache], and railroad signs! The German who has not had to work in foreign countries cannot understand the problems that the Czech brings to him. And when the Germans see how more and more of these strange people come into their valleys, and begin to make demands on behalf of their nation, year in and year out, then the Germans become anxious for their homes. Shall this beautiful piece of land in which my parents are buried, and on which the cradle of my child sat, this land that was for hundreds of years German, become the prize of people so wholly different than us?23
Thus Bauer puts words into the hypothetical mouth of the common German worker in an attempt to draw a compassionate picture of the German antipathy to the Czechs. But seen in another light, the exposure of metaphor, the question of Czech separatism and its threat to Austrian Social Democratic unity becomes an allegoric vehicle for the civil war of emotion and ego defense which Bauer constantly engaged in.24 Within his self-consuming struggle were concealed the racial instincts attributed to the Czechs. Bauer, who attempted to force all his existence into a serfdom (not slavery) to the intellectual masters of Marxism and the Austrian Social Democratic party, who had isolated himself in an intellectual island of language, as removed as the quiet mountain retreat of the idealistic Germans, was threatened by the foreign, unbridled, rash, irrational, and to him ignorant [unwissend] elements that invaded his German land. The issue of Czech separatism became a possessive picture of Bauer’s being, usurping his vision of the external for its own hungry ends.
In the same article, Bauer suggests that to heal the increasingly aggravated split between the Germans and Czechs in the labor unions of Vienna and in the state in general, a “double organization” be created. This double organization was based on Renner’s concept of the personality principle wherein the economic affairs of all unions would maintain an international, that is, unified party character, whereas the Czechs should have their own language rights and the Germans theirs. In an impassioned wail to fate, Bauer closes:
If my way proves to be invalid, then the working class will be forced to suffer the difficult, painful path of separation, a path which will cost the Austrian worker many fruitless years. But this way will lead finally to the goal [of unity], I do not doubt that. For just as surely as the unified party is not possible today, just that surely will the essential unity of all proletarian interests finally overcome all difficulties, which are our inheritance from the tragic history of our state. Damned through the malevolence of history to live in a state whose inner contradictions poison and contaminate thought and feelings of its inhabitants, we will only be able to achieve the kind of unity won by workers of other lands through long, difficult internal battles, only with inexpressible sacrifice of time, patience, and energy.25
In the light of such expressionistic language, one can gain a clearer understanding into many of Bauer’s other proposals to settle the conflict between the Czechs and Germans. His proposals were cloaked in figures of speech that mirrored many attitudes toward this internal separation. At times, he desired unity so strongly that he would make major concessions to the Czechs; at times, he sought means to bypass the Czech nationalists and win support of other elements in the Czech lands (Czech Marxist internationalists); and at times, he damned the Czechs and suggested a separate German socialist party and state. For instance, Bauer’s creation of the third category, the class of assimilable and nonassimilable minority nationalities in his article on the conditions of national assimilation, is, in terms of the world, a hapless effort of symbolic logic; but seen in terms of Bauer, one realizes that he admitted by creating this category that in the major metropolises of the state in which he lived it was not clear which nationality would win in the battle of cultures. Thus he suggested that the language of each nation be guaranteed in the schools of Vienna and Prague, allowing the individual national to decide the culture he would follow when given both alternatives. Once the Czechs were exposed to the obvious superiority of German letters and science, they could not fail to choose the German way.
In 1911, Bauer sought a more drastic means to bridle the Czechs and their desires: he encouraged the Austro-German Social Democrats to support the efforts of a separate Czech socialist movement that was nonnational in its aims.26 Victor Adler discouraged this approach, for according to a letter Bauer wrote to Kautsky, Adler believed the Czech nationalist demands were the life force of Bohemia and Moravia and that the new Czech Marxist Internationalists would “give birth to a stillborn child.”27 During the early months of 1911, Bauer fumed under the conciliatory hand of Adler, calling him “a fanatic for unity,” but by July 1911, after the Czechs had officially left the central authority of the Austro-German Social Democrats, Bauer joined Adler in attempting to bring them back and gave up the hope of the Czech centralists as fruitless. Bauer stated in a letter to Kautsky on July 8, 1911, “The struggle against separatism ends practically in a nationalistic baiting [Hetze] of the Czechs, in an actual struggle of German and Czech workers with each other—not only figurative—with knives! That is a poor means to propagate Internationalism.”28
As George Eliot once wrote, every battle without is also a battle within. By the summer of 1911 the Czechs, who had functioned as a metaphor for the personal turmoil of Bauer’s life in these years, began to lose their symbolic pregnancy. The first indication we have of this withdrawal of energy from the mirror of the Czechs is the article “Zu neuen Formen,” where Bauer urges all Austro-German Social Democrats to close ranks and “go their own way” and expressed the desire for a recollection of all German elements in the empire “to form a new body.”29
As long as a possibility of healing the separation existed, Bauer manifested his syndromes through the Czech problem, but when other civil wars were evidenced, as they soon were in the Balkan states, Bauer shifted his attention and his pen. As if to clear the ground for a new center of involvement, Bauer wrote an article about the Czech question that appeared in October 1912 in which he not only expressed satisfaction with the state of separate Social Democratic national organizations within Austria and the wish that they remain separated in the future but also attempted to show that there had not been realy party unity within Austrian Social Democracy since 1897 and as far as the Czechs were concerned, since 1887—before Austrian Social Democracy had been established by Victor Adler.30 Thus, as done with the Jews, Bauer reinterpreted history in order to establish a new body of facts that would allow him either to generate or withdraw his projection of personal needs within the real world. His desire to establish “a new organization in new forms” was a metaphor that expressed the need for a new historical situation to serve as a projective scapegoat for his internal struggle, as well as the political need of Austrian Social Democracy in the wake of Czech withdrawal.
Foreign policy commanded all Bauer’s attention between the summer of 1912 and the outbreak of World War I. Almost every month he published an article in Der Kampf on existing wars, future wars, the state of the Habsburg military, or the military policy of Austrian Social Democracy. The basis of all these articles was the statement in the July 1912 article entitled “Bourgeoisie und Militarismus”: “There is no doubt that the fatherland needs protection against the external enemy that threatens its borders and protection against the disturbers of the peace internally; therefore the duty exists that every able-bodied man learn to use weapons.”31
Above all other foreign threats, Bauer feared Russia and her influence over the southern Slav peoples within the Austrian state—other “nations without a history.” Yet, although the southern Slav peoples of the state were placed in this inferior category, ostensibly because of their lack of a capitalized economy, Bauer granted them a superiority over their language brothers outside of the Austrian domain. This distinction is especially clear in an article written at the time of the final annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Austrian state in 1908 in which he attempts to explain why an expansion of the Austrian state into the Balkans could be beneficial and should not be viewed as an imperialistic evil. The expansion of an industrialized Kultur brought with it the treasures of Bildung, and although there was always the threat of capitalist exploitation, such expansion was a necessary evil for a nation without history. Bauer admonished the “blind hatred and fear” of the Austrian rulers, who insisted on treating the southern slavs as an inferior people and, instead of giving them national autonomy within the realm with the beneficial access to all that was best in the culture, alienated them, treating them as serfs. The southern Slav “irredenta” were in danger of revolting and following PanSlavism, Bauer asserted, because they were not treated as first-class citizens. As he succinctly put it, “Fear of the irredenta creates the irredenta.”32
In November 1908, Bauer expressed the policy that would be best for the Balkan lands, both within Austria and not yet within Austria. He adumbrated the role the German Kultur of the Austrian state must play on the European continent, especially to the south:
Greater Austria [Grossoesterreich] is not primarily the satisfaction of our personal demand [as a Social Democrat], but rather the necessary final product of an already observed tendency of development. These existing tendencies, therefore, must define our own politics and set their direction. . . . Must not Austria, when she has developed her national autonomy earlier and more fully than her neighboring states, exercise a great attracting power by the nature of her constitution on her comrades across the border? . . . Thus, the idea of a Greater Austria, as paradoxical as it may sound, can become part of the oldest traditions of our political thought: its realization appears as a tool of European Democracy against czarism, and as a step toward the final completion of the principle of nationality.33
Fear of Russia justified expansion of Austria on the Continent. Moreover, one senses Bauer’s metaphorical possession when he imagines that political and cultural forms of the Austrian Germanic state can “complete” the principle of nationality in the “comrades across the border.” Historians differ as to Russia’s actual force in the Balkans before World War I and whether she was a real threat to Austria. Oscar Jaszi stated that a PanSlavism initiated by Russia in the Balkans made war inevitable; Carl Schoerske, an expert on German Social Democracy, held that after the 1905 revolution in Russia, most of the party no longer saw the czarist culture as a bastion of reaction or a major threat to Europe.34 In December 1909 Bauer again warned that military preparation was necessary and that Austrian interest must be protected, especially in the Balkans: “The advance of capitalism has created a world of enemies armed against us. Hatred of Austria unites Italian democracy with czarism. True, the wounds Russia has suffered from her war with Japan and the revolution [in 1905] are not yet healed. But in a few years Russia and czarism will have a powerful army again at her bidding. What then?”35
But as with all his writing, Bauer’s statements regarding foreign policy in the Balkans are contradictory, either in the same or another article. For example, in an article written in September 1909, Bauer urged that Social Democracy fight every attempt at Habsburg expansion in the Balkan peninsula as an evil of capitalist imperialism. Instead of bringing Kultur through capitalism, Bauer emphasized that “free trade” with the Balkan lands was necessary to “take away the nourishment [Naehrmittel] that fed the voices of hatred against Austria, and thus avert the danger of war.” In this article, Bauer saw the Balkan situation in different focus than in earlier articles; he concentrated on the customs war Austria had waged with Serbia since 1906. This aspect of the southern Slav situation seemed to allow Bauer to be more open to the non-Austrian Slavs than he had ever been but for the purpose of averting war and taking away the nourishment of their hatred. In the same article, he speaks of “tearing down the dam our agrarian egoism [Selbstsucht] has erected against the Balkan people.” The Balkan people, like the Czechs, provided an excellent mirror for Bauer’s ego defense against his emotional past and present. As in the Czech question, Bauer’s contradictions voice the manifold, shifting attitudes toward his own existence.
Even more pregnant in this vocabulary of civil war was the presence of Russia, an evil genius that carried every element of existence antithetical to Bauer’s ego allowances. Thus Bauer’s desire to tear down the dam of agrarian egoism erected by Austrian powers was mainly to keep Russia from taking advantage of the economically oppressed Balkans. In the same article Bauer employs his favorite tactic of self-justification when he condemns Russia as “the bastion of all reaction”; he builds an argument within the frame of a chronological history that would seek to give his subjective attitude a place in the objective flow of time, preferably a time with a foundation of at least one hundred years. Scattered dates and the authority of economic determinism are characteristic presences that give depth and continuity to Bauer’s momentary impressions:
Marx and Engels during their life . . . sought always to mobilize the energies of European democracy against Russia. The war against Russia would serve as a European revolution, analogous to the war the French waged against the united princes of Europe. The war against Russia was urged by Marx in 1848 when he called upon the Germans to lead it, in 1853 when England carried the banner of his hopes; and even in the years from 1860 until 1890, Engels hoped that Germany and Austria would begin a war against Russia, for they knew Russia to be the bastion of all reaction.36
Thus the “bastion of all reaction” served as the evil threat that could organize Bauer’s emotional reaction. The southern Slavs, even more than the Czechs, were excellent material for the emotional reactions to a repressive logic. The southern slav national character was much stormier than the Czech, and their secret societies and political murders provided Bauer with more than adequate material for his expressionistic forays. Perhaps the most fascinating and repelling people among the Balkans for Bauer were the Albanians; although a non-Slav nation, they were lumped in Bauer’s mind together with the rest of the Balkan “nations without a history.” In an article written at the time of the first Balkan war, Bauer dwelled at length on the national character of these people, whom he considered the most barbaric in Europe, describing the custom of political murder in Albania and treating in almost fond detail the tradition of family venegeance and the meting out of law by vendetta. He was fascinated by the political and social structure of Albania, its division into five districts on the basis of family, and how these five families marry exogamously, thus transforming the nation into a complex of family relationships—a nation truly organically united. After spending the first four pages of a six-page article on the culture of Albania, he says it is a country without a culture and a people without a will to one. The Albanians are condemned as a nation without a history, who have not yet awakened to their lack. As an example of their lack of culture, Bauer mocks the absence of a written language on the model of the Germans, completely overlooking the existence or importance of their oral culture. The Albanians had an oral epic literature that has been compared to the Homeric epic in its richness of tradition and educative function. Nevertheless, Bauer writes:
The Albanians, too, are a nation without a history. They have had no literature, no written language, not even an alphabet in which to write their speech . . . and not only do they have different languages among their own nation, they also have different orthographics composed of different alphabets. One person writes down the Albanian language in Latin characters, another with Greek, another with Arabian letters. One could jest about Albania “they have more modes of literating than literates” [mahr Alphabete als Alphabeten], that is, more means of writing than those who can write.37
Yet in later articles Bauer manifested a curious concern for the cultural integrity of Albania. He expressed the desire that the country be left alone by the European powers, including Austria, which wished to stretch its railroad nets (Eisenbahnnetzen) into Albania, acting as Albania’s protector, but also giving itself an outlet on the Adriatic Sea. Here he contradicted his previous statements about the need for capitalist development in countries without a history, especially those on the mission of German Kultur and his allegation that Albania was the most culturally deprived country in Europe. Again Bauer was ambivalent about the primitive spontaneity of the southern peoples. In one breath he defended their right to autonomy and in the next demanded that this autonomy fit the conditions of his definition of culture. His ambivalence can be understood when we scrutinize his wording closely. His depiction of the interference of Austria and Italy in Albania brings to mind the childhood scenes he must have witnessed between two warring adults struggling for the favor of their children. The sentences are built from clauses that never seem to complete their point, that clash to a final conclusion. The clauses and the conclusion are always in the future conditional tense (if only one could avoid this state of affairs, Bauer seems to sigh):
If the Austrian and Italian governments support the capitalists of their countries in the competition over the Albanian market with political means of force; if each of the two governments seeks to place the conflicting parties of Albania under its control, and have them do service for it; if the two governments, filled with jealousy and mistrust against each other, meddle in the internal turmoil which the Albanians cannot avoid, as their own palace coups and civil wars create new crises that involve Italy and Austria, then will Albania become an increasing threat to the peace between Austria and Italy.38
Bauer’s desire for freedom and independence for Albania is expressed with words that recall his childhood struggles for personal freedom and pleasure:
There is a general interest of European democracy, of European culture, of European peace to stop a catastrophic outbreak of war between Austria-Hungary and Italy. Therefore the proletarian democracy on this side and beyond the Alps must demand that the solution of “Albania for the Albanians!” must be seriously attempted, and that any interference in the affairs of Albania by imperialistic politics on Albanian soil must result in Albania’s real freedom and independence, even against the Austrian and Italian lust for domination [Herrschafts gelueste]. “Hands away from Albania!” [Haende weg von Albanien!] must be the watchword [Losung] among Social Democrats in Austria-Hungary and Italy.39
His concern with the Balkan peninsula (Balkanhalbinsel) must be considered, in part, a phallic metaphor for his continuing struggle for an identity free of the manipulative presence of his parental model. These expressionistic intrusions into objective politics were always controlled by a reality principle for Bauer; he managed to keep his deliberations within plausible boundaries of Social Democratic politics. He closed the subject of the Balkans and Albania in an article a few months later with the insight that fortunately Albania would probably be industrialized by other Mediterranean or Balkan nations in the near future, thus being brought into the civilized nations by another force than Austria.40
Bauer’s relationship to Austrian Social Democratic participation in Parliament was as ambivalent as his attitudes to Balkan politics. He maintained a theoretical distance from unquestioning participation in a “bourgeois” government, yet as secretary of the Austrian Social Democratic faction in Parliament after the universal suffrage of 1907 he was active in parliamentary politics. His objection to participation never reached a pitch that would discontinue such involvement. An expression of his position in 1908 is reflected in an article he wrote for Der Kampf in which he states that the Austrian Social Democrats have a choice of two roles: they can be a critical minority, in constant opposition to the bourgeois parties, or they can engage in the tactics of obstruction, participate in committees, and accept the minister’s portfolio.41
As long as Parliament was somewhat viable as an organ of political change, Bauer continued to work within it, making statements of qualification as to the role of such participation in Austrian Social Democratic policy and the future socialist state. He found personal meaning in his involvement with everyday political realities, and the activity of Parliament provided such political realities. Thus he could subtly justify Parliament in a more fundamental manner than his initial caveat would suggest:
The great task of transferring the means of production into the possession and the administration of society, and the disciplined new ordering of societal production and societal consumption will naturally be led by the representatives of the whole society, thus must be led by a parliamentary body. Can parliamentary action be enough to fulfill this great task? Where democratic laws have created a democratic organization of autonomous local administrations, and a democratic military body, where the powers in control have no weapons to use against the parliamentary majority, there is the fate of the capitalistic society decided, and completely through the proletarian conquering of Parliament.42
Conceived as a military campaign, full participation in Parliament was justified. Bauer could allow himself to become absorbed by this body.
The continuing failure of the Austrian Parliament to pass social legislation between 1907 and World War I caused a great hardship for Bauer because he was not prepared to take the revolutionary alternative of direct action beyond Parliament. He needed the responsibility and interaction of an authorized forum; he was not a revolutionary. The loss of effectiveness in an everyday forum threatened his stability. In an article whose title signified his own gradual unraveling in the several years before the war, “Die Lehren des Zusammenbruchs” (The lessons of breakdown), Bauer bemoaned the stalemate of Parliament, which had been dissolved twice during the first six months of 1909 because of national obstruction. He saw only two alternatives for the future of Austria: “National settlements and reform in the order of parliamentary business by Parliament itself or bureaucratic Oktroi [the dissolution of Parliament by order of the Emperor]!—these are the alternatives! Shall these problems find a democratic solution through Parliament or a bureaucratic one dictated by the government?—That is the question . . . that will determine our whole internal development.43
Bauer’s psychophysical development was tied closely to the meaningful structure of Parliament, which for him and his associates was the only alternative for Social Democratic realization of policy. The bourgeois way of life necessitated peaceful settlement of disputes. One must view a book review he published in 1911 on the Austrian politician Adolf Fischhof as a piece of dramatic irony, produced and directed by Bauer’s warring state of existence, his unconscious. Who was Adolf Fischhof? “In 1848 [Adolf Fischhof] represented the bourgeoisie in the academic legion and the academic legion in the bourgeoisie; he sought to overcome the opposition between the bourgeois and the worker, between the moderates and the radicals; he was always and everywhere the “middleman,” and the “politician of moderation,” who sought to walk “the middle line” between the parties.”44
Fischhof had attempted to find a constitutional solution that would resolve the German desire for a centralized Austria ruled by the Habsburgs and the Slav desire for a crown land federalism.45 Like Bauer, Fischhof devoted his life to the political struggle of opposites in Austria. Bauer wrote: “Fischhof’s example shows that the method of compromise has its dangers, that not every compromise is unavoidable as its generation believes it to be. . . . There are in Austria tendencies with which no compromise can be permitted, tendencies that must be fought until society’s development removes them.” Fischhof was guilty in Bauer’s eyes of falling prey to the inherent contradictions of the Austrian state and not adequately exerting his will or perception to solve “the problems presented by the necessity of political and national compromise and the boundaries of its necessity.” Bauer evidences a deep compassion, however, for Fischhof; after all, he says, one must recognize how hard it is not to be compromised by the monster of the Austrian state:
It is not accident that in Austria not only responsible practical politicians, but also the writers who show the necessary direction, whose job is really not at all the conclusion of compromises, rather the production of principles, must be content with seeking the “middle line” between the conflicting forces. . . . The most fearsome crime of this state is that every political idea, every political movement, is forced to make deals with its opposite and compromise itself. Therefore other nations have their Danton, Robespierre, Bonaparte, Cobden, Gladstone, Fichte, and Bismarck, while we—we have our Fischhof.46
Then, in a short description of the span of Fischhof’s career, Bauer writes his own epitaph: “Fischhof’s political effectiveness began on the 13th of March 1848. After the collapse of the revolution he accompanied the history of Austria as a political commentator until the year 1893 with countless brochures, articles, and letters. Thus his life image is intertwined inextricably with the social, political, and national struggles of two generations.”47