8

The Party as Father for Friedrich Adler

For Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler, the Austrian Social Democracy party served as a transpersonal father, providing a thread of hope in the labyrinth of the Habsburg state. For Friedrich Adler, Austrian Social Democracy was the Gordian knot of his existence. Whereas Renner and Bauer found a sublimation to their family situations within Austrian Social Democracy, Friedrich Adler’s family, personally and transpersonally, was truly the party, and any solution to his problems of personality could come only by a direct confrontation with the chimeric presence of Victor Adler as party leader and personal father, and not, as for Renner and Bauer, in a return to self apart from the party. For Friedrich Adler had no self divorced from Austrian Society Democracy; he depended totally on the world and presence of Victor Adler. And if a self could come to be for Friedrich Adler, it could arise only out of the ashes of destruction—the annihilation of the party and family patriarch that had usurped his life.

Not all sons of political leaders share the patriarchal possession experienced by Friedrich Adler. The unique quality of his origins can be appreciated only with the unfolding of his family’s story. Friedrich Wolfgang Adler, the first son of Victor Adler and Emma Adler, née Braun, was born in their home in Vienna on July 9, 1879. He was named after Friedrich Schiller and Wolfgang Goethe, with possibly an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Victor Adler venerated. The marriage of Victor and Emma was stormy in the beginning, for Emma, who was said to be fit as a bride for only the revolutionary nature of Friedrich Nietzsche or Victor Adler, was melancholic and subject to severe spells of depression.¹ Her tragic beauty and dark, passionate nature served as the model for creative work by artists of the society.² From the beginning of their marriage Victor controlled and suppressed the emotional abyss represented by his wife and present in his son Friedrich. Their honeymoon was a Studienreise (educational excursion) in Italy, in the manner of Goethe, after which they went to England, where Victor studied factory conditions.³ Apparently, Victor, proud and protective of his rational existence, had picked his antithesis as a bride and proceeded to mold her to mesh with his planned existence.⁴

Victor seemed to have a genius for choosing professions and associates that expressed the dark forces of his own unrecognized self and channeling these factors into currents that would suit his will. Before directing the inchoate desires of the proletariat, he had studied psychiatry, and he saw his family as a mass that symbolized the irrational forces of nature that could erupt at any time. Of the three children of his marriage to Emma, one went permanently insane at seventeen years of age, and Friedrich, as we shall see, walked the edge of mental collapse continually.⁵ Adler’s patriarchal will within the family was frustraed by emotional illnesses he could not control and that compelled him to devote more attention that he desired to those immediately around him. The family could break through the abstractions of Victor Adler, party leader, only by exposing him to the violence and intensity of an emotional crisis.⁶ When the house was quiet, Victor spent fifteen hours a day on Austrian Social Democratic business.⁷ Friedrich, who grew up simultaneously with his father’s other child, Austrian Social Democracy, in his thirtieth year wrote a letter to his father on the occasion of the twentieth birthday of the Gesamtpartei, which expressed the family life he had known: “You never took the slightest notice of your person, and its appendage, the family. I, who belonged to this appendage, who made you a great deal of care and trouble, I would like to tell you today that no matter what happens with me in the future, I am glad that you were a man and not a father. The highest that life can give one you would have taken away from me if you had had consideration of the family.”⁸

To Friedrich Adler, the highest that one could experience was a life lived only for an intellectual ideal, excluding all personal affairs, all subjective concerns. This birthright granted by his father replaced and embraced all normal family life. As a child, Friedrich heard at meals the stories of the poor workers’ families, which touched him so deeply that he would break out in tears. The emotional energy—the love—of his father was felt primarily through the vehicle of the proletariat world; the image of the suffering masses was the third person in virtually all contacts between father and son. Such an abstract emotional vehicle became an impediment to any genuine contact with his father or his own emotional self. Socialism became a vehicle that absorbed all the qualities of individual life. All feeling and the sense of meaning that is granted by an emotional presence were first known in the metaphors of a Marxist world. These metaphors embraced the entire spectrum of love and hate and all the hidden motives that would find an outlet as Friedrich matured. Even as a child Friedrich released his ambivalent feelings toward his father through Social Democratic events. In 1887, when his father was imprisoned for four months, we are told that Friedrich happily told the news to the first person he encountered. In 1893, when his father had been indicted for many political offenses, Friedrich “proudly” reckoned that his father could receive a twenty-year sentence, and “he could not understand why his mother admonished him for telling this to his sister.” His biographer states that Friedrich’s joy was “pride over his father who suffered for freedom,” and adding that Friedrich was “a tender child from whom every aggressive impulse was foreign.” That aggressive impulses toward his father remained foreign to Friedrich Adler’s consciousness there seems little doubt, for his father appeared as a god, the one god. Nevertheless, the anecdotes of Friedrich’s childhood contain the germ of his later behavior toward his father and his father’s political party. Friedrich’s later rebellion within Austrian Society Democracy was vitally connected to its essential truth and meaning content. Never did the metaphors of socialism cease to exert their force. As Friedrich Adler wrote to the Christian theologian Leonhard Ragasz in 1921: “Belief plays an extraordinary role in the life and activity of men . . . belief seems to me to be the most important human attribute, something that is given subjectively. . . . The belief in the realization of socialism is such a belief, but one that is throughout a human belief, one that is possible within . . . the framework of what can be experienced. . . . I am, however, of the opinion . . . that knowledge of the conditions of the development of socialism is not enough, that an emotion must also be present for it to be realized.”⁹

The religion of socialism was a live force for Friedrich Adler from his earliest consciousness. At eight years of age he helped fold the first numbers of his father’s socialist publication Die Gleichheit, which he considered a service in behalf of freedom. At ten years of age he was inspired by the tramway strike in Hernals (a section of Vienna) when workers and soldiers clashed in the streets. In the same year the first May Day parade was held, and Friedrich “could not forgive his mother for not permitting him to attend. He had expected on this day, after all he had heard, a great revolution.” By his fifteenth year Friedrich considered himself a full-fledged “party comrade” and read all the socialist literature available, consuming daily the Arbeiter-Zeitung from the first to the last line. He took part in street demonstrations and spent all his free time outside of school in party activity.¹⁰

Victor Adler’s reaction to his son’s involvement in the affairs of Austrian Social Democracy brings inevitably to mind the image of his archetypal predecessor, Oedipus’s father. Victor Adler did not want his son to have any part in the political life of the party. From his earliest years, Friedrich’s education was tailored by his father to exclude activity in the party. What Victor Adler articulated as concern with Friedrich’s weak and sensitive constitution, causing him to plan a quiet bourgeois existence for Friedrich, must be viewed as an attempt to emasculate his son.

Although Victor gave little attention to his family’s everyday presence, the question of his son’s education and general goals was a matter of concern. As early as his fourteenth year Friedrich was oppressed by his father’s wishes for his future, which ran contrary to his own. Victor Adler planned that Friedrich would not follow the path of the normal bourgeois intellectual, which could lead to the party oligarchy. Friedrich was to attend Realschule instead of Gymnasium and then go the technological institute and learn a practical profession. This plan, formulated when Friedrich was ten years of age, was ostensibly to protect the boy’s sensitive nervous system. After completing the first grades of the Realschule, however, Friedrich pleaded “that he could not live without higher mathematics” and begged to be allowed to take his Matura, which would permit him to visit a university. Victor consented only after a long conflict and with the qualifying condition that he must follow a practical profession as a chemist or engineer, or “if worse came to worse” as an academic professor. Friedrich was allowed to go to the University of Zurich because his Realschule degree excluded him from entrance to the University of Vienna.¹¹

During the fourteen years between Friedrich’s entrance to the University of Zurich in 1897 and his admission to the Austrian Social Democracy party oligarchy in 1911, a continual internecine strife existed between father and son. On the father’s side this conflict was evidenced by constant undermining of Friedrich’s attempts to establish himself in Social Democratic politics. Friedrich was kept outside of politics and outside of Austria, in a genuine exile, but the psychological center of his life remained within the compass of Vienna. And although during these fourteen years he made many attempts to establish a life apart from his father and Austrian Social Democracy, they all paled quickly, and the image of Vienna would again force its way into his desires.

While in the University of Zurich, Friedrich repeatedly threatened the life plan his father had constructed for him. In the first year he wrote to his father that he wished to leave his studies for a year to work in a coal mine and then in a factory so he could learn what a proletarian life was like. His father reasoned with him at first, then refused to hear of the plan. At the end of his second semester in Zurich, Friedrich informed his father that besides chemistry, he wished to study history, national economy, and philosophy. His father replied with a “categorical no.” Friedrich proposed a compromise: instead of becoming a chemist, he would study physics and mathematics, which were more intellectually stimulating, and would forego subjects that smacked of political and economic preparation for a Marxist career. Thus Friedrich began his third semester working toward a doctor’s degree in physics. To Friedrich the study of physics provided an outlet to the promised land. It became a focus for the path to his own self, Austrian Social Democracy. His concern with physics was centered on an attempt to find how the “mechanical materialism of this science related to historical materialism.” During his university years Friedrich sought continually for a “unified world picture.” He created models of organic life based on a dialectical use of Darwin and employed Marx’s dialectical reasoning in the areas of his studies that dealt with cosmogony, embryology, and geology.¹² A satisfactory relation between historical materialism and the development of theoretical physics eluded him for many years. Eventually, however, he was to discover the magic key that could turn his scientific effort in physics into the living word of political Marxism.

As a student, Friedrich “did not drink, smoke, or lead a gay life”; he spent all his time discussing politics or studying. He was actively involved in the Russian Communist group of students at the University of Zurich and often discussed Marxist theory with them far into the night.¹³ Victor Adler had sources in Zurich who checked on his son’s activities. August Bebel, the German Social Democrat, who lived there at the time, seemed to share Victor Adler’s opinion that Friedrich was not meant for a political career and wrote frequent letters warning Victor of Friedrich’s activities.¹⁴ On the basis of such information, Victor wrote to his son in his third year at Zurich: “You seem to require more of your nerves than they will stand. For God’s sake, postpone your examinations, rather than tax your nerves to the degree that you are . . . whether you finish a half a year later or not is absolutely the same. But you must remain healthy for me [underlined twice] for my sake [underlined three times].”¹⁵

Friedrich received frequent letters from his father warning him about his health. His weakness became a fixed idea in the minds of father and son, and although he suffered no physical ailment until 1911, the grounds for a psychosomatic illness were well prepared by the paternal power of suggestion. When, for example, Friedrich finished the examination that would permit him entry into the technical field of physics, he begged to be allowed to continue his study in the area of epistemology, an interest stimulated by Engels’s Anti-Duehring. His father replied:

There is no doubt that you are a talented person with an ability to work. How far your talents go, whether they are more than normal, I don’t know, and you hardly know; that your physical strength, the strength of your nerves must be exercised with caution, is already known to you. But I am happy to believe that your talent and energy will suffice for normal goals . . . .

But you will not be satisfied with something normal, you wish the supernormal abilities could bring personal satisfaction.

And here begins my fear . . . that you will drop physics, become an aimless student [verbummlete student] . . . wander through other areas of knowledge, without a plan, without a defined goal, grasp your career in a merely improvised manner. Perhaps a few people have done that without going to pieces [kaputt zu gehen] . . . .

This new enterprise of yours I consider beside the point, it is simply crazy, you have already found an area to work in, and are happy enough! I consider it wanton and petulant to leave your involvement in physics. . . . You wish to undertake something where you have but one chance in a thousand to succeed without losing yourself.¹⁶

Then as if to soften the wound, Victor added: “But you do have this one chance in a thousand to survive. Perhaps you do have the abnormal energy, nerves, and ability to become a man of many fields, a worker without a definite area of work. Perhaps! After all, you are young, and you risk nothing but your own head.”¹⁷ But Friedrich dropped his plans to study epistemology and continued his work in physics toward a doctorate, another compromise with his father. In 1903 he acquired his doctor’s degree in physics and assumed the position of assistant in the physics laboratory at the University of Zurich.¹⁸

In 1900 at the University of Zurich Friedrich had met the woman who was to be his wife, a Russian Jew, Katharina Jakoblewna Germanishkaja. The couple soon wished to be married. Victor Adler objected, believing Friedrich to be too young, but after he met Katharina (Kathia) he gave his permission. By 1905 Friedrich had two children, Johanna Alice and Emma Frida, and his assistant’s position at the university proved insufficient to support a family. From 1903 to 1905 his work had absorbed him, sublimating the longing for a political career, but the necessity of assuming a more responsible position with higher pay forced him to make the overt step toward a Social Democratic career. His father again discouraged him, and Friedrich was compelled to accept a position as scientific assistant at the Deutsches Museum fuer Meisterwerke der Naturwissenschaft und Technik in Munich. He remained there from June 1905 until the spring of 1907. Friedrich was unhappy with the position and complained to his father that his real desire, to be an Austrian Social Democracy party worker, was frustrated mainly by patriarchial ill will. His father answered: “That you maintain a political longing I can well understand. . . . If I was really the force that kept you out of politics—a rather childish philosophy of history—then I wouldn’t blame myself, rather I would consider it a service rendered.”¹⁹

Apparently without his father’s knowledge, Friedrich turned to Karl Kautsky and pleaded for a position on Die Neue Zeit as an editor; he told Kautsky that he had taken the job at the Munich museum “on the one hand out of the need to earn a living, but on the other hand, because I thought it would be reasonable to dress in bourgeois clothes once to show the party that I didn’t come to them because no one else would take me.”²⁰ But this argument, which sounded as though he was trying to satisfy his father’s usual qualifications for party oligarchy, did not influence Kautsky, and Friedrich was forced to remain in Munich. In 1907 Friedrich accepted a position as Privatdozent in physics at the University of Zurich. He lectured in this capacity until 1910, when he failed to receive a newly established post of professor of physics. During these three years his research and lectures again returned to the theoretical physics that sought a Marxist base for pure science.²¹

When Friedrich Adler learned that his university career could go no further in Zurich, he “had the feeling of an enormous liberation” and wrote to his father, “What depressed me for months in a horrible manner was finally finished. . . . I believe now I must leave theory and seek a practical activity. And that can only be a party activity . . . that is important to me besides epistemology. To deny science and party, become purely and simply a family father, would never satisfy my energy.” Although the answer to this letter is not available, it seems that Victor Adler once again attempted to discourage his son, for Friedrich wrote in his next letter to his father: “I didn’t become the engineer you wanted me to be, because it contradicted my entire nature; I did not seek a position in the university as you wished me to; every step I took toward what I wanted to be was done against your will. . . . You shouldn’t take this as a reproach, but realize the fact that I can take care of myself without your great circumspection.”²²

The opportunity to engage in Social Democratic politics finally came in the spring of 1910, but not from Austria. The Swiss-German Social Democratic party in Zurich offered Friedrich the editor’s post of its daily paper, the Volksrecht. Because Friedrich had been active in political groups in Zurich since 1897, his nomination to this post was on his own merit. He had served since 1901 as president of the Association of International Workers’ Groups in Switzerland (Verband der Internationalen Arbeitervereine in der Schweiz), an amalgamation of German and Austrian socialists, besides contributinng to the Volksrecht as a political commentator. The editorship was seemingly the answer at least to his stated yearnings, for it allowed him to devote his full time to practical and theoretical Marxism. Moreover, the condition of the Swiss socialists was reminiscent of Austrian socialism in 1889; Friedrich was placed in the position of mediator between the radicals and moderates, as was his father at the beginning of his political career. Friedrich wrote to his father soon after beginning his activity: “I work like a horse, do not get a chance to sleep, but feel as if I was re-born. . . . I am filled with the fire and flame of the thing, and the people here are somewhat flabbergasted, for they are not used to this tempo.” He described how he had reorganized the paper and how he did everything from writing the lead to articles to reporting on the affairs of the day. He closed this letter with “It seems as if I was born to be an editor-in-chief.”²³

Yet as promising as this area of activity was, it failed to fulfill Friedrich’s needs. A short time later he wrote his father that although he was satisfied, he was not sure that this post was sufficient for his wants: “I cannot say that I will not make greater moves. Subjectively, the position was good for me, but in the long run, there is still a question.”²⁴ He spoke of the editorship in the past tense; his present was still in Vienna and in the hunger for activity within Austrian Social Democracy.

The call that he had waited for came on April 26, 1911, in a letter from Karl Seitz, the vice-chairman of the Austrian Social-Democratic party. Friedrich was asked to accept a position as party secretary, an opening created especially for him, and to help prepare for the election campaign of 1911. Friedrich was given the editorship of a small biweekly party organ, Das Volk, besides the activities of election propaganda that were part of the position of party secretary. He also lectured at the Arbeiterschule, spoke at political meetings, and, in 1913, was appointed an editor to Der Kampf.²⁵

Why had his father relented? Because of his position on the party executive committee, it is obvious that Victor Adler approved of Friedrich’s entry into the Austrian Social Democratic hierarchy. Moreover, in creating a special position for his son, Victor demonstrated that had he so desired, Friedrich could have at any time begun Austrian Social Democratic activity. Victor Adler wrote to August Bebel in July 1911: “That Friedrich (Fritz) is here is a true blessing, as you might imagine.”²⁶ But how can we explain these words that contradict Victor Adler’s behavior over many years toward Friedrich’s wishes to return to Vienna and enter the party? The answer to this enigma, which Friedrich Adler’s biographers admit to be as puzzling as Friedrich’s sudden lack of interest in Swiss socialism, can be suggested but never fully resolved.²⁷ Friedrich Adler’s desire to leave Swiss socialism and Victor Adler’s readiness to make it possible may be seen in Oedipal terms. As Friedrich wrote in 1910, the job as editor of the Volksrecht “subjectively . . . was good” for him, but he could not say that he would not “make greater moves.”²⁸ Shortly after receiving this letter, Victor Adler had Friedrich called to Austrian Social Democracy. It seems that after Friedrich challenged his father with the news of his manifold creative activity and hinted that he was ready for bigger contests, his father accepted the challenge. Seeing that his son was proving himself not to be the sensitive, emotionally unstable, ordinary person that he had been trained to be, Victor brought him home for what may be considered an Oedipal moment of truth, facing his son in a last effort to make him into the person that his imagination desired. Victor’s motives may be seen as twofold. On the one hand, Friedrich, like his mother, had to be physically limited to a dependent, unstable role. On the other hand, Victor constantly sought liberation from his self-made prison of reason, and a confrontation with his son might be the only way to win back his own projections. Either Victor would again vanquish his son or in his own defeat he would be freed from the self-made treadmill of his life.

Friedrich’s acceptance of the challenge was, in a sense, a betrayal of his greater self, for he did not bring his wife and three children to Vienna in 1911. Thus in his attempt to win back his life from the metaphors of patriarchal Austrian Social Democracy, Friedrich recreated the one-sided father who had created him. His excuse for leaving the family behind was that his children were too weak and sensitive to come immediately to Austria.²⁹ In confronting his own myth, Friedrich began to perpetuate it. Perhaps because of his acceptance of his father’s challenge without the presence of his own creations such as his children and of his wife, who might support him, Friedrich had a heart attack in September 1911.³⁰ His heart ailment, myocarditis, was a psychosomatic disease that recurred periodically and included among its symptoms a mental incapacitation.³¹ Friedrich was forced to remain in bed for several months, during which time he suffered from depression and doubt over his ability to engage in politics.³² By returning to Austria, Friedrich had exposed himself to the full power of his father and his father’s organization. In matters of party policy, he could do nothing but follow his father, although in a manner that expressed the hidden struggle. His article in Der Kampf about parliamentary policy in June 1911 approved of “parliamentarianism” but made the distinction between the “potential” energy and the “kinetic” energy of a party; he stated: “One cannot fulfill potential constantly. There must be a phase of waiting. One must join leaders of the bourgeois and express a threat of what can be unleashed.”³³ Friedrich’s own kinetic energy was checked by the presence of his father’s rule; his potential had yet to be unleashed. In such an environment, according to the Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler, a physical illness might develop created by an inferior (minderwertig) organ symbolizing the psychic inferiority felt by the subject.³⁴ Adler’s hypothesis of the inferiority complex (minderwertigkeitsgefuehl) and its psychosomatic result has moment here, for Friedrich Adler knew of Alfred Adler and his theories. One might almost surmise that Alfred Adler had given Friedrich Adler a hint of the roots of his own condition. A month before the psychosomatic attack that incapacitated Friedrich mentally, striking at his heart but numbing his brain, Friedrich had written an article for Der Kampf entitled “Minderwertig in Internationalismus” (inferior in internationalism) in which he said that the idea of internationalism had been neglected by both Czech separatists and Austro-German Social Democrats; he stated that internationalism as a principle must be raised from its inferior rank in the national consciousness of Social Democrats to a more prominent place.³⁵ Internationalism, the one socialistic unit that could assert more symbolic power than Austrian Social Democracy, was the metaphor that would serve Friedrich as the foremost weapon in his struggle with Victor Adler because Austrian Social Democracy seen through its relation to the Second International was but one part of a greater whole.³⁶

Friedrich recovered from his illness in the spring of 1912 and returned to party activity. His family had come from Zurich, and he began to gather energy and courage for the next assault upon his father’s stronghold. During the two years between his reentry into political action and the outbreak of World War I, Friedrich retreated to the fallow ground of mental and emotional preparation and the nonassertive contemplation of his position that built up his supply of potential energy. His state of mind is revealed in the first article he wrote for Der Kampf after his illness, “Wissenschaft und Partei.” Ostensibly written as a comment upon the ouster of Gerhard Hildebrand, a German Social Democrat, from the unified ranks of German Social Democracy because of his heretical views on colonialism, the article served as a forum for a debate with himself over his relation to his father in the person of Austrian Social Democracy. Friedrich compared the Social Democratic party in all lands to the Catholic church. The party program was viewed as the Eucharist, the manifest presence of truth and the means whereby the individual Social Democrat could partake of the spirit and matter of this truth. The metaphor indicates that Friedrich recognized his essential bond to the party program of his father and understood that his life force emanated from the transcendental presence of the party imperative. Thus there was no question of manifesting an individual will apart from the general will of the party in Friedrich’s mind. He considered the ouster of the German Social-Democrat justified. Although Social Democrats had the free will to think for themselves, if they reached conclusions contrary to the party program they should consider themselves no longer Social Democrats and, like a Catholic who ceased to believe in the Eucharist, should leave the organization. No man might act contrary to the party program, although a man might attempt to transform the program through the proper channels.³⁷

Friedrich committed himself to the existing order and hierarchical obedience in this article, yet he opened a door for his own possible triumph as an individual over the will of his father. For if his will could assume the same status as that of his father, having the same general validity for all Social Democrats, he could win the independence of person so long denied to him. If he could finally partake in the framing of Marxist law within the party program, then the old king would be vanquished and the new king would reign. Would such action, however, truly be a liberation from the clutches of his father’s spiritual womb? Or would it not be a Pyrrhic victory, an independence that left him as emotionally emasculated as his father and as destructive to those around him? For with such a victory, Friedrich, too, would have limited his conscious life to a marriage with the abstract bride of Social Democracy, leaving his personal emotional life, his family, and his everyday affairs in the same dark closet as his father had done. Friedrich Adler was faced with a difficult path through the labyrinth. He could not turn his back upon Social Democracy, for only by confronting it could he face the metaphors of his own life and rescue them from the stupefying abstraction of Marxism; on the other hand, he could not rest with expressing his will through his own brand of Marxism, for this, too, would be a continuation of the alienation from self introduced by his father. At the outbreak of World War I, Friedrich began the first half of the liberation process, the exerting of his own will through the metaphors of Marxist principle and the tremendous effort to have his understanding of Marxist principle incorporated into the party program. The physical illness of his father no doubt aided him in his revolutionary stance. By 1913, Victor Adler had begun to manifest the symptoms of a fatal illness and was virtually unable to carry on party business.³⁸ A vacuum of power was created that would cause contention among the party oligarchy. Within this vacuum Friedrich Adler, in the single act of assassinating Count Stürgkh in 1917, created the potential conditions for a spiritual and emotional liberation from the curse of his forebears. But then, unconsciousness set in; the full magnitude of Friedrich’s act was lost to him. The act became a vehicle merely to establish his own will within Austrian Social Democracy, to usurp the party from the will of his father.

From the confines of his prison cell, where he was incarcerated until the last months of the war, Friedrich gained increasing popularity among the rank and file of the party, which enabled him to influence the general policy of the oligarchy.³⁹ In the long run, however, he never replaced his father within Austrian Social Democracy. The reason was twofold. On the one hand, Otto Bauer’s ubiquitous eclectic presence usurped the theoretical mantle from the shoulders of Friedrich Adler. Bauer, who had become a favorite of Victor Adler in the last three years of Victor’s life,⁴⁰ managed to appear to the radicals as radical as Friedrich Adler, yet was obliging enough for the moderates to gain their support. On the other hand, after the death of Victor Adler, Friedrich seems to have lost interest in Austrian Social Democracy. He did not attempt to counter Otto Bauer’s leadership over the left and left-center factions of the party or Karl Renner’s leadership over the right and right-center factions; rather, Friedrich shifted his attention to the question of international socialism. After World War I, Friedrich created his own socialist international, an inter-European organization without any genuine support from national socialist parties; his organization had an office but no proletarian adherents. The Second International had collapsed at the outbreak of World War I, and international communism had found its most powerful exponent after the war in Russia, who established herself as the leader of the Third Communist International.⁴¹ Friedrich Adler’s organization, officially known as the Labor and Socialist International but popularly called the 2½ International, sought to become the leader of the Marxist center, a direction of thought that had no place in the post–World War I world of national socialism and the Russian Communist International.⁴² In his involvement with the 2½ International, Friedrich Adler had closed his vision; he spent the rest of his life in the self-made darkness of intellectual fantasy. Victor Adler lived on in his son as a mocking spirit; Friedrich was to be a caricature of his father’s hyperrationality and neglect of personal life. For Friedrich lacked the balance of real political presence in the organization controlled by his will, and thus the 2½ International became a bizarre arena for the play of his neglected emotions. It was claimed that in the years before World War II, Adler turned the 2 1/2 International into a personification of his “shadow side.” As a petty tyrant, he made his office staff answer to his will. His attention “compulsively” concerned itself with every detail of the International’s activity from the placing of stamps on letters to the international principles that he had drafted, which defined in detail the action to be taken by socialists of all lands in peace and war.⁴³ And so when he finally knew freedom from the exile imposed by his father, his life became monstrous. His mission was still a force with the fulfilling energy of a religion, but a religion that devoured its disciple.

In 1944 Friedrich Adler reflected publicly upon the religious basis of his life:

Everyone has an a priori behind his political consciousness. He has assumptions upon which a political theoretical structure arises which he takes for granted, assumptions which for him could never be based upon illusion. Those deepest of all convictions can be affirmed through experience and scientific knowledge, but they themselves spring from a knowledge before any science; they are, as the psychologist Jung designates them, a religious experience—⁴⁴ religion in the broadest sense in contradistinction to scientific knowledge. . . . I will not judge of others, but will confess that for myself socialism was a religious experience for me long before I knew of or understood its scientific doctrines.⁴⁵

Adler concludes that he knows he has realized fully the existence of his “personal a priori” through his life in socialism.⁴⁶ So might Oedipus have spoken at Colonus!