Alfred Klahr

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Alfred Klahr on a postage stamp from the GDR Deutsche Post (1962)

Alfred Klahr (born September 16, 1904 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † July 1944 in Warsaw ) was an Austrian political scientist, communist and journalist.

Life

Studies and journalistic activities in the interwar period

Klahr's father, Salomon Klahr, was the cantor of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Vienna . As a schoolboy, Klahr became a member of the Association of Socialist Middle School Students and later joined the Communist Youth Association . From 1924 he was a member of the KPÖ and eventually became a functionary of the party. After graduating from high school in 1923, he began studying chemistry at the University of Vienna , which he soon had to give up for economic reasons. From the winter semester of 1924/25 he completed a degree in political science in Vienna, where he received his doctorate in political science in 1928 . He then began to work as a journalist in Berlin for the KPD central organ, Die Rote Fahne , initially as a volunteer. In Germany he was a member of the KPD. In July 1929 he went to Moscow, where he worked in the Communist Youth International and the Comintern . In the spring of 1932 he returned to Vienna, resumed his party activities there and finally worked for the Rote Fahne . When the newspaper was banned in the summer of 1933 during the Austro-Fascist era , Klahr was deputy editor-in-chief .

After the February uprising in 1934, Klahr was temporarily imprisoned because of his political views. He then emigrated to Moscow for a short stopover in Prague , where he worked as a lecturer in the Austrian sector of the International Lenin School until the end of 1937 .

Activity in the anti-fascist resistance, imprisonment in concentration camps and murder

Memorial plaque for Alfred Klahr on his home at Novaragasse 17, Vienna

In early 1938 Klahr returned to Prague to work as editor of the communist magazine Weg und Ziel ; his wife Rosa (1910–1978) stayed in the Soviet Union. After the annexation of the Czech Republic by the National Socialist German Reich , however, he had to flee again. As a result, Klahr worked, constantly on the run, in several European countries in the anti-fascist resistance of the Austrian communist émigré group. After the German occupation of Belgium , he and other comrades-in -arms were arrested in May 1940 and detained in the French camp of Saint-Cyprien . In August 1940 he managed to escape with other prisoners and he continued his resistance work. Finally, in 1941, Klahr was arrested by the Zurich canton police and extradited to the French Vichy regime . In August 1942 he was out of the internment camp Le Vernet to Auschwitz transported and received the prisoner number 58933 there. First he had to do forced labor in the Jawischowitz satellite camp; In 1943, with the help of members of the Auschwitz combat group, he was transferred to the main camp of Auschwitz . On June 15, 1944, he and a Polish prisoner managed to escape from the camp with the support of the Auschwitz combat group. His job was to establish a connection between the local management of the Polska Partia Robotnicza and the camp resistance and to contact the Red Army . Klahr was able to make his way to Warsaw. There he was picked up by an SS patrol and shot.

Alfred Klahr and the Austrian nation

theory

In March and April 1937 the series of articles on the national question in Austria appeared in the theoretical journal of the KPÖ Weg und Ziel . In this Klahr, under the pseudonym "Rudolf", deals with the question of whether Austria is part of the German nation or has an independent national identity, and comes to the conclusion:

“The view that the Austrian people are part of the German nation is theoretically unfounded. A unity of the German nation, in which the Austrians are included, has never existed before and does not exist today either. The Austrian people lived under different economic and political living conditions than the other Germans in the Reich and therefore developed differently. How far the process of developing into a particular nation has progressed or how close the national ties from common ancestry and common language are, can only be revealed by a concrete examination of his history. "

Historical meaning

Klahr's work on the Austrian nation is in the context of a comprehensive theoretical debate on the so-called “national question”, which found its first expression within the socialist labor movement in the mid-19th century in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . At the turn of the century, growing national tensions, especially within the multi-ethnic empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia , further intensified the discussion among socialists and communists. Otto Bauer ( The Question of Nationalities , 1907), Rosa Luxemburg ( National Question and Autonomy , 1909), Josef Strasser ( The Worker and the Nation , 1912), Stalin ( Marxism and National Question , 1913) and Lenin ( On the Right to Self-Determination of Nations , 1914) made sustainable and effective contributions.

In this context, Alfred Klahr is considered to be the first thinker of the Marxist spectrum who conceived Austria as an independent nation against the background of the German question . After the First World War, the German-Austrian social democracy was still working towards joining an all-German (socialist) republic. In 1937, against the background of the National Socialist expansion and extermination policy, Klahr used the theoretical approaches of Lenin and Stalin to show for the first time the differences between a German and an Austrian nation with reference to differences in the history of economic and mentality. Years later, Klahr's conclusions coincided with the Allied post-war plans , which were adopted in the Moscow Declaration in October 1943 and which included the restoration of an independent Austria. The Austrian writer Robert Menasse observed in 1993:

“However, after 1945 there was no majority in Austria that approved the idea of ​​an Austrian nation. And there was also no national feeling that had grown historically but was then buried and that could now have been reactivated. The only thing that existed was the theoretical preparatory work of Austrian communists, who, for whatever political and strategic reasons and however weird, were the first to try to scientifically justify the existence of an Austrian nation, just to name a few to give an example, Alfred Klahr. These ideas were consistently implemented in foreign and domestic politics and, as we know, actually led to Austria's independence, to an Austrian national feeling and to the international recognition of Austria as an independent nation. "

Reception: Decoration of Honor of the Republic of Austria and the Alfred Klahr Society

Alfred Klahr received first recognition from the state in 1979, when he was posthumously awarded the Badge of Honor for Services to the Liberation of Austria . An initiative supported by well-known historians to issue an Austrian commemorative stamp in 2003 was not taken into account by the Austrian Post .

The Alfred Klahr Society , based in Vienna, was founded in 1993 from the cultural environment of the KPÖ . It administers and secures the archive and library of the KPÖ as a national cultural asset and is active in researching the history of the labor movement with its own publications and events. The founding members include the university professors Hans Hautmann and Gerhard Oberkofler and the historian Winfried Garscha . One of the best known supporters of the Alfred Klahr Society was the Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka .

Fonts (selection)

  • Rudolf (pseudonym): On the national question in Austria , in: Weg und Ziel. Leaves for Theory and Practice of the Labor Movement, Volume 2, No. 3, March [1937], pp. 126-133.
  • Rudolf (pseudonym): On the national question in Austria , in: Weg und Ziel, Vol. 2, No. 4, April 1937, pp. 173–181.
  • Alfred Klahr: Against German chauvinism! (a debate with Bruno Baum , against whose chauvinism Klahr turned) Auschwitz 1944, again Benario-Baum, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-932636-13-9
  • Alfred Klahr: To the Austrian nation . With a contribution by Günther Grabner to the biography of Alfred Klahr, ed. from the KPÖ, Globus-Verlag , Vienna 1994.

literature

  • Martin Krenn / Michael Tatzber-Schebach: Alfred Klahr (1904–1944) - New research on his biography , in: Mitteilungen der Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft, 19th year (2012), No. 2, pp. 1–10. (PDF; 1.7 MB)
  • Gerhard Oberkofler / Peter Goller : The young Alfred Klahr in the environment of the Kelsen school (1928) , in: Mitteilungen der Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft, 4th year (1997), No. 1, pp. 1–2.
  • Arnold Reisberg : Alfred Klahr. first Marxist-Leninist theorist about the Austrian nation . In: History of the Labor Movement . 25, Jg. Berlin 1983, pp. 411-416 ISSN  0005-8068
  • Horst Schumacher: A note on Arnold Reisberg's contribution about Alfred Klahr . In: History of the Labor Movement . 25, Jg. Berlin 1983, pp. 417-420.
  • KPÖ (ed.): Immortal victims. Fallen in the struggle of the Communist Party for Austria's freedom. Vienna undated, pp. 12-14.

On the national question

Web links

Commons : Alfred Klahr  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "On the national question in Austria" ( Memento from November 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file; 128 k; 441 kB)
  2. ^ John Schwarzmantel: Marxist theories on nation building and the collapse of communism, in: Winfried R. Garscha / Christine Schindler (eds.): Workers Movement and National Identity (ITH Conference Reports 30), Vienna 1994, pp. 35–43.
  3. ↑ Helmut Konrad: Resistance on Danube and Moldau. KPÖ and KSC at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Vienna / Munich / Zurich 1978, p. 143
  4. ↑ Robert Menasse: The land without properties. Essay on Austrian identity. Vienna: special number 1993, p. 49
  5. ^ Announcements from the Alfred Klahr Society, 2/2012, p. 7. (PDF; 1.7 MB)
  6. ^ Announcements from the Alfred Klahr Society, 2/2012, p. 7. (PDF; 1.7 MB)
  7. ^ Homepage of the Alfred Klahr Society
  8. ↑ Announcements of the Alfred Klahr Society, 4/2009, p. 28. (PDF; 788 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Klahr, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian political scientist, communist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 1944
Place of death Warsaw