Brno Imperial Conference
The Brno Reich Conference was a meeting of Austrian Social Democrats in Brno in 1934.
At the end of December 1934, the leading Social Democrats from Austria met in Brno after they had been forced into illegality by the Dollfuss regime after the bloody crackdown in the course of the February uprising . The party leaders Otto Bauer , the main theoretician of Austromarxism , and Julius Deutsch , along with other members of the party executive, fled to Brno, where the foreign office of the Austrian Social Democrats was set up and the party organ Arbeiter-Zeitung was printed.
The conference was marked by fundamental differences between two competing currents: the “Revolutionary Socialists” led by Karl Hans Sailer and the “New Left” with Josef Buttinger as spokesman, who distrusted the party leadership. While the “Revolutionary Socialists” clung to the idea of a mass party, Buttinger and his colleagues pleaded for the creation of a disciplined cadre as the vanguard of a “working people's dictatorship”.
The Republican Protection League as the armed arm of the party joined the Revolutionary Socialists.
Opposing positions existed on the question of the relationship with the communists . The majority of the participants in the Brno Reich Conference decided against the formation of a joint fighting front with the communists and opted for special agreements on a case-by-case basis.
Numerous party members were subsequently arrested in Austria, like Bruno Kreisky and sentenced to prison terms at the socialist trial in January 1936. Even Franz Jonas was arrested at that time, but acquitted for lack of evidence.
Individual evidence
- ^ Bruno Kreisky ( memento of March 13, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) in the Wiener Zeitung
- ^ Vienna in retrospect Franz Jonas