Friedrich Adler (politician)

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Friedrich Adler (around 1917)

Friedrich Wolfgang Adler (born July 9, 1879 in Vienna , † January 2, 1960 in Zurich ) was a politician in the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) and a scientist . In 1916 he shot and killed the Austrian Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh in protest against the government's policy in the First World War , was sentenced to death for this, pardoned by Kaiser Karl to 18 years in prison and given an amnesty in 1918. In 1918 and 1919 he played a major role in the suppression of attempts at communist coups. From 1923 to 1940 he worked as (General) Secretary of the Socialist Workers ' International, from 1938 to 1945 he decisively shaped the political orientation of the Austrian Socialists' Organization in Exile ( AVOES ). His nationalistic attitude made him a political non-person after 1945.

Life

Studies, apprenticeship and first years of war (1897–1916)

As the son of the founder and chairman of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) Victor Adler, Friedrich Adler showed great interest in politics from a young age. His mother Emma Adler was a socialist and sister of the Reich German Social Democrats Heinrich Braun and Adolf Braun . Due to his unstable health and his tendency to fanaticism, however, his father wanted to keep him away from political activities and persuaded him to study in Switzerland after graduating from high school. Friedrich went to Zurich, where he obtained a diploma as a specialist in mathematics and physics in 1897 and was awarded a doctorate in 1902. phil. PhD. In 1909 he applied for the newly created position of associate professor for theoretical physics at the same time as Albert Einstein , with whom he had been friends since his student days , but then renounced in Einstein's favor. The waiver was based primarily on his increased involvement in the local labor movement . In 1897 he became a member of the Association of Austrian Social Democracy in Switzerland, in 1898 he worked for the Swiss newspaper “Volksrecht” , for which he was editor-in-chief from 1910 to 1911. In 1901 he also took on a board function in the Federation of International Workers' Associations in Switzerland. When Einstein moved to the University of Prague in 1911 , he wanted Adler to be his successor. But he had now finally decided on a political career. He returned to Vienna in 1911, where he worked alongside Otto Bauer as one of the four party secretaries of the SDAP, primarily as editor of the programmatic monthly “Der Kampf” . There he represented a pronounced internationalist and pacifist course, for which he initially found hardly any supporters. All the greater his hopes were placed in the Second International , constituted in 1889 , which, in view of the tensions in the Balkans, had spoken out against the armed conflict and in favor of resistance to any war policy in the country in question, and passed resolutions accordingly.

The outbreak of war brought Friedrich Adler two bitter disappointments: The peace-keeping resolutions of the Second International were almost nowhere implemented, and national interests prevailed among almost all members of the International. The second disappointment was the attitude of our own party. It not only supported the government's measures, but also supported them in the fight against the “reactionary Tsarist regime ”. When a particularly martial and patriotic article by editor-in-chief Friedrich Austerlitz appeared in the party organ Arbeiter-Zeitung on October 22, 1914 , Friedrich Adler had enough. In his papers he now attacked not only Prime Minister Stürgkh, who ruled with emergency ordinances, but also his own party leadership and thus also his father. His isolation grew. After he had directed a particularly sharp attack against the party leadership in a speech on October 20, 1916, his isolation seemed complete. A day later he took up a gun.

Assassination attempt and consequences (1916–1918)

On October 21, 1916, Friedrich Adler shot and killed the Austrian Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh in the dining room of the Meissl & Schadn Hotel in Vienna . In the Arbeiter-Zeitung , Friedrich Austerlitz initially described the act as "foreign and incomprehensible to the whole world of socialist ideas". Adler is a person "who follows a delusion" and in an "unfortunate act [...] in the fanaticism of self-destruction [...] gives himself up and cruelly destroys what promised a rich bloom."

Adler used the murder trial in which Adler was represented by Gustav Harpner as a stage for settling accounts with his own party. He complained that there the “bureaucratic apparatus had already gained the upper hand over the future interests of the proletariat”. His anger was directed primarily against the reformist Karl Renner , whom he accused of "honest mendacity", "lack of principles" and "juggling". Among people like him, the party is more and more “ Christianized , nationalized and belittled.” As a result, it has developed more and more into a “counter-revolutionary authority” that has long since become unfaithful to the principles of the 2nd International. He warned the party leadership against this development several times; However, he was not taken seriously. As a result, he was convinced that only a rousing act could initiate the urgently needed general rethinking. He has now committed this act. It is an assassination attempt “against Austrian morality”, and secondly a “commitment to violence” by a socialist who is based on the mass struggle that is to be waged “with all appropriate means” according to socialist principles. His act is legitimized by the absolutism prevailing in the country . It should neither replace the mass struggle nor trigger it, but merely create the “psychological conditions for future mass actions” in Austria.

Adler was sentenced to death . After the trial, Austerlitz wrote differently in the Arbeiter-Zeitung than after the fact. He did not make Adler a martyr of the movement, but at least a “martyr of his convictions”, who stood up “with upright bravery” to “serve social democracy, to serve the idea that his spirit, his will, his labor for ever. ”Adler was soon pardoned by Emperor Karl to 18 years imprisonment and released from imprisonment by the same emperor in the course of one of his last official acts in 1918. The amnesty was announced to Friedrich Adler on the evening of November 9, 1918 by the prison authorities in Krems-Stein. Since there were no more trains to Vienna at this time, Friedlich Adler spent another night in the prison and on November 10, 1918 took the early train at 6:34 a.m. to Vienna, where he was met by his brother Siegmund and his father Victor at the Franz- Josefs-Bahnhof was expected.

If one takes the personnel decisions made at the 1917 party congress as a yardstick, the party officials failed to hear Friedrich Adler's message. Not only was the old board confirmed in office, but Karl Renner, a functionary who was particularly severely attacked by Adler, was appointed to the board. But apart from that, the effects of Adler's shots were unmistakable. Inspired by the deed and displeasure of the starving, war-weary population, the course had already been set before the party congress from social patriotism to centrism and social pacifism .

Folk Hero and the Revolution Option (1918–1919)

The amnestied Friedrich Adler was courted as a folk hero not only by his own party, but also by the communists, who twice unsuccessfully proposed him to lead the party. Adler remained loyal to social democracy and was given a key role in leading the workers' councils. On November 12, 1918, the communists' first attempt to seize power failed. The situation remained explosive, however, as communist Hungary under Béla Kun now also got involved . On June 12, 1919, plans for a further attempted communist coup led by representatives of the Third International were leaked to Friedrich Adler . The following day he put these plans on the table at the workers' councils conference. His passionate appeal not to support this action was understood and the attempted coup was nipped in the bud. Otto Bauer, deputy party chairman and chief ideologist of the SDAP, later stated, not without justification, that the "purposeful leadership of Friedrich Adler in the workers 'councils, Julius Deutsch and his circle of friends in the soldiers ' councils ... decided the fight."

Internationalist (1920-1940)

Victor Adler died on November 11, 1918, the next day the Republic of German Austria was proclaimed, three days later the party leadership was transferred to Karl Seitz , who was more of the pragmatic party wing. However, the actual leadership of the party was taken over by the deputy party chairman and chief ideologist Otto Bauer. The SDAP now went into a coalition with the lower-voiced Christian Socialists, he himself took over the external department, but resigned a few months later when the longed-for affiliation with socialist Germany failed due to the veto of the victorious powers. Bauer's next plan was to implement the idea of ​​“ Integral Socialism ”, also known as the “Third Way”. This was the attempt to reunite the workers' movement , which was divided into the (social-democratic-reformist) 2nd International and the (communist) 3rd International founded on March 4, 1919 . The International Working Group of Socialist Parties (ridiculed by the Third International as 2 1/2 International) should serve this purpose. It was supposed to move the reformists to transition to the “revolutionary struggle” and to encourage the Soviet regime to peacefully dismantle the internal dictatorship, which was to be “replaced by social democracy”. Like Otto Bauer, Adler was deeply convinced of the necessity and usefulness of this initiative and also chaired this working group. The first conference in the presence of representatives of all three groups, which began on April 2, 1922 in Berlin, clearly demonstrated the incompatibility of the positions. The working group then returned to the bosom of the 2nd International, which met on March 21, 1923 in Hamburg and founded the Socialist Workers' International . Friedrich Adler and Thomas Shaw were elected general secretaries, but it was soon Adler alone who pulled the strings of this organization until 1940. Braunthal, himself a temporary employee of Adler in the "working group":

“But he was the head of the International. He steered its policy in the innumerable committee meetings which met in the periods between the congresses on his suggestion, and in the meetings of the bureau and the congresses, whose deliberations and decisions he prepared by memoranda. Through the proposals on the agenda of the conferences, he put the problems up for discussion in accordance with his policy and, through the choice of speakers, influenced the political line of their treatment. "

But the circumstances were stronger. The International met for the last time in the year Hitler came to power , and with Hitler's expansion began the decline of the European labor movement. In 1940 Friedrich Adler felt compelled to evacuate his secretariat and flee to the USA. In the years before, Adler had repeatedly asserted its influence in favor of the German resistance against National Socialism and tried to moderate conflicts within German social democracy. Among other things, he helped the aid fund of the Red Shock Troop resistance group to receive support payments and tried, with moderate success, to mediate between this group and other left-wing socialist groups and the party leadership of the SPD ( Sopade ) in exile in Prague.

Informal leader of the Social Democratic Exile (1938–1945)

In March 1938 German troops marched into Austria and the country was " annexed ". The chairman of the " Revolutionary Socialists of Austria ", illegal under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg , Joseph Buttinger , fled abroad with a small group of followers. He left the party, organized as a conspiratorial cadre party, with a standstill order and without further instructions, because he was convinced that his organization was already compromised and no longer able to work. Buttinger met Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler in Brussels in the last days of March. It was agreed to merge the foreign office of the Austrian Social Democrats (ALÖS) with the leadership committee of the Revolutionary Socialists of Austria to form the “ Foreign Representation of Austrian Socialists (AVOES)”. The constituent meeting of AVOES took place from April 1st to 2nd, 1938 under the leadership of Joseph Buttinger. In addition to Buttinger, Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer, the social democratic functionaries Otto Leichter , Oscar Pollak , Josef Podlipnig , Karl Hans Sailer and Manfred Ackermann took part. At this meeting, the statutes and goals of the organization's work in exile were determined and unanimously decided. The main features were published as the Brussels Declaration (also known as the Brussels Manifesto or Brussels Resolution). (Details see there)

In the manifesto, the political shielding of an all-German revolution after Hitler was declared the primary political goal of exile work. In order to preserve the freedom of action of the revolutionary forces on the ground, socialist exile should not become dependent on other Austrian exile organizations or with host countries.

This Brussels Manifesto, together with the “War Declaration” issued a few months later, “The political position and activities of the diplomatic mission during the time of acute danger of war” (published in “RS-Korrespondenz” No. 5 of November 2, 1938) remained the Guideline for work in exile until 1945. It was a program which condemned socialist exile to extensive political inactivity. The activities were mainly limited to preventing representative organizations representing the interests of Austria as a whole. This behavior met with growing lack of understanding on the part of the host countries and the rest of the Austrian exile, especially after the start of the war, and was also criticized by many exiles close to the party. For some AVOES members, the self-imposed corset of the manifesto was too tight. Tensions escalated when the self-confident, internationally renowned Julius Deutsch , who had been appointed Spanish general, returned from Spain and demanded an appropriate position in the AVOES, which Buttinger refused to grant him.

After Bauer's death in 1938, Buttinger was mostly only able to assert himself with the help of Friedrich Adler, which made him the referee and finally the informal leader of the AVOES. The German campaign in the west in 1940 forced the AVOES functionaries to flee from Paris to southern France and into exile overseas. With the help of Buttinger, whose wife Muriel was an influential, wealthy American, Friedrich Adler and the majority of AVOES members were able to get to New York . Only Oscar Pollak and Karl Czernetz ended up in London, which had become the center of Austrian exile after the fall of Paris, and established the London office there as the official branch of AVOES. With this office they repeatedly intervened in exile events in line with the Brussels Manifesto. The prevention of the formation of a representative Austrian diplomatic mission abroad was received negatively even by the majority of the social democratic emigrants and led to the exodus of two thirds of the members of the socialist club affiliated to the office.

Deeply affected by the fate of the European labor movement and marked by the ongoing dispute, Buttinger and Hubeny left the AVOES towards the end of 1941. Podlipnig had not attended any meetings since arriving in the USA. Adler no longer wanted to continue the AVOES either, but was persuaded to at least agree to the establishment of an organization to represent the interests of the socialists active in the USA. After December 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on the US naval base Pearl Harbor , Adler was no longer able to evade these demands , especially since the German declaration of war on the USA soon afterwards had drastically changed the situation of German-speaking exile. The Austrian Labor Committee (ALC) was therefore founded in spring 1942 , and Adler received almost the same statutes as the AVOES. The ALC's statutes therefore once again contain the following objectives:

"To ensure the freedom of the Austrian people to decide about their fate, which must be made after the fall of Hitler ... The ALC sees the socialist reorganization of Europe as the main goal. The ALC is convinced that the working class in Austria does not have to bring about a 'national revolution', but rather to concentrate all efforts on the social revolution that will follow the war. "

On the sidelines (1944-1960)

After the ALC had helped to prevent the formation of an Austrian combat battalion under the US flag and the attempt to establish a government in exile under Hans Rott and Willibald Plöchl in the USA was torpedoed , Adler withdrew more and more from the Work of the committee back. He did not speak up again until October 31, 1943, in the Moscow Declaration, the decision of the Allies to re-establish Austria as a free and independent state. While the rest of exile enthusiastically welcomed this memorandum and tried to present it as a success of his work, Friedrich Adler saw himself in front of the ruins of his exile policy, his striving for self-determination of the Austrians, and criticized the memorandum in Austrian Labor Information (ALI), the newsletter of the ALC because it corresponds to "the spirit of dictation and not the recognition of equality between peoples" and helps to build a misleading "legend of happy Austria". The international reaction was violent and also caused incomprehension and resentment within our own ranks. Adler now planned a spectacular exit from the ALC, but which he both Jacques Hannak and by Wilhelm elbow and Otto Leichter was done speaking. Nevertheless, he resigned the management of the ALC, which Otto Leichter took over. Adler was asked to continue to attend the meetings, which led to a situation that Leichter described in a letter to Wilhelm Ellenbogen as follows:

"The situation is now such that the ALC is under the sign of a permanent resignation of Comrade Adler ... which ... is put into force again at the beginning of each session by a new letter, and then, if Comrade Adler's point of view has been accepted, at the end to be returned to the simple permanent resignation of the session. The consequence is that the will of Comrade Adler, whether or not there is a majority otherwise, decides on every question. For this purpose, meetings of the ALC are no longer necessary. One could turn to Comrade Adler in writing with suggestions, he would decide, because according to the mechanisms described everything has to happen what he wants ... "

This letter illustrates the fact that even after Adler's resignation there could be no change in the policy of exile.

After the war, the new SPÖ was confronted with the accusation of the KPÖ that it had paved the way for National Socialism through its German nationalism , advocated the Anschluss with Renner and offered no resistance against Hitler. The KPÖ invoked its functionary Alfred Klahr , who had already represented the thesis of the existence of an independent Austrian people in 1937. On the occasion of the 950th anniversary of Austria, the attacked racer took a radical turn that was also valid for his party as a whole:

“The Austrian is not a German tribe in the strict sense of the word. His peculiarity distinguishes him from all German tribes ... our people have such a distinctive and different individuality from all others that they have the aptitude and also the right to declare themselves to be an independent nation. "

- Karl Renner: 950 years of Austria. Speech by the Federal President on October 22, 1946

Friedrich Adler did not manage this turnaround. He insisted that he felt himself first as an internationalist, then as a German and finally only as an Austrian, and vehemently opposed the general condemnation of the German people, whose democratic powers were Hitler's first victims for him. Among other things, he said in the post-war years:

“If the reactionary and disgusting utopia of an Austrian nation became true and I were forced to choose between it and the German nation, I would choose the one in which Goethe's Faust , Freiligrath's revolutionary poems and the writings of Marx , Engels and Don't let it belong to foreign literature. "

Wiener Zentralfriedhof - grave complex with the final resting places of Victor Adler , Otto Bauer , Karl Seitz and Engelbert Pernerstorfer , in which Friedrich Adler is also buried.
detail

Such opinions - publicly expressed - led to a sharp reaction from Renner and reinforced Friedrich Adler's desire to stay out of Austrian politics completely. After returning to Europe in 1946, he first liquidated the office of the International in Brussels, then moved to Switzerland, near his daughters, and devoted himself there to the history of the labor movement. His father's correspondence with Karl Kautsky and August Bebel , edited by him and carefully commented on , was published in 1954. Then he began to work on his main project, the biography of his father, but in the last years of his life he no longer had the strength to complete this work.

He visited Vienna only once after the war, in 1952 on the 100th birthday of his father. The party gave him a dignified welcome.

After his death he was buried in the grave of his father in the Vienna Central Cemetery . In 1989 the Friedrich-Adler-Weg in Vienna- Favoriten (10th district) was named after him.

Rating

Friedrich Adler's life was devoted to socialism, a socialism that bordered on religiosity:

“For Marx and Engels, socialism was a conviction that was so deep that there could be no doubt about it; the scientific justification was only an afterthought. I don't want to judge others, but I want to confess that socialism was such a religious experience in my life long before I got to know and understood its scientific doctrines ... "

- Friedrich Adler

Adler's socialism was a socialism of action, based on the conviction that a socialist society would come, but that the appropriate international framework had to be created for it. In doing so, one should not use methods that are permanently incompatible with human rights. With this attitude, called centrism by the opponents and integral socialism by Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer , he pursued a middle course between the Bolsheviks and the reformists, which turned out to be unenforceable from a political point of view.

Friedrich Adler's achievements for Austrian social democracy and for Austria were fundamental for today's Austria. It was he who ushered in the end of alliance with the doomed monarchy during the First World War. It was he who, on the basis of his popularity, which he had acquired through the murder of a symbol of war politics, was able to keep the left wing of the party in line after this war and thus keep communism with Soviet Russian characteristics in his country down. And after all, it was he who shaped the controversial exile policy during the Second World War that prevented the constitution of an Austrian government in exile or representative missions abroad, but only created the vacuum that Renner was able to fill with his provisional government and free elections, elections that not its initiators - the Soviet Union - but the democratic majority of Austrians the hoped-for results and brought Austria freedom years earlier than many of its neighbors.

Fonts

  • Local time, system time, zone time and the excellent reference system of electrodynamics . An investigation into Lorentz's and Einstein's kinematics. Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1920
  • Ernst Mach's overcoming of mechanical materialism . Brand, Vienna 1918
  • Friedrich Adler: Before the exceptional court . The assassination attempt against the First World War. Ed .: Michaela Maier and Georg Spitaler. Promedia, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-85371-406-5 , p. 248 .
  • Before the exceptional court; Statement on outbreak of war. The manifest of December 3, 1915, the main hearing before the exceptional court on May 18 and 19, 1917, the interrogation protocol of the preliminary investigation October 22 to November 7, 1916 . Vienna 1917
  • The renewal of the International. Wartime essays . Vienna 1918 digitized
  • Should the war break out anyway ... Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1929
  • Correspondence from Victor Adler. Correspondence with August Bebel and Karl Kautsky . Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1954
  • The fight. Social Democratic Monthly Magazine . Years 1924–1934
  • Great figures of socialism , 2 volumes. Folk bookshops, Vienna 1947
  • Friedrich Adler, Albert Einstein: Physics and Revolution. Letters - documents - opinions . Löcker, 2006
  • The British trade union delegation's report on Russia. Critically examined. With an appendix: sincere and insincere united front . Executive Committee of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Czechoslovak Republic, Prague 1925
  • The Stalin experiment and socialism . Vienna 1932
  • The witchcraft trial in Moscow . New York 1937
  • Le Procès de Moscou et l'Internationale Ouvrière Socialiste . Paris 1932
  • La guerra e la crisi della socialdemocrazia . Introduzione di Enzo Collotti. Rome 1972

literature

  • Norbert Leser : Between Reformism and Bolshevism. Austromarxism as theory and practice . Vienna 1968.
  • Norbert Leser, Richard Berczeller: As onlookers of politics. Austrian contemporary history in confrontations. Youth and People, Vienna 1977.
  • Joseph Buttinger: Using Austria as an example . Cologne 1953.
  • Helene Maimann : Politics in the waiting room Austrian policy in exile in Great Britain . Vienna 1975.
  • Rudolf G. Ardelt : Friedrich Adler. Problems of a personality development at the turn of the century . Vienna 1984.
  • Adler, Friedrich. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 1: A-Benc. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22681-0 , pp. 42-45.
  • J. Zimmermann: From the bloody deed of an unhappy person. The assassination attempt by Friedrich Adler and its reception in the social democratic press . Vienna 2000.
  • Julius Braunthal : Victor and Friedrich Adler. Two generations of the labor movement . Vienna 1965.
  • Hans Egger: The politics of the foreign organizations of the Austrian social democracy in the years 1938 to 1946. Thought structures, strategies, effects . Dissertation University of Vienna, Vienna 2004.
  • Manfred Bauer: Friedrich Adler. Unity rebel. Nevertheless-Verlag / Verlag der Sozialistische Jugend, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-7010-9999-5 .
  • Walter Wiltschegg: Austria - the "Second German State"? The national thought in the First Republic . Stocker, Graz / Stuttgart 1992.
  • John Zimmermann : "On the bloody deed of an unhappy man". The assassination attempt by Friedrich Adler and its reception in the social democratic press (= series studies on contemporary history, volume 19). Publishing house Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-8300-0043-X .
  • Michaela Maier, Wolfgang Maderthaner (Ed.): Physics and Revolution. Friedrich Adler - Albert Einstein. Letters - documents - opinions . Löcker Verlag, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-85409-428-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Sigmund: A case of excess of the mathematical. The standard of October 21, 2016.
  2. ↑ The complete statements of Friedrich Adler can be found in shorthand in: Michael Maier, Georg Spitaler (Ed.): Friedrich Adler before the exceptional court. The assassination attempt against the First World War. Promedia Verlag, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85371-406-5 .
  3. ↑ Austrian National Library: ANNO, Arbeiterwille, 1918-11-10, page 7. Retrieved on November 9, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Braunthal: Adler . P. 295.
  5. ↑ Braunthal: Adler . P. 300.
  6. ↑ Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop . An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3867322744 , ao pp. 188–192 and 217–219
  7. ^ Buttinger: Example p. 590
  8. ↑ Maimann: Waiting room p. 122 ff. And 322. (Declaration by the "Köstler Group" on the Moscow Declaration)
  9. ^ Austrian Labor Information Issue No. 1 of April 20, 1942
  10. ↑ Goldner p. 140 f.
  11. ↑ Goldner p. 86
  12. ↑ Austrian Labor Information No. 20–21 / 1943
  13. ^ IISG-AA 56. Letter Leichter to Ellenbogen, June 21, 1944
  14. ^ Karl Renner: 950 Years of Austria. The speech by Federal President Dr. Karl Renner on the occasion of the ceremony on October 22, 1946 . (Vienna 1946) pp. 5, 17
  15. ↑ Wiltschegg (1992), p. 117.
  16. ^ Braunthal: Victor and Friedrich Adler . P. 325.
personal data
SURNAME Adler, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Adler, Friedrich Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian scientist and politician (SDAP), member of the National Council
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 2nd January 1960
Place of death Zurich