Richard Robert Wagner

Richard Robert Wagner (born October 10, 1888 in Opava ; † around 1941 on the island of Rab in Yugoslavia ) was an Austrian popular educator, trade unionist, editor and writer.

Life

family

Richard Robert Wagner was the child of Moriz Wagner and his wife Gold Gisela, b. Ratzenschacher. Richard Wagner studied political science and literature at the University of Vienna from 1906 . He completed his studies in 1910 with a dissertation on the poet Johann Fercher von Steinwand . In 1915 he married his first wife Berta Marie Sobotik. During the First World War he became a first lieutenant in the reserve. After the end of the war he was assigned to Julius Deutsch , the State Secretary for the Army, as an employee. During this time he befriends his colleague Robert Musil . In addition to the physicist Fritz Zerner, Richard Wagner serves as a template for the figure of the socialist Schmeißer in the man without qualities . In 1920 Richard and Berta Wagner resigned from the Israelite religious community .

Union work

In 1923 he left the civil service and went to Berlin. He returned to Vienna two years later and became editor of Der Aufstieg , the magazine for the clothing workers' union. He also taught at the Vienna Trade Union School, at adult education centers , party and youth schools and in literary specialist groups. Wagner also published articles in a number of newspapers and magazines: Arbeiter-Zeitung , Der Kampf , Bildungsarbeit. Sheets for socialist education , The Free Soldier , Labor and Economy , The Social Democrat. Social democratic monthly . Together with Käthe Leichter and Eduard Straas he worked on the 2nd volume of the history of the Austrian trade union movement by Julius Deutsch , which was entitled: In World War I and in the Post-War Period and was published in 1933.

Literary work

He wrote poetry and prose. In 1933 he joined the Association of Socialist Writers . In 1934 he lost his job with the union newspaper. Thanks to Viktor Matejka , he found work in the Vienna Chamber of Labor . His youth poems from 1908 and the play Fieber , composed in March and April 1939, came as manuscripts to the union, resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor Emma Mayerhofer after 1945 . His last book, the novel about Robert Owen , was published after his death.

exile

In November 1938 he fled to Yugoslavia via Graz and joined the partisan movement . He was in contact with the actor Camil Taussig (Paul Tyndall), from whom the news comes that Wagner, as leader of the local partisans, who organized a rescue transport for the elderly, children and refugees, died in the bombing of a port facility on the island of Arbe found.

Works

• The class struggle for people , Berlin 1927
• History of clothing workers in Austria in the 19th century and in the first quarter of the 20th century , Vienna 1930
• Goldtauern , Vienna 1935
• Robert Owen. Life novel by a believer in man , Zurich 1942

Texts by Wagner

• The class struggle for people, 1927 (excerpt) in the Herbert Exenberger archive of the Theodor Kramer Society .

literature

• Michael Frühwirth in: Der neue Aufstieg'Organ of the union of textile, clothing and leather work. Vienna, November 1, 1945, volume 1, No. 1, p. 4.
• Sabine Lichtenberger : Richard Wagner (1888-1941). A life for the "intellectual class struggle" . In: Zwischenwelt. No. 3-4 (December 2009), pp. 53-57

Web links

• Entry in the Herbert Exenberger archive of the Theodor Kramer Society .