Journal of Jewish Identities

This paper compares the ideas of Karl Renner (1870-1950)¹ and Otto Bauer (1881-1938)² on national identity as a theoretical concept, the nationalities question in the Habsburg Monarchy, and the concept of a civic Austrian national identity.³ Furthermore, while they agreed on many issues, their most interesting divergences occurred when discussing nationalism and identity as it related to Jews. This paper will explore these divergences, as well as offer some explanation for them based on differences between the two men's families' experiences regarding assimilation.

Both Renner and Bauer were giants within the Austrian Social Democratic Party in the first half of the twentieth century. Renner served as the first chancellor of republican Austria in 1918-1919, and was the first president of the second Austrian republic from 1945-1950. Bauer was the party's official leader throughout the inter-war years. The two men offered theoretical analyses that formed the backbone of Austro-Marxism⁴ and helped shape the ideology of the Austrian Social Democratic Party on nationalism and the national question in the last two decades of Austria-Hungary's existence.⁵

For Renner and Bauer, their respective theoretical understandings of national identity helped shape the way they approached the Habsburg nationalities question. Both of them contended that a person's national identity was a matter of choice, that one could be a member of whatever national group he or she chose based on the language and culture with which he or she affiliated. Such a contention stood in stark contrast to the ideas of racial nationalists, who argued that individuals were born into a national group whose members shared certain inherited and objectively identifiable characteristics. Racial nationalism became widespread in Central Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period when Renner and Bauer formulated their ideas.

Despite the overall similarities between the two men's views on national identity, Bauer's became somewhat muddled when he discussed Jews. His family had exchanged their traditional East European Jewish culture and Yiddish language for German before he was born and, in addition, they identified [End Page 1] themselves in national terms as Germans, an identity Bauer adopted as well. Like many from such assimilating families, he harbored a strong ambivalence about his Jewish background.⁶ This ambivalence offers some insight into why his writings displayed inconsistencies on questions relating to Jewish assimilation and identity. Renner, on the other hand, whose family background did not include a similar transformation in terms of ethnic, cultural, or national identity, developed an ideology that treated different nationalities such as Jews and, even to a remarkable degree for that time, black Africans (see below) consistently when it came to questions of identity and assimilation. He seemed to accept the notion that Jews, like anyone else, could simply adopt any nationality they chose. Unlike Bauer, Renner did not dwell on their case in particular. Their backgrounds certainly do not explain the entirety of the two Social Democrats' views or the differences between them, as people from every sort of background are reflected across the political spectrum as well as within Socialism itself. It appears, however, that the differences in their backgrounds in terms of assimilation help explain why Renner and Bauer, two thinkers whose ideas on nationalism and identity share a great deal, diverge on some occasions when the discussion turns to Jews.

Before examining the views of Renner and Bauer in detail, a brief discussion of how nationalism and the demands of its peoples affected the political system of the Habsburg Monarchy in the time they formulated their ideas is in order. The nationalities question stood at the center of domestic politics and, to a good degree, foreign policy as well in the last decades of the Monarchy. Emperor Francis Joseph, who ruled from 1848 until his death in 1916, spent a great deal of time dealing with the often irreconcilable demands of his peoples on issues relating to language and culture. The most intractable problems revolved around what level and what type of autonomy to grant some or all of the Monarchy's peoples and...