Otto Bauer

Otto Bauer (born Sept. 5, 1881, Vienna, Austria-Hungary—died July 4, 1938, Paris, France) was a theoretician of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and statesman, who proposed that the nationalities problem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire be solved by the creation of nation-states and who, after World War I, became one of the principal advocates of Austrian Anschluss (unification) with Germany.

A founder of the socialist educational movement Die Zukunft (“The Future”) and contributor to various periodicals, Bauer became secretary to his party’s parliamentary faction in 1904. His theoretical talents were revealed with the publication of Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1907; “The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy”), in which he viewed the conflict among the nationalities as a class struggle and foresaw many of the actual post-World War I developments in the Danubian region.

A soldier and prisoner of war in Russia during World War I, Bauer assumed leadership of his party’s left wing on his return in 1917. He became Austrian foreign minister at the end of the war. On March 2, 1919, he signed the secret Anschluss agreement with Germany, which was later rejected by the Allies. Bauer deals with this period in his Die österreichische Revolution (1923; The Austrian Revolution). He resigned in July 1919, but he remained his party’s guiding personality for the next two decades. A member of the Austrian National Council from 1929 to 1934, he went into exile after the abortive Viennese socialist revolt in 1934, first to Czechoslovakia, then to France.