Austrian Social Democracy:
Adelheid Popp & Friedrich Adler
In Europe during the 19th century, industrialization brought people from the countryside into cities where they found jobs in an increasingly capitalist economy. In metropolises like London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, working people often experienced the new conditions of their labor as harsh and cruel. They sought to organize and bargain collectively in order to improve their work situations, but the obstacles were formidable.
In Vienna, for example, protesting workers encountered not only the resistance of the owning class but also the repressive apparatus of the Hapsburg state, whose police and laws were deployed to defeat their unionization drives and their strikes.
In response to these conditions, the Social Democratic Workers Party of Austria was inaugurated on December 30, 1888. Among the early leaders of the party was Adelheid Popp, born into an impoverished weavers family in 1869. At age 40, she published an autobiography, “The Story of a Young Woman Worker,” that chronicles her life experiences, first as a maid and seamstress and then as an industrial worker in Viennese factories. The book was read by a large audience in Austria, received international recognition as well, and is still widely read today.
Adelheid Popp
I was taken into a workshop where I learned to crochet shawls. I earned from five pence to six pence a day, working diligently for twelve hours. If I took home work to do at night, it was a few farthings more.
How often on cold winter days, when my fingers were so stiff in the evening that I could no longer move my needle, I went to bed aware that I must wake up all the earlier. Then, after my mother had wakened me, she gave me a bed seat so that I might keep my feet warm, and I crocheted on from where I had left off the previous evening.
At an age when other children play with dolls or go to school, when they are guarded and cherished — at this age I had to go out to bear the hard yoke of work…. In later years a feeling of unmeasured bitterness overwhelmed me, because I had known nothing, really nothing, of childish joys and youthful happiness.
Advocating for the cause of social democracy, Adelheid Popp spoke to large audiences everywhere in Austria and abroad too. The “unmeasured bitterness” that she had experienced as a young woman may have influenced the militancy of her activism, but not in a doctrinaire direction. She welcomed into the women’s movement individuals with very diverse backgrounds, including relatively privileged women of the upper classes who believed in the cause. And she brought that same spirit of tolerance and reconciliation into the Social Democratic Party as a whole. “Every yoke is broken, every chain torn away,” she said, “when those who bear the yoke, who moan under the clanking of chains, stand together for common action.”
For the sake of that “common action,” Adelheid Popp always favored an open-minded, peaceful working-through of internal differences. Together with others like-minded in Austria’s Social Democratic Workers Party, she recognized that a divided left delivers victory to the right. Subsequent decades in the history of Austria and Germany would testify to the terrible correctness of that insight.
Adelheid Popp speaking at a meeting for unemployed women, 1892
In 1919, women representatives were for the first time elected to the Austrian Parliament. Among them, Adelheid Popp at the lower left. Are the men nearby wondering what to make of this new phenomenon?
Friedrich Adler
When Adelheid Popp or Friedrich Adler spoke in public on behalf of social democratic causes, their appeal was not only emotional; they counted on the capacity of working people to think for themselves and be moved by the better argument. In his youth he had taken an interest in the natural sciences and had prepared to pursue a career in physics (he became good friends with Albert Einstein). Friedrich Adler believed that, at the end of the day, evidence and reason can win a debate, whether it takes place in a scientific laboratory or in a political meeting hall. That confidence would, beginning in the fall of 1916, be severely tested by his extraordinary life experience. Because his life and circumstances cast light on the trajectory of Austrian social democracy in the first half of the 20th century, we’ll spend some time reviewing his journey.
Friedrich Adler is known in European history chiefly for his war-protest assassination of the Austrian prime minister, Count Karl Stürgkh, during World War I. But like his famous father Victor Adler, who had founded and led Austria’s social democratic party, Friedrich too was committed to “united front” politics. He became a member of Parliament and party leader and theoretician, working out of the Social Democratic Party headquarters in Vienna.
As a young man, Friedrich abandoned a hard-won start as a scientist to become a party official and aide to his father Victor, who led Austrian social democracy from 1889 to 1918. The ever proper but sometimes discordant relationship between these two men, who looked very similar and respected each other deeply, was a powerful test of wills. Beyond being a classic father-son confrontation, their clash was pivotal in Austrian socialism.
The Adler family in Vienna, 1910, with Friedrich in the back. His mother Emma was a journalist, biographer, and translator.
Young Adler was considered to be a sensitive and physically infirm child, and his parents wished to shield him from the anxieties and harshness of political life. He was nevertheless allowed a child’s portion of participation, folding the party newspapers and sitting in the gallery at party conventions. For a time, Friedrich went off to Zurich to study physics and chemistry, but it was politics that held his deepest interest. In the evenings, he attended a coffee house where he debated with anarchists and supporters of Lenin, opposing them in favor of a “united front” political strategy. He favored a collaborative approach to politics rather than the factionalism of the Bolsheviks.
In Zurich Friedrich met Katharina Germanischkaja, a Russian Jew who had come to Zürich to study physics because Jews were denied admission to Russian universities. He invited her into his political circles, believing that her bright mind could contribute to the struggle.
In 1911 Friedrich moved back to Berlin because leaders of the social democratic party needed an activist to edit a party periodical, prepare campaign literature‚ and serve in Parliament. For three years Friedrich and his father met almost daily for lunch in the family apartment where political conversation was the main fare. Victor admitted in a letter to Kautsky, “Our rising generation is better than we could possibly have expected.”
In the summer of 1914, however, Austria’s and the world’s social democratic hopes were abruptly shut down. On 28 June, 1914 the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Serbia. Austria declared war, and by the 4th of August, Germany, France, and Britain had joined the fight. Opposition to the war was disallowed in Austria; the government administration in Vienna, directed by Prime Minister Karl Graf Stürgkh, suspended Parliament, refused to call new elections, and censored the press. SPD leaders like Victor didn’t call for a vigorous and public antiwar response because they believed that any such action would be quickly suppressed and severely punished. Friedrich, on the other hand, believed that social democrats, in Austria and internationally, had lost their way, abandoning their long-standing pacifism, their class solidarity, and their conscience.
Austrian soldiers on their way to the front
Friedrich saw that socialist workers could become flag-wavers too, swept away by patriotic sentiment and rampaging militarism. They marched behind colorful banners and even sang socialist songs as they marched to the Eastern front. Friedrich conceded that Party leaders who did not join in the hysteria might lose popular support in the present moment, but he wanted the Party directorate to mount at least a token protest against the war.
Victor Adler viewed the situation differently. He explained that although he detested the Habsburg rulers, he had even less sympathy for the Czar, Russia’s cruel dictator. If and when Parliament was reconvened, he said, the Social Democratic representatives would have to approve funds for the war even though doing so went against their pacifist principles. This war, he conjectured, might put an end to Russian autocracy.
Friedrich Adler resigned from the Party and penned a fiery attack on the leadership. He argued that the war would kill democracy and devastate the working class, regardless of which side—Czarist militarism or Prussian militarism—won. During the first years of the war, Friedrich felt very alone. Party officials spoke out against him, calling him unpatriotic, even fanatical. There were forebodings of emotional collapse that Friedrich’s family had worried about when he was a child. When the Party convention met in 1915, Friedrich’s fiery invective against the Party’s war policy drew the support of only 10% of the delegates. He received no support from party leaders, including Victor Adler.
In the darkness of the war years, Friedrich Adler decided that an act of radical resistance could amplify antiwar sentiment and help to unlock the shackles that bound the masses of people to a war they were beginning to hate. Although he continued to favor mass protest over individual action, he decided to assassinate the Prime Minister Count Stürgkh.
Friedrich Adler Arrested. From the “Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung,” October 1916
Friedrich had been told that the Count lunched every day at the Hotel Meissel and Schaden near the Hofburg Palace. So, on Saturday, the 21st of October, 1916, Friedrich went there for lunch, patiently waited a few tables away until they both had finished dining–waited also until a woman sitting at a table nearby had left the room, so that she would not be endangered–and then walked over to Stürgkh and fired four shots at him with a pistol. Within a few hours Friedrich Adler was in prison and Stürgkh was dead.
Nothing and no one had warned Victor Adler that something like this might happen. Friedrich’s feat was a solitary act. Yet within a few hours Victor had to write an editorial stating the official Social Democratic Party response. If the Social Democrats were implicated in this assassination, the government could use that to strike against, perhaps even eliminate, the Party. So Victor condemned his son’s act as the product to a deranged mind.
letter from Albert Einstein to Friedrich Adler, offering to testify on his behalf. April 13, 1917
Friedrich immediately repudiated his father’s account, saying that he had acted rationally and with justification. “When I carried the assassination out I did so with the knowledge that thereby my life would end. I have not for one second regretted my action.” Both his father and the government wanted Friedrich declared insane, but for different reasons. Victor saw this as a way to save Friedrich’s life, while the state aimed to discredit his act. This meant that both the state prosecution and the defense (hired by Victor) intended to block expression of Friedrich’s political message.
Beginning with his first day of police interrogation, Friedrich was entirely open and truthful. He explained the assassination in detail and the motivation leading up to it. He patiently led his police interrogators through the complexities of social democratic theory and his analysis of Austria’s wartime situation. A panel of psychiatrists interviewed him and concluded that “none of his political views appeared to indicate madness… He has the mind of a fanatic but is never senseless or illogical…. he considers himself not as a martyr but as someone who has done his duty.”
The days in jail were not tiresome for Friedrich. He felt no remorse for his deed nor fear for his future. He returned to his scientific studies, putting in fourteen-hour days with a library of books which his family brought him. He was calm and creative.
Friedrich Adler in court. From the “Interessante Blatt,” 24 May, 1917.
On May 18,1917, Friedrich Adler went to trial, which became a cause celebre. Friedrich had first to deal with his own defense attorneys, which he did by simply rejecting their assistance and making his own case in court, aimed at discrediting the government instead of saving his life. The assassin was allowed six hours to testify and he used the time wisely. With his father in the court room, he argued that:
“Every citizen has not only the right to use force, in a situation like mine, but even the obligation to intercede at that moment when all constitutional approaches fail…. At issue is not law, but moral duty…. We live in a time when the killing fields are covered with hundreds of thousands of dead and tens of thousands of people lie beneath the sea…. I am guilty to the same degree as every military officer who has killed or given the order to kill –no less and no more!”
The case that Friedrich made received considerable support from the Austrian public during and after the trial. He was satisfied: he had been heard and was ready for the gallows. As expected, the court found him guilty and condemned him to death.
There are many ironic twists in history, however. Austria’s Kaiser Karl, aware that he might be held responsible at the end of the war (which was not going well for Austria), decided to talk the matter over with Victor. The Kaiser first waived the death penalty for Friedrich and then pardoned him on November 1, 1918. Victor’s son stepped out of prison a folk hero, and became once again a leader in the Austrian social democratic movement.
Some on the left argued that the Austrian Social Democratic Party had disgraced itself by supporting the war and no longer deserved support. Some workers and soldiers even asked that Friedrich lead a Bolshevik-style revolution. He urged them instead to rally behind the new Austrian Republic and the Social Democratic Party that Victor Adler had done so much to build. In subsequent decades Friedrich not only helped to advance social democratic causes in
Austria but became well-known also for his work on behalf of international labor movement solidarity. During the Second World War, at considerable risk to himself, he helped Jewish refugees escape from Hitler, and he remained politically active until his death in Switzerland in 1960.
Austrian social democracy flourished in the second half of the 20th century, although marred by a failure to confront the country’s fascist past.
In agreement with his father and other founders of social democracy, Friedrich Adler believed that the movement had to be global. The 482 representatives to the 1904 International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam came from 24 nations and 4 continents.
Social democrats held that the main conflict in modern societies is between social classes, not between one nation and another. The 1904 Congress passed a resolution urging peaceful resolution of international conflict. The delegates recognized that militarism could not solve the problems that humans fundamentally face in living together. That recognition would be trampled in the dust during the following half century, when two world wars ravaged Europe and other parts of the world.
1904 International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam. Luxemburg stands in the middle, dressed in white, with Bernstein just in front of her to the left and Victor Adler behind her to the right.
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