Der Grosse Illusionist

The description of the Austrian Socialist and Marxist theoretician Otto Bauer as an ‘Illusionist’ (in the sense of ‘self-deluded’) is amply justified throughout this biography by Ernst Hanisch. Bauer’s illusions are ultimately underpinned by his early conversion in the late Habsburg monarchy to Marxism and a belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution. They appear (not entirely without justification) in the ruins of the monarchy with the confident prediction of an imminent pan-German revolution; in the dismal decline of Austria’s parliamentary politics over the following decade, they lead Bauer to interpret every setback as a step closer to the goal; in the 1930s, despite his shock at Stalin’s purges and show trials, Bauer accepts them as ‘dialectically necessary’, and endorses Stalin’s Soviet Union as progressive (the sentiment was not reciprocated); shortly before the 1938 Anschluss, Bauer sees a Habsburg restoration as the most imminent threat facing Austria and, after German troops march in, succumbs to what Hanisch calls his ‘last great Illusion’ by proclaiming that ‘the Austrian people ... can only be liberated from German fascism by the pan-German Revolution’ (‘dass das österreichische Volk ... nur durch die gesamt-deutsche Revolution gegen den deutschen Faschismus befreit werden könne’, p. 370)

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