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Karl Renner and the Politics of Accommodation: Moderation versus Revenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Peter Loewenberg
Peter Loewenberg
Affiliation:
Department of History, 405 Hilgard Avenue, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024–1473.
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Extract

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.

Type
Articles: Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture (1986)
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 22 , January 1991 , pp. 35 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1991

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References

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31 See, for example, the instructions to the frontier post in Feldkirch to search Renner's luggage and person most carefully on his exit from and entry to Austria under the pretext of currency controls. Ministerium des Innern, BKA, Inneres, General Direktion für öffentliche Sicherheit 316:904–St.B. No. 51, January 23, 1935. Verwaltungsarchiv, Vienna.

Renner was spied on in the train from Paris to Austria in October 1935 and his conversation reported. He said that he looked forward to a coalition government with Social Democratic participation and the return to a half parliamentary regime. Report of October 4, 1935 by a security police spy. The cover letter says: “You will see from this how little one may rely on the promises of old party chiefs (alien Parteibonzen).” Bureau of the Vice Chancellor to State Secretary Baron Hammerstein, October 10, 1935, Ibid., No. 50.

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34 The entire text is reprinted in Hannak, , Renner, pp. 650–652Google Scholar. In Hannak's, opinion Renner committed “a far reaching mistake” (p. 652)Google Scholar.

35 Luža, Radomír, Austro-German Relations in the Anschluss Era (Princeton, 1975), pp. 71–72Google Scholar.

36 Renner, , Die Gründung der Republik Deutschösterreich, der Anschluss und die Sudetendeutschen: Dokumente eines Kampfes ums Recht, typeset but not published, Vienna 1938Google Scholar, Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, No. 57656. This document is omitted from the otherwise complete Renner, Bibliographie (Vienna, 1970)Google Scholar and from his Nachlass in the Austrian Staatsarchiv.

37 Ibid., p. 6.

38 Ibid., p. 47.

39 Ibid., p. 85.

40 Ibid., p. 53.

41 Ibid., p. 71.

42 Ibid., p. 57.

43 Ibid., p. 73.

44 Ibid., pp. 77–78.

45 Ibid., pp. 20, 50–51.

46 Ibid., p. 7.

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51 A contemporary Austrian scholar considers this a typical Austrian problem and Renner as the prototype for Austria's ambivalent position toward National Socialism and the model for the person and symbol of President Kurt Waldheim. Pelinka, Anton, Karl Renner zur Einführung (Hamburg, 1989), pp. 107–110Google Scholar.