ABSTRACT
Pressures generated by the First World War focused the Austrian Social Demo-cratic Workers' Party on preserving the fatherland, which, at least in a de facto sense, came to mean not a transformed state, but Austria-Hungary as she actually was, warts and all. The state was to be preserved if for no other reason than so that it might be around to be reformed once the war was brought to an end. The Brunner Program thereby was put on the sidelines as the party's leadership concentrated its energies on convincing its following of the necessity of maintaining the state. To this end, Friedrich Austerlitz, editor of the party's highly respected Arbeiter Zeitung, gave his front page over to calling upon Austria's proletariat to celebrate "Der Tag des deutschen Nation."1 He framed the spreading conflagration with urgent tones tinted in moralistic hues, but, in something of an abrupt about-face, Austerlitz ended his appeal by noting that events now made it necessary to defend civilization from assault by a barbarous Slavdom. Austerlitz went on to conclude: "events threaten the soil of the fatherland. Not only the state but the nations within the state ... must be defended if the nations are to remain free .... In times of danger everyone must support his country."2 Austerlitz thereby succeeded only too well in giving tangibility to the suspicion of non-German Austrians (and not only the working class among them) that when push came to shove, German Austrian social democracy's high-sounding words regarding a supranational proletarian international based on working-class solidarity was nothing more than highfalutin rhetoric. And in fact not a few close to the center of the party's leadership were aghast that Austrian socialism apparently could forget so easily its fundamental canons. Not the least among these dissidents was Viktor Adler's own son, Dr. Friedrich Adler. But young Adler was not alone. On July 25, 1914, the south German Karl Kautsky, whose land of birth was Austria, had written to Viktor Adler expressing his shock over the terms in Austria's ultimatum to Serbia of July 1914, and he urged the Austrian leader to organize demonstrations against this war policy on the part of Vienna. "The ultimatum came so unexpectedly as I had assumed that the old Franz Joseph and the Junge [Karl] wished for their peace and quiet. And now suddenly a declaration of war."3 Kautsky further noted that now war was "a foregone conclusion" and the moment had arrived in "Austria when there should be a
mass strike on the part of the proletariat to protest against war. But," lamented Kautsky, "one notices not the slightest stir of protest action on the part of the party.
