Karl Renner (14 December 1870 – 31 December 1950) was an Austrian politician. He was born in Untertannowitz (Dolní Dunajovice) (Moravia) and died in Vienna. He is called the Father of the Republic because he headed the first government in republican Austria in 1918 and was once again decisive in establishing the present Second Republic in 1945, whose first President he became.
Renner was born the 18th child of a poor farmer but because of his intelligence was allowed to attend a selective gymnasium. One of his teachers was Wilhelm Jerusalem. From 1890 to 1896 he studied law at the University of Vienna. In 1895 he was one of the founding members of the Naturfreunde (Friends of Nature) organisation and created their logo.
When in 1918, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he became the first head of government ("State Chancellor") of that newly established small German speaking republic which did not wish to be considered the heir of the Habsburg monarchy, he proposed the name "Norische Republik", or Noric Republic, for an altogether new state, a reference to the ancient Celtic "regnum Noricum", which was a kingdom that covered almost the same area as the new state and was later incorporated as a province in the Roman Empire. His suggestion was passed over in favour of "Republik Deutsch-Österreich," i.e. Republic of German-Austria, a name that in the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 1919 was prohibited by The Entente when they crushed the resolution of the Constituent National Assembly in Vienna that "German-Austria" was to be part of the German Republic. It had been Renner who even before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the Social Democratic party committee had proposed a future union of the German parts of Austria with Germany and he even used the word "Anschluss",[1] which, however, simply means 'connection'.
Renner was always interested in politics and became a librarian in parliament. In 1896 he joined the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), representing the party in the Reichsrat from 1907 till its dissolution in November 1918. He was in the forefront of the Provisional and the Constitutional National Assemblies of those "Lands Represented in the Reichsrat" (the formal description of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy) that were predominantly German speaking and had decided to form a nation state just like all the other nationalities had done. He was the leader of the delegation that represented this new German-Austria in the negotiations of St. Germain where the "Republic of Austria" was acknowledged but was declared to be the responsible successor to Imperial Austria, where any political association with Germany was prohibited and where he had to accept the loss of the German speaking South Tyrol and the German speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia where he himself was born.
Renner was Chancellor of Austria of the first three coalition cabinets and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1918 until 1920, and from 1931 to 1933 he was President of Parliament, the National Council of Austria. In the time of autoritarian Austrofascism from 1934, when his party was prohibited, he even welcomed the Anschluss. Having originally been a proponent of new German-Austria becoming a part of the democratic German Republic he expected National-Socialism to be but a passing phenomenon, not any worse than what he was experiencing in Austria. During the war that followed, however, he distanced himself from politics completely.
In April 1945, just before the collapse of the Third Reich, the defeat of Germany and the end of the war, the elderly Renner astutely set up a Provisional Government in Vienna with other politicians from the three revived parties SPÖ (social-democrat), ÖVP (conservative) and KPÖ (communist). On April 27th, by a declaration, this Provisional Government separated Austria from Germany and campaigned for the country to be acknowledged as an independent republic. As a result of Renner's actions Austria was to benefit greatly in the eyes of the Allies as she had fulfilled the stipulation of the Moscow Declaration of 1943, where the Foreign Secretaries of US, UK and USSR declared that the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Germany was null and void calling for the establishment of a free Austria after the victory over Nazi Germany provided that Austria could demonstrate that she had undertaken suitable actions of her own in that direction. Thus Austria having been invaded by Germany was treated as an unwilling party and "the first victim" of Nazi-Germany and had been liberated. Being somewhat suspicious of the fact that the Sovyets in Vienna were the first to accept Renner's Cabinet, the Western Allies hesitated a short while with their recognition, but his Provisional Government was in the end recognised by all Four Powers and he was to be the first post-war Chancellor. In late 1945, he became the first President of the Second Republic.
Karl Renner died in 1950 and was buried in the Presidential Tomb at Zentralfriedhof in Vienna.
[edit] His beliefs
For most of his long life, Renner alternated between the political commitment of a social-democrat and the analytical distance of an academic scholar. Central to Renner's academic work is the problem of the relationship between law and social transformations. With his Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des bürgerlichen Rechts (1904), he became one of the founders of the discipline of the sociology of law. His and Otto Bauer's ideas about the legal protection of cultural minorities were taken up by the Jewish Bund, but fiercely denounced by Lenin. Stalin devoted a whole chapter to criticising Cultural National Autonomy in Marxism and the National Question[2].
[edit] Publications
- Under the penname 'Synopticus': Staat und Nation (Vienna 1899).
English: State and Nation In: Ephraim Nimni (ed.), National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics, London: Routledge, 2005 pp. 64 - 82 ISBN 0-415-24964-5
- Under the penname Rudolf Springer:Der Kampf der Nation um den Staat (1902)
- Grundlagen und Entwicklungsziele der österr.-ungar. Monarchie, die Krise des Dualismus, (1904)
- Under his real name: Österreichs Erneuerung (3 vols., 1916/17)
- Marxismus, Krieg und Internationale, (1918)
- Die Wirtschaft als Geaamtprozess und die Sozialisierung (1924)
- Staatswirtschaft, Weltwirtschaft und Sozialismus (1929)
- Die Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion (1929)
English: The Institutions of Private Law and their Social Function, Transl. by A Schwarzschild, with an introduction by Otto Kahn-Freund, London 1949.
- Wege der Verwirklichung(1929)
[edit] Literature
- Ephraim Nimni (ed.), National cultural autonomy and its contemporary critics. Routledge Innovations in Political Theory,(16 essays) London: Routledge, 2005 ISBN 0-415-24964-5
- Stephane Pierre-Caps, "Karl Renner et l'Etat Multinationale: Contribution Juridique á la Solution d'Imbroglios Politiques Contemporains", Droit et Societé 27 (1994), 421-441.
- Ernst Panzenböck, Ein Deutscher Traum: die Anschlussidee und Anschlusspolitik bei Karl Renner und Otto Bauer. Materialien zur Arbeiterbewegung, PhD thesis, Vienna: Europaverlag, 1985 ISBN 3203508974
[edit] References
- ^ Ernst Panzenböck, Ein Deutscher Traum: die Anschlussidee und Anschlusspolitik bei Karl Renner und Otto Bauer. Materialien zur Arbeiterbewegung, PhD thesis, Vienna: Europaverlag, 1985 p.93
- ^ Bill Bowring, Burial and Resurrection: Karl Renner's controversial influence on the nationality question in Russia. In: Ephraim Nimni (ed.), National-Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics, London: Routledge 2005, pp. 162 - 176
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Renner, Karl |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
|
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
President of Austria |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
December 14, 1870 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Untertannowitz, Moravia |
| DATE OF DEATH |
December 31, 1950 |
| PLACE OF DEATH |
Vienna, Austria |
