Friedrich Adler, Karl von Stürgkh, and violent civil disobedience in First World War Austria

November 2 is the first anniversary of the deadly terrorist attack in Vienna last year that took the lives of four people and wounded 23 more.

The presumed assailant, who was killed by police during the attack, was an adherent of the Islamic State and is thought to have secured his weapons from a radical Muslim group that in part operated in Vienna. This hour-long documentary ont he attack from the Vienna daily Der Standard is in German but partly in English: "Neun Minuten – Ein Jahr danach": Die Dokumentation zum Terror in Wien 10/30/2021.

This Deutsche Welle report from a year ago is in English: 'Islamist terror attack' in Austria's capital Vienna leaves four dead 11/03/2021.

Political violence has been a lot in the US news lately, thanks to the radical Trumpistas. A few recent examples:

• Will Bunch, ‘When do we get to use the guns?’ The life-or-death stakes of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Philadelphia Inquirer 10/31/2021
• David Neiwert, Hacked Oath Keepers data exposes how deeply ‘patriot’ extremism has penetrated the mainstream Daily Kos 10/29/2021
• Paul Rosenberg, How extremist Christian theology is driving the right-wing assault on democracy Salon 10/31/2021
• Matt Ford, The Right’s Embrace of Political Violence Is Escalating New Republic 10/28/2021
• Alfred McCoy, Are We Ready for the Next Trump-Led Coup? The Nation 10/30/2021

I also just finished a recent book dealing with the four-day armed conflict in Austria in February 1934 that despite the brief length of the shooting has gone down in history as the Austrian Civil War. It was the turning point at which the authoritarian regime of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss took the decisive step of completely suppressing the democratic constitution of the Austrian First Republic, which he effectively had put on ice a year before. What his government pulled in February 1934 was a kind of self-coup, with some notable similarities to what Trump and his militants attempted on January 6.

In the process of all this, I also brushed up a bit on "Austromarxism" associated with Austrian Social Democratic leaders like Otto Bauer and Karl Renner which was known for its active critical engagement with non-socialist sociology and which through scholars like Carl Grünberg also exercised an important influence on the philosophical tradition that in the 1930s came to be known as Critical Theory. (The real thing, not the phantom bogeyman of "critical race theory" over which the Republicans are currently hyperventilating.)

And in the process I took some time to refresh my recollection of an assassination of an Austro-Hungarian Imperial official that didn't have the drastic immediate repercussions of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the unfortunate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. But it was nevertheless a notable political event.

Friedrich Adler (1879-1960) was the son of Victor Adler, founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDAP, now SPÖ). (In an it's-a-small-world observation, Victor once lived in the building where Sigmund Freud later lived and had his counseling room with its famous couch. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, lived just down the street.)

Friedrich studied physics in Switzerland, where he become friends with Albert Einstein. Friedrich at one point declined a faculty appointed because he thought it should go to Einstein, who did accept the post. Victor had pushed Friedrich to pursue a science career because he did think politics would be the right field for him. But Friedrich eventually became a Social Democratic journalist and an important figure in the SDAP.

When the First World War broke out in the wake of the Archduke's encounter with Gavrilo Princip, Friedrich held to the prewar line of the Socialist International that the national parties should oppose the war, which in their official view would be an imperialist war for the benefit of the capitalist classes. But, notoriously, when the war broke out, most of the Social Democratic Parties including the SDAP still led by Victor Adler opted to support the own countries' war efforts.

Douglas Alder recounts Friedrich's political trajectory in Friedrich Adler: Evolution of a Revolutionary German Studies Review 1:3, Oct 1978). On October 21, 1916, two years into the First World War, had lunch at the Hotel Messel and Schaden in central Vienna and then fired several bullets into the head of another diner, Count Karl von Stürgkh, then the Prime Minister of Austria. Friedrich planned the assassination carefully, hoping to spark antiwar sentiment within the SDAP. The reactionary Stürgkh had suspended the Austrian Parliament in March 1914, months before the beginning of the war.

How then, one might ask, did Friedrich Adler wind up living until 1960? Alder describes the course of Friedrich's trial and subsequent history in his account. Friedrich surrendered to police right at the hotel. He did not try to claim a legal justification for his actions, and he fully expected to be executed for it. His friend Einstein, also a socialist with strong antiwar leanings, offered to come to Vienna to testify in Friedrich's defense.

Friedrich actively opposed any kind of insanity defense on his behalf and was determined to claim that it was a conscious decision based on a political goal. As Alder writes, "He never felt remorse for his deed nor depression about his future," which he assumed included his own execution. "According to expectations, the court found him guilty and condemned him to death." Friedrich was allowed to testify for three hours at his trial, where he explained:

Therefore, the moral justification of my act in my eyes as a citizen is perfect. The ministry has torn the constitution apart; the ministry has given up its legallity [sic]; the ministry had given up its job of concerning itself with the laws of Austria, and there remains no other way than the way of force ...

Individual citizens, in my opinion, are justified to use force when the laws are destroyed. Everyone is justified to grasp justice on the basis of necessity which the government has caused. Yes, every citizen has not only the right to force, rather in my position, also the duty to intercede in that moment where all constitutional approaches fail - where there is no parliament, where there is no guarantee of justice, where all these have been taken away. Only a demoralized citizenry that has allowed itself to be seduced of all its conscience will stand aside. It cannot be a question of law; it is a question of duty.

Adler presented his assassination of Stürgkh as an act of civil disobedience for which he was willing to accept the legal punishment of death. His basic argument included the following elements, which notably did not include presenting himself as a martyr:

1. Stürgkh's government had lost its moral legitimacy
2. It had also lost its legal and political legitimacy by failing to follow its own laws
3. All attempts at a constitutional remedy had failed
4. Now only an illegal act of force can restore a legitimate government
5. He saw the assassination as a moral and patriotic duty, despite its illegality
6. He saw the killing as an act of conscience, despite its illegality

Given the currently operative use of "terrorism" to refer to attacks aimed at random civilians, like the Vienna attack of November 2020, it's worth noting that Stürgkh's assassination was a targeted act aimed at a government official, however one decides to evaluate it today.

In fact, Friedrich Adler's act did find some public resonance. Here it's important to recall that as the war began in 1914, there was a wide expectation that it would last probably a few weeks. Public enthusiasm for the war effort may have been exaggerated by official propaganda. But no one expected the prolonged mass slaughter that ensued. And no one expected it to end with the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires.

As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of the First World War in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

It was then that political and social systems, centuries in the building, came apart - sometimes in a matter of weeks. And others were permanently transformed. It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position - and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began. World War II continued, enlarged and affirmed this change. In social terms World War II was the last battle of World War I.

In the case of Friedrich Adler, even so blatant an act of treason as murdering the head of government right in public didn't bring the execution he fully expected to receive. Emperor Franz Joseph died in 1916 less than a month after Karl Stürgkh left this mortal world. He was replaced by the last Habsburg emperor, Charles I. Charles first converted Adler's sentence from death to 18 years at hard labor. On November 1, 1918, he pardoned Adler completely. Early the next year, the monarchy was replaced by Austria's democratic republic, a key goal the SDAP had always sought.

As Alder relates:

Friedrich stepped out of prison a folk hero. During the long months between his arrest and pardon, he became the object of international leftist adulation. Peace crusaders in Austria and Russia called for Dr. Adler's release. Radicalized workers and soldiers greeted his release with a call for him to be the Austrian Lenin, leading the Bolshevik revolution in Vienna. ... He urged the workers to rally behind the new Austrian Republic and the Social Democratic Party that Victor Adler's death, on Armistice Day 1918, left in the able hands of Otto Bauer.

Despite popular enthusiasm, Friedrich didn't aspire to a major role in party leadership, though he remained active in Social Democratic affairs, "He died in Switzerland in 1960 after a distinguished effort as an international socialist leader which included harrowing months during World War II helping Jewish refugees escape from Hitler."