Viktor Adler, an Austrian politician and an Australian Foreign Minister who worked throughout the war in behalf of peace initiatives. In the latter capacity he worked in behalf of union with the nascent German republic. Creator of the Austrian Socialist party.
Background
Viktor Adler was on June 24, 1852, the son of a prosperous merchant. He was born in Prague, but when he was four, his family moved to Vienna, where they prospered and were able to leave the Leopoldstadt ghetto for a fashionable part of the city.
Education
Although he received an elementary Jewish religious education, Adler soon assimilated into German culture.
He studied at medical school at the University of Vienna. Adler too specialized in psychiatry at the university, but went on to devote his life to politics.
Career
In the 1870s Adler supported Pan-Germanism. However, in 1885 when an anti-Jewish paragraph was introduced into its program, Adler was forced out of the movement. Even as a “new" Christian, Adler was not permitted to join “völkisch” clubs and various societies and associations.
Socialist ideology appealed to many Germanized Jews, and in 1886 Adler joined the Austrian labor movement. In 1888-1889 he was responsible for the establishment of the United Austrian Social Democratic Party. Within the party, Adler showed remarkable talents for diplomacy in preserving the internal unity of the Austrian Socialists. Politically, perhaps his biggest success was when the imperial government in 1905 granted universal suffrage.
Religion
In 1878 he converted to Protestantism (although his wife remained Jewish) arguing that he was severing himself from Judaism to make it easier for his children and save them from embarrassment. Ironically his son Friedrich, who was baptized at the age of seven, married a Lithuanian Jewess who insisted on a religious wedding ceremony.
Politics
As an assimilated Austrian Marxist Adler refused to accept the specific problems of a Jewish proletariat and saw Zionism as futile, irrelevant and unacceptable.
Views
Adler was forever conscious of his Jewish origins. His opponents were forever pointing a finger at the Jewish leadership of the Socialist party. Adler however refused to take a clear stand on Jewish issues. In his need to be fair he denied both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in equal measure.
Quotations:
• One must have Jews as comrades, but not too many.
• The last anti-Semite will disappear with the last Jew.
• I have no vocation for quiet academic work but lama serviceable hawker of foreign ideas - we Jews seem predestined for peddling.
• The Jews’ fear of the anti-Semites is only equaled by the anti-Semites’ fear of the Jews.