Background
Buttinger was born into a working-class family and left school at age 13 to help support his family.
Buttinger was born into a working-class family and left school at age 13 to help support his family.
He became a youth movement leader in Austria and, by the age of 24, was secretary of the Social Democratic Party. When Germany occupied Austria in 1938, he and his American-born wife Muriel Gardiner fled to Paris, where he was chairman of the exiled Socialists. In 1939, several months before the fall of France, the couple moved to the United States with Gardiner"s daughter from a previous marriage, Connie, whom Joseph later adopted.
During and after World World War II, Buttinger helped establish many of the refugee programs for the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
His personal actions helped smuggle thousands of anti-Fascist refugees out of Europe. Foreign over 40 years he served as director of the IRC"s Paris office and European division, and as an IRC board member and vice president
During the 1950s, he aided North Vietnamese refugees in South Vietnam and took an abiding interest in the history and culture of that country. He formed the American Friends of Vietnam, and became a prominent scholar of that country"s culture and politics, producing a two-volume work entitled Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled.
According to the New York Times, the then-Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, observed that 'Mr.
Buttinger was such a hero that if he had returned he would have become Chancellor."
The Mina Rees Library of the City University of New York Graduate Center owns the “Joseph Buttinger Rare Book Collection on Utopias.”.
After being imprisoned for several months in 1934, he became chairman of the Socialist underground and a leader of the anti-Fascist movement. In the 1950s, Buttinger and his wife subsidized the democratic socialist magazine Dissent, edited by Irving Howe. He also wrote "In the Twilight of Socialism", which was a history of Austrian Socialism in the years 1934-1938.
He also produced several other books on Vietnam and on the history of socialism.