Карл Реннер: Австрия Республикасының негізін қалаушысы

Former President and Chancellor of Austria

Karl Renner (14 December 1870 – 31 December 1950) was an Austrian politician and jurist of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria. He is often referred to as the "Father of the Republic" because he led the first government of the Republic of German Austria and the First Austrian Republic in 1919 and 1920, and was once again decisive in establishing the present Second Republic after the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, becoming its first President after World War II (and fourth overall).

Renner was born the 18th child of an ethnic German family of poor wine growers in Unter Tannowitz (present day Dolní Dunajovice in the Czech Republic), then part of the Margraviate of Moravia, a crown land of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Because of his intelligence, he was allowed to attend a selective gymnasium in nearby Nikolsburg (Mikulov), where 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 Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde) organisation and created their logo.

In 1896 he joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (SDAP), representing the party in the National Council (Reichsrat) from the 1907 elections until its dissolution in November 1918. During this period he founded and edited the party's journal, Der Kampf, together with Otto Bauer and Adolf Braun. Renner's interest in politics also led him to become a librarian for the Reichsrat. During these early years, he developed new perspectives on law — all the while cloaking his innovative ideas under a variety of pseudonyms (for example, Synopticus and Rudolf Springer) lest he lose his coveted post as parliamentary librarian. He was especially interested in the problems of the Austrian state, whose existence he justified on geographical, economic and political grounds. On the nationality question, he upheld the so called "personal autonomy" on the basis of which the super national state should develop, and thereby influenced the agenda and tactics of the Social Democratic Party in dealing with it. As a theorist he was reckoned as one of the leaders of Austro Marxism.

In 1918, after the collapse of the Austro Hungarian Empire, he was in the forefront of the Provisional and the Constitutional National Assemblies of those Cisleithanian "Lands Represented in the Reichsrat" (the formal description of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy) that predominantly spoke German and had decided to form a nation state like the other nationalities had done. Renner became the first head of government ("State Chancellor") of that newly established small German speaking republic which refused to be considered the heir of the Habsburg monarchy and wished to be known as the Republic of German Austria (Republik Deutsch Österreich). This name, however, was prohibited by The Entente. They also vetoed a resolution of the Constituent National Assembly in Vienna that "German Austria" was to be part of the German Weimar Republic. Even before the collapse of the Austro Hungarian Monarchy, Renner had proposed a future union of the German parts of Austria with Germany, even using the word "Anschluss". Like other Austrian socialists, Renner believed that the best course was to seek union with Germany. 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. There Renner had to accept that this new Austria was prohibited any political association with Germany and he had to accept the loss of German speaking South Tyrol and the German speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia where he himself was born; this forced him to give up his share in the parental farm if he, "the peasant proprietor who turned Marxist", wanted to remain an Austrian government officer. Renner was Chancellor of Austria of the first three coalition cabinets from 1918 until 1920 and at the same time Minister of Foreign Affairs, backed by a grand coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Social Party. A wide range of social reforms were introduced by Renner's government, including unemployment insurance, paid holidays, the eight hour workday, and regulations on the working conditions of miners, bakers, women, and children. State aid was also provided for the disabled, together with health insurance for public employees. In addition, a law was passed that provided for collective bargaining and the mediation of disputes. From 1931 to 1933, Renner was President of Parliament, the National Council of Austria. After the dictatorial Austrofascism period from 1934, when his party was prohibited, he even welcomed the Anschluss in 1938. Having originally been a proponent of new German Austria becoming a part of the democratic German Republic, he expected Nazism to be but a passing phenomenon not worse than the dictatorship of Dollfuss's and Schuschnigg's authoritarian one party system. During World War II, however, he distanced himself from politics completely.

Antisemitism in contemporary Austria was widespread after the First World War and even after the Second World War, even in the highest government offices. Karl Renner, whom Emperor Karl I rejected as prime minister, stood out before and after the war due to vehement anti Semitism. This attitude persisted even after the Nazi terror against Jewish returnees and survivors of the concentration camps. Marko Feingold, survivor of the concentration camp and president of the Salzburg Jewish Community, said in 2013: "Karl Renner, after all the first Federal President of the Second Republic, had long been known in the party as an anti Semite. He didn't want us concentration campers in Vienna after the war and he also frankly said that Austria would not give anything back to them."

For most of his 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 private law and private property. With his Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des bürgerlichen Rechts [The Institutions of Private Law and their Social Functions] (1904), he became one of the founders of the discipline of the sociology of law. In this book, Renner developed a Marxist theory of the institution of private law. Renner argued that the separation of public and private law is a creation of capitalism, whereby the state enforces the interests of capital owners. His and Otto Bauer's ideas about the legal protection of cultural minorities were taken up by the Jewish Bund, but fiercely denounced by Vladimir Lenin. Joseph Stalin devoted a whole chapter to criticising Cultural National Autonomy in Marxism and the National Question. The 1977–1978 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.