Karl Renner

Check ME repurposing a chunk of my essay talking about Karl Renner and why he's so great to tell you here about Karl Renner and why he's so great. Wholesale! It's because I'm tired.


Naturfreunde, or Friends of Nature, founded in Vienna in 1895 by teacher Georg Schmiedl, blacksmith Alois Rohrauer, and law student Karl Renner. Renner went on to become the first chancellor of the Austrian Republic in 1918 and a dominant figure in the “Red Vienna” era of Austrian politics between the end of show more the First World War and the Dollfuss coup in 1934. For Austrians (and I am an Austrian-Canadian) of left-wing sensibilities, the era is poignant given seemingly permanent right-wing, insular shift in Austrian political culture since (as I write, I have just learned that my cousin has been elected alderman in our ancestral village on a freiheitlich or “freedomly” programme, which is just as grim as it sounds). Renner made his mark on Marxism with his writings on “cultural national autonomy”, a reimagining of the Habsburg monarchy with its roiling minorities into a multicultural socialist state based on a principal of devolution of powers to ethnic minorities under a general social-democratic rubric, “with a complex web of autonomous arrangements for territorial and nonterritorial minorities” (Nimni 2). By “nonterritorial minorities” Renner seems to have meant primarily the Jews of Vienna and Prague; in general, though, he conceived of cultural national autonomy as explicitly land-based and anti-imperial—should German-Austrians pursue socialist development on behalf of Austro-Hungarian minorities as the dominant ethnic group in a centralized state, he writes, “rather than Habsburg foothills we would become a Hohenzollern hinterland” (Renner 26).
This pastoral, conservationist approach to socialism was very different from the prevailing wisdom of the successful Russian and unsuccessful German revolutions, both of which were led by urban intellectuals, and Renner was condemned at length by both Lenin and Stalin. (And, incidentally, it has little to do with the later development of agrarian Maoism, which despite its peasant triumphalism was essentially an attempt to integrate the countryside into the totalitarian envelope.) It is irresistible to draw parallels with Renner’s early experience as a founder of the Naturfreunde, walking long-established Alpine ways along which German, Italian and Slovenian or German, Czech and Slovak villages intersperse, and fighting for the opening of the high Gebirge at a time when access to the peaks was restricted by the monarchy.


Environmental conservation, advocacy of access to nature as a public patrimony, socialism, and protection of cultural diversity and minority rights must have seemed outgrowths of one another, in an almost (I blush a little to use the word, overdetermined as it is, but I think it’s appropriate) rhizomatic fashion. Within a few decades, Solnit tells us, the Naturfreunde had over 200,000 members, marching not only under the slogan Berg frei but also in solidarity with Zionists, feminists, and labour activists (156). Even now, the Naturfreunde Web site gives a prominent place to cultural and political concerns in its mission statement:


"Our work is focused on shaping the sustainable development of our societies and includes in particular
• protecting, cultivating and making people aware of our
natural and cultural heritage,
• consciously engaging with nature and culture, the two
pillars of a global, socially sound and fair societal development,
• making the right to a healthy environment and living conditions
a reality for all people,
• treating people from diverse countries and regions with respect,
irrespective of their gender, origin or colour,
• mediating between the interests of the visited and the visitors,
• encouraging sustainable mobility,
• ensuring that nature-based tourism is environmentally compatible."


When I meditate for a moment on the name of the right-wing pre-war German youth hiking organization, the Wandervogel or “wandering birds”, I get a lump in my throat and understand in a flash the power of the National Socialist appeal to cherished folk practices and values (and I’m only half Austrian!): strong legs! alpenstocks of straight clear pine! a nip of schnapps at the top of the mountain! Pink-faced adolescents in leather shorts. But it was the progressives, the Naturfreunde, who spread across Europe and North America (from which they were mostly extirpated during the war; in this century the organization has opened shop in Senegal and Togo and become involved with conservation of African endangered species and habitats (NFI). Manfred Pils, the Naturfreunde Secretary General, tells Solnit, “(i)t was the Friends of Nature who campaigned against the efforts to exclude peope from private meadows and forests in the Alps. The campaign was called “Der verbotene Weg” (the forbidden path). So the Friends of Nature achieved finally a legalistic resolution which guaranteed access by walking to forests and alpine meadows for everyone.”" show less