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Title: Anarchism in Austria Author: Gabriel Kuhn Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Austria, history Source: Retrieved on 22nd November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0042 Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
In the nineteenth century, anarchism in Austria was mainly associated
with anti-monarchist sentiments in the non-German speaking territories
of the Habsburg Empire. In 1851 Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) was sentenced
to death by Austrian authorities for his role in the Pentecostal
Uprising in Prague two years earlier. His sentence was later commuted,
and he was extradited to Russia.
Most early anarchists within Germanspeaking Austria emerged from the
radical wing of the Social Democratic Party. A major influence was the
agitation of Johann Most (1846–1906) in the 1860s. Another important
early anarchist agitator was Josef Peukert (1855–1910), co-publisher of
the journal Die Zukunft (The Future) (1879–84). In 1883–4 the killings
of two police agents who had infiltrated the radical workers’ movement
were attributed to anarchists. The following wave of government
repression saw many anarchists imprisoned or forced into exile. The
assassination of Empress Elisabeth (1837–98) by self-declared Italian
anarchist Luigi Luccheni (1873–1910) in 1898 seemed to confirm the
movement’s violent character. Anarchism continued to influence radical
factions of the social democrats, however, most notably the work of Max
Adler (1873–1937).
A workers’ council movement, strongly influenced by anarchist ideas,
emerged in the early twentieth century and proved decisive in forcing
the monarchy’s dissolution, and, in turn, an end to World War I. A
short-lived council republic was established in Hungary in 1919.
After World War I and the establishment of the Austrian Republic, most
anarchists rallied around the Bund herrschaftsloser Sozialisten
(Alliance of Non-Authoritarian Socialists) founded by Pierre Ramus
(1882–1942) in 1919. Austrian-born historian Max Nettlau (1865–1944)
lived and worked in Vienna during most of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932
the small railway town of Wörgl in western Austria drew international
attention for its successful implementation of a free money syst em –
declared illegal by Austrian authorities a year later – based on the
economic theories of Silvio Gesell (1862–1930). The Austrofascist
seizure of power in 1933 and the Nazi takeover in 1938 put an end to
almost all anarchist activity in the country. Most anarchists fled into
exile or were imprisoned or executed.
The reemergence of an anarchist movement after World War II proved
difficult. In the 1960s some artists’ groups, most notably the Wiener
Aktionismus and the Wiener Gruppe, expressed anarchist sentiments. In
1976 the anarchist journal Die Befreiung (Liberation) was founded
(publication ceased in 1997). It would take until the 1980s, however,
before the autonomous movement brought anarchist notions back to public
attention and debate.
From 1982 until 2005 the bookstore and publisher Monte Verita was a
focus point of anarchist activity. It was associated with an influential
anarchist collective, the Revolutionsbräuhof (Revolution Brewery). The
TATblatt (Action News) (1988–2005) was the most important journal for
the autonomous movement. The Ernst-Kirchweger-Haus (EKH), a Vienna squat
occupied since 1989, counts as the current center of Austria’s anarchist
counterculture. The Pierre Ramus Society was founded in 1992 and
publishes the journal Erkenntnis (Knowledge).
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Botz, G., Brandstetter, G., & Pollack, M. (1977) Im Schatten der
Arbeiterbewegung. Zur Geschichte des Anarchismus in Osterreich und
Deutschland (In the Shadow of the Workers’ Movement: On the History of
Anarchism in Austria and Germany). Vienna: Europaverlag.
Foltin, R. (2004) Und wir bewegen uns dock. Soziale Bewegungen in
Osterreich (We Are Still Moving: Social Movements in Austria) . Vienna:
Edition Grundrisse.