Eduard Bernstein’s Ignaz Auer: eine Gedenkschrift is a short memorial biography of the German Social Democratic Party organizer and Reichstag deputy Ignaz Auer, published in Berlin in 1907, the year after Auer’s death. Bernstein, a lifelong friend and fellow party leader, wrote it as a tribute to a man he regarded as one of the movement’s indispensable builders rather than one of its celebrated orators or theorists. The book follows Auer from a poverty-stricken miller’s childhood in Bavaria through his years as a wandering journeyman, his rise in the party’s various factions, his imprisonment and exile under Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, and his long service as the party’s first secretary after the laws fell.
The epigraph Bernstein chose sets the tone for everything that follows: Auer himself had asked that his gravestone record his life as a struggle to reconcile and bridge the opposites dividing the contemporary world. That ambition—to hold a fractious movement together rather than to win arguments within it—is the thread Bernstein follows through twelve short chapters, from childhood and apprenticeship through Berlin, Hamburg, Chemnitz, Munich, and the final years. Bernstein admits in his foreword that the book can only sketch Auer’s life in broad outlines; a truly exhaustive biography, he says, could only be written in connection with the intimate history of German Social Democracy, so closely was Auer’s life bound to every important development of the party. What he offers instead is a portrait meant to keep alive for the movement’s fighters and its rising generation the image of a man he calls a loyal pioneer of the poor and a genius risen through self-education.
From the Mill to the Party’s Inner Circle
A Memorial and Its Purpose
Eduard Bernstein opens his 1907 memorial with an epigraph drawn from Auer himself: the wish that his gravestone record a life spent struggling to reconcile and bridge the opposites dividing the contemporary world. That self-description sets the tone for the whole book. In his foreword, dated Berlin, June 1907, Bernstein explains that he means to honour a loyal pioneer of the poor, a man of genius risen through self-education, and an example of firmness in thought and action. Brevity forces him to sketch only broad outlines; a truly exhaustive biography, he admits, could only be written alongside the intimate history of German Social Democracy, so tightly was Auer’s life bound to every important development of the party. The book, he hopes, will keep Auer’s image alive for the fighters and the rising generation, and in it readers will find the love and admiring esteem of a man who was perhaps the oldest of Auer’s surviving friends.
Birth, Poverty, and a Harsh Childhood
Auer was born on 19 April 1846 in the village of Sommelfeld near Neuburg am Inn, the ninth child of the miller Franz Auer and the last male of the line. Two years later his father died, leaving a debt-burdened house and seven hungry mouths. The family sank into bitter poverty; the local community refused to support them, and his mother was reduced to begging. At seven the boy went to an uncle, a miller at Kirnbach am Inn, where he was well treated—until the uncle died in 1855 and the child was, in Bernstein’s word, “auctioned” to a farmer, tending cattle and doing hard labour as a servant. A village schoolteacher turned hostile, but a clergyman who lent him books encouraged him; Auer later rejected every revealed religion yet never hated the clergy as a class. At fourteen he was confirmed and apprenticed to a miller named Gottlieb in the Lech valley—joyless years. He completed the apprenticeship in 1863, aged seventeen, and his mother died a year later.
Wander Years and the Socialist Awakening
His wander years fell in a politically agitated time, dominated by the national question and the split between the “Great German” and “Lesser German” currents. Auer joined workers’ educational associations, travelled to Munich and Augsburg, and in Stuttgart in 1867–68 met Johann Most; the two became close friends. Conscripted into the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment at Regensburg, he served six months and was discharged as unfit for garrison duty with the rating “excellent.” Returning home, he joined a democratic workers’ support association in Nassau and was elected its chairman at twenty-two. By the Eisenach congress of 1869 he was in Augsburg, inside a strong Lassallean community, and he joined the Eisenach party. In 1870 he went to Munich, then Vienna, where he learned that Most had been arrested with Heinrich Oberwinder and others. He spent the winter of 1870–71 back in Augsburg—the social democrats fared poorly in the first Reichstag elections—then moved to Kassel, becoming a leading Eisenacher against the Lassalleans. When a printers’ strike in Kassel collapsed in spring 1872, Auer, now married, decided to try Berlin, where the Eisenach party needed strength.
First Words in Berlin
Berlin’s workers showed little of the academic-minded spirit, and meetings were thinly attended. In April 1872 a better hall was found at Niederwallstrasse 40, and there, on 21 April 1872, Auer spoke for the first time in Berlin before the Demokratischer Arbeiterverein. The announced speaker was a young physician, recently arrived and working as an editor for the Demokratische Zeitung, lecturing on the ground and property question. The assembly learned that Auer was the only man willing to speak; at first he found no support, but by March he had won a following. The chairman opened with a long speech hoping the educated would be convinced of the justice of the workers’ aspirations; then came the lecture, which led into discussion of the trades and the communist significance of ground and property. Among the discussants the Demokratische Zeitung names one “Auer”—Ignaz Auer was meant.
His remarks made a lasting impression. He began by owning the inadequate education he had found in the provinces, then showed the actual conditions, proving himself thoroughly at home in the subject and able to speak engagingly; the workers answered oppression with a fine irony. Auer was surprised to find himself among these Social Democrats. He had been in Berlin some time and had vainly studied the Eisenach programme; only the notice of the Demokratischer Arbeiterverein in the Demokratische Zeitung had drawn him, since its purpose was to unite local workers—showing it was a mere appendage of the dominant democracy. Others arriving from outside likely did the same, and while one lingered under that delusion one should not be surprised if a worker who had belonged to the Eisenach party outside ended up in Berlin in the Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein. Were such lectures organized under the party flag, it would win more listeners and supporters.
Founding the Berlin Section
The lecture had an immediate effect. Members tired of the self-satisfied old guard eagerly took up the idea and moved to admit the newcomer and decide on founding the association. Patience was needed: at the general assembly weeks later, on 13 May 1872, the motion survived long and heated debate to win an absolute majority, though not the required two-thirds. Following the chairman’s example, the entire board resigned, and a new board of “young” members was elected, with August Reinsch and August Baumann as chairmen—men who earned the greatest merits in founding the Berlin section of the Eisenach party and later the united party. Bernstein himself, having joined the movement as a newcomer, took a seat on that board and soon after the honorary office of “party” work, which brought him into close contact with Auer; the two quickly became close friends.
Three weeks after the founding, in June 1873, the association renamed itself Sozialdemokratischer Arbeiterverein and resolved to meet only once a month, otherwise to be free—a step that soon forced it to give up three of its four local groups and hand over only one. The new direction was heeded and the founding perfected. Auer, surrounded by men like Naumann, Reinsch, Kapfer and Märfe, now led the Berlin section. In hard struggles with the Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein they brought the Eisenach section from meetings of twenty or thirty to assemblies of 120 to 150, and one after another of the initially hesitant Eisenachers was reconciled.
Leader Under Fire
A resolution can be passed in a large circle, Bernstein reflects, but it is not the size of the circle that characterizes a person—it is how he behaves where he stands. The born leader proved himself under all circumstances, keeping himself free in full clarity. To build in Berlin an Eisenach membership able to compete in every respect with the mighty Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein was Auer’s work—in every respect, despite the systematic disruption practised against the Eisenachers, at times descending into physical struggle. “If we had fifty men like that,” Auer once said, “we would blow up the Lassallean general assembly so that they would come to reason.” He stood in the midst of his liveliest development and could not praise his luck enough. He never boasted of it, yet his success was never forgotten, and where it mattered he could match a multitude. Bernstein recalls the committee meetings at Münzstrasse 5, once overrun by a crowd of corps students, one of whom wanted to confront him; in the ensuing scuffle Auer and a compatriot and professional comrade seized the ten or twelve young fellows with sturdy fists and escorted them up the stairs.
The Party’s Unpaid Servant
Auer’s work for the party paper was often interrupted and broken off, and a supplement of the Hamburger Arbeiterzeitung once portrayed him with humour and vivid descriptions of Hamburg conditions. While he held his strong position in the expedition and administration of the paper, he himself often struggled to preserve his humour. Bernstein does not know what payment Auer received for his laborious work, but he is certain that what Auer had told the Zeitung about Walster’s experiences held true in heightened measure: his pay did not suffice even for his modest needs. The party press was then thoroughly proletarian in its means; the greatest part of party work went unpaid—among the Eisenachers even more than among the Lassalleans, whose stricter centralization had better finances. Auer threw himself into the work regardless.
At the Leipzig party congress he was elected to the Reichstag for the 22nd Saxon electoral district, Altenburg-Zwickau. At the Whitsun congress of 1877 in Gotha the leadership was renewed, with Auer, Geib, Peroff and others forming the Central Election Committee. At the end of 1877 he gave up his secretary post to move to Berlin, where a new and no less important party mission awaited him.
Editor of the Freie Presse
The Berliner Freie Presse, founded in 1876 as the capital’s first social-democratic daily, was printed at the press of the Allgemeine deutsche Assoziationsbuchdruckerei, a registered cooperative of party members. Its board and a five-person supervisory council were chosen by tacit agreement from the five members of the party’s Central Election Committee. From 1877 the political editorship rested with Paul Grottkau, Vollmann and others. As the paper grew in importance the editorial staff came under pressure: Johann Most, who had led it at its founding, was on tense terms with the editorial board, and the state authorities persecuted the editors. One after another was removed by harsh sentences; Grottkau was eventually driven to emigration, Vollmann left Berlin. The Central Election Committee, whose members were also supervisory councillors of the press cooperative, decided to entrust Auer with the editorship, and so around 1877–78 he took over the Freie Presse for the third time.
Auer did not belong to those who could overlook or ignore; where he felt something was wrong he could display an iron severity without otherwise playing the superior. He combined editing and business management and worked to restore a collegial relationship between the two bodies. As editor he acted so that the state’s attorney was given as little opportunity as possible—not from sensationalism or oppositionalism, for on press questions there were then no differences of any significance. He did love sharp expressions, though, and was not always careful about insults against opposing personalities or correspondences. The state’s attorney often enough found occasion to bring charges whose condemnation was certain, but Auer never shrank from the danger.
Most, Greifenberg, and the Limits of Discipline
An anecdote captures the editorial room. Auer would sometimes let his imagination run too wild, and the director, Karl Greifenberg, would bring the manuscript to him asking whether it should really be printed. Auer would read it and say it would not be printed; Greifenberg would object that it would; Auer would insist it would not; Greifenberg would say it must be seen; Auer would reply that Greifenberg was the responsible editor and could not do that. Finally Auer would grab Greifenberg by the arm and tell him to stay calm—he remained the editor and Auer his subordinate—and to write a proper article. This literally happened: Most would let the manuscript go, grumbling and half-laughing, and write another.
The contrast between the two men is the point. Most was an undisciplined talent, not subordinate; Auer showed him too clearly that he did not fully count, and Most stored up resentment. Most’s agitation ended with his arrest after the Hödel assassination attempt of 11 May 1878, while Auer and other leaders were in prison. The Nobiling assassination of 2 June 1878 followed, and an unprecedented persecution broke over the party and its press.
The Widening of the Printed Word
The narrative picks up with an official report conceding that the spread of prohibited printed matter in Berlin has increased. Auer’s response, as Bernstein frames it, is wry: whether or not the report is accurate, he cannot change it, and if true it is a good sign for his comrades and a verdict against the Socialist Law. The authorities have accomplished nothing except to admit that forbidden writings circulate as before. He grants that some of the material arriving from abroad goes well beyond what was customary in his day—but after a law that placed Socialists outside the law, no one can reproach a man for concluding that if he has no rights he has no duties either. That the writers abroad, alongside comrades active inside Germany, sometimes overshoot the party’s bounds is rooted in the nature of things, and there is no remedy for it.
Exposing the Bismarckian Press
Auer next took on the suppression of the Neue Gesellschaft and the state of siege over Hamburg-Altona and its surroundings. He laid out, in trenchant fashion, the machinations of the Bismarckian press, tying Hamburg to the consequences of the siege, and exposed in Hamburg fashion the system of the police commissioner who ran this dirty work as a central office. Auer believed he had shown that the point was to parry attacks—attacks not to be sought on the social-democratic side but quite elsewhere. His challenge to the authorities was blunt: it is up to you to better the matter; you have the best intentions, we are on the watch everywhere.
Puttkamer’s Boast and the Comedian’s Wish
Bismarck’s answer to the urgent question, prompted by the newly promoted Interior Minister Puttkamer, came in the latter’s first official speech as deputy minister. Puttkamer began worthily enough by claiming that “we” are far more influential in the workforce than the social-democratic representatives—a sentence that illustrated his striving better than anything else could. One believes what one wishes. Even Bebel could no longer deny the facts; the “pure comedian,” as Theodor Barth once called him in the Reichstag, acted as though he believed them. What was beyond doubt was the wish behind it: that Social Democracy should become revolutionary, because then it would cease to be the party of the working class.
Schwerin: From Journalist to Tradesman
Brought down by his own fault, Auer feared his stay in Leipzig—where Bebel, Liebknecht and Hasenclever lived—would not last, and that settling there would only hasten the state of siege Puttkamer already envisaged. He moved to Schwerin in Mecklenburg, his wife’s home, where he was received with mockery; the political idyll was over. Unable to make a living by journalism—no socialist paper in Germany had its existence secured for the next day—he gave the profession up and became a merchant, half trader, half journeyman, entering his mother-in-law’s old-ware business as a partner with a small sum borrowed from a well-off comrade. The work meant carpentry, upholstery and furniture-polishing, wood and paint, brush and spirit varnish—everything a small self-employed producer must take on. The strain told on him. “I have become old,” he wrote years later, doubting he could endure such hardships again. Financially the business failed to thrive for want of capital and commercial experience; the small deposits were used up, and at the end of the Schwerin years he was the same proletarian as before.
A Backward Land and a Lost Mandate
Political activity of any note was impossible in backward Schwerin: the industrial workers were mostly in the countryside, a few votes were mustered at Reichstag elections, and the feudal institutions of the Obotrite land excluded development on a purely political basis. Auer gathered the small local band of comrades and did the necessary work quietly. Worse, his Reichstag mandate was lost again in the elections of 27 October 1881—an event that struck the party like a thunderbolt, in the oldest of its constituencies, where in 1873, when Auer first ran, 10,470 socialist votes had faced 4,240 conservative ones.
The Munich Trial
On 27 September 1888 a state action opened with a weapons search; twelve Social Democrats were charged, among them Georg von Vollmar and his son Kaspar. Auer was not among the accused, though he was called the soul of the party in Munich and the head guiding its undertakings—somewhat exaggerated, the text allows, for the Munich rank and file. He had quickly won the trust of Munich comrades, and he handed the prosecution its handle: at the trial of 28–29 October 1888, with Bernstein among the defense counsel, Auer appeared and testified in the first instance about the suppressed Munich meetings, confirming the charge. The prosecutor sought a year’s imprisonment against him and moved against the rest. Auer, with unmatched skill, forced the national-liberal deputy Schauss to speak for the accused and compelled the Reich government, by the force of his presentation, to act in its own cause. Despite excellent pleadings by Auer and the two advocates, all the accused were acquitted.
“After Ten Years”
A brochure noted that Auer’s health had forced him to cut contact with comrades and friends to a minimum. He had undertaken, on the party’s commission, a history of the first twelve years of the Socialist Law—laborious work gathering and sifting material from all over Germany, with the earliest period impossibly hard to establish. To finish by the law’s anniversary he moved to Zurich at the start of 1889 to work free of police interference; with advice and help the first part appeared around August 1889. Before the rest was done his nerves gave out—he literally could not hold the pen. When party circles learned of it, the Nuremberg members, long the bearer of the party, offered a sum of workers’ groschen, enabling him first to take a water cure and then to rest at Lake Geneva, restoring his working capacity as far as his nervous condition allowed. At the start of 1890 the final part of Nach zehn Jahren appeared—the only larger printed work Auer left the party, a monument assembled by a master-builder from stones others helped gather.
May Day and the Halle Congress
In the elections of 20 February 1890 Auer could again intervene personally, and his mandate was won back. In April 1890, before he went to Berlin for the new Reichstag’s first session, the dispute over the May Day celebration broke out—the struggle of the “Young” against the old leadership. Auer was held responsible for the phrase that the party had no interest in workers stopping work, and the Reichstag caucus decided against the May Day strike, determined by the fact that the expiry of the Socialist Law was not yet settled and any serious clash had to be avoided—clashes the more likely because anti-worker feeling was ripe among employers and found favor with the authorities. When Hamburg employers answered May Day with a lockout, Auer took up the pen again, publishing “Gewehr bei Fuß” in the Berliner Volksblatt of July 1890, urging workers to concentrate all their strength on Hamburg. On 1 August 1890 the executive published its invitation to the first Social Democratic congress on German soil, with a draft organization for the post-law era. A storm of attacks arose; Auer defended the draft in the Volksblatt and at the Halle congress of 12–18 October 1890, giving a substantial report on the party’s organizational history. The draft passed with amendments, and Auer was unanimously elected first party secretary.
The Berlin Years and the Inner Life of the Party
His Berlin years, 1890 to 1903, look outwardly uneventful: the Reichstag mandate renewed each time, no more exile or imprisonment. He lived near the Kreuzberg and died there. The evenness concealed exhausting work and struggles over fundamental questions and tactics. Auer had a talent for tending the party’s internal affairs while developing its external fighting strength—like an outstanding staff officer who must sometimes defer to the majority. At Frankfurt in 1894 he sided with the “classical” wing against the Bavarian deputies, remarking that it belongs to democrats to say: you are my comrades, but I must submit to your decisions. The executive is a democratic college, not an autocratic one, and the congress protocols are the chief source for Auer’s intellectual personality. At Erfurt in 1891, debating Vollmar’s resolution on the “eve of revolution,” Auer spoke against Vollmar, distinguishing his own opportunism from Vollmar’s and warning against having two programs—one for weekdays and one for Sunday. At Berlin in 1892 he reported on cooperatives, tariffs and factory inspection.
Agrarian Demands and the Prussian Landtag
At Breslau in 1895 Auer stood under the banner of agrarian demands adapted to peasants as property owners. At Gotha in 1896 he reported on the organizational activity forced by the Reichstag dissolution and the dissolution of the executive. His report at Hamburg in 1897 on participation in the Prussian Landtag elections—where the party had previously practiced abstention—had fundamental significance; even sharp opponents called it a masterwork pleasing from the aesthetic standpoint alone. Year by year he advocated participation with growing conviction, undeceived by particular successes: he did not believe it would bring Social Democrats into the Landtag, and said the liberals would gladly take Social Democratic votes and give nothing in return. The only achievable gain was driving the ultra-reactionary majority out. It demanded high political thinking from the workers, and Auer refused to hear that they were not clever enough: if our people are clever enough to bring about a new culture, a new worldview, then they are clever enough for this. Participation carried by a great majority and confirmed by later congresses, though under changed political circumstances the tactic took a different course than Auer imagined, with neither the effects he envisioned nor the harms opponents feared.
Radicalism, Opportunism, and “Bernsteinism”
The congresses after Hamburg stood under the sign of the struggle between radicalism and opportunism, and of revisionism. Whether Auer was an opportunist could be denied or affirmed depending on the meaning given the word: strictly speaking he was never one, or always one. He kept out of theoretical debates but was better informed than he admitted and never let the corpus delicti of Bernsteinism be smuggled past him; no friend of theory, he judged much of it critically, convinced the party must act in organic connection with its growth and struggles. In a letter of 13 July 1899 he asked whether there was really no “opinion” in the party, recalling Bernstein’s 1865 writing that Social Democracy must emancipate itself from an outlived worldview and become a democratic-socialist reform party—doubting a party of fifty years’ literature and nearly forty years’ organization could turn overnight, and warning the leading circles would simply split it. On 31 July 1899 he wrote that Bernstein’s articles and book had placed a milestone between the masses and revisionism; everyone must read it, and its effect would not fail. He called it Kantian nonsense to say that if English workers wanted, the socialist state would come to England in six hours; a movement with a healthy foundation tolerates such things. At Stuttgart in 1898 he called out to those fearing disintegration: I fear that this fear arises in some because they are not firm in themselves. Strengthen yourselves, and then you need not fear that we shall be corrupted. At Hanover in 1899 he declared that once he had grasped Bernstein’s teachings he was an enthusiastic follower; his series in the Neue Zeit and an article on the nature of the masses stirred tempers so that more than a third of delegates withheld their votes at the executive election, distressing him greatly. By Mainz in 1900 things had smoothed over: as rapporteur on organization he showed himself at the height of his ability and humor, and all votes came together again. Lübeck in 1901 went less favorably; the trade-union question supplied the conflict.
The Organizer as a Type
Bernstein’s Auer is not the heroic agitator or the doctrinal theorist but something rarer in the literature of the labor movement: the man who does the unglamorous work on which everything else depends. The book returns again and again to this distinction. Auer could speak, and speak well—his first Berlin speech in April 1872, at a meeting of the Democratic Workers’ Association, made a lasting impression because he knew the conditions of the trades from the inside and could address them with engaging irony. But what Bernstein emphasizes is not eloquence. It is the patient construction of organization: building the Eisenach faction in Berlin from meetings of twenty or thirty people into assemblies of a hundred and fifty, negotiating with hostile Lassallean rivals, editing the party press under threat of prosecution, and later, as first party secretary after 1890, managing the internal affairs of a mass party while its public fighting strength grew.
The comparison Bernstein draws is telling. He likens Auer to an outstanding staff officer who must sometimes defer to the majority—a man whose talent lay in attending to the party’s internal affairs while others commanded attention in the Reichstag or the congress hall. The congress protocols, Bernstein says, are the chief source for Auer’s intellectual personality, and he treats them as such, quoting at length from Auer’s reports on organization, cooperatives, factory inspection, and electoral tactics. The portrait that emerges is of a politician whose medium was the committee room and the executive session rather than the platform.
The Reconcilement of Opposites
The epigraph’s promise—that Auer’s life was a struggle to reconcile and bridge the opposites dividing the contemporary world—finds its fullest expression in Bernstein’s account of the party’s internal wars. Auer’s position in the great contest between radicalism and opportunism, and around the revisionist controversy that attached to Bernstein’s own name, is described with deliberate care. Depending on how opportunism was interpreted, Bernstein writes, the question whether Auer was an opportunist could be denied: strictly speaking he was never one, or always one. Auer kept out of theoretical debates but was better informed than he admitted, and he did not let the evidence of Bernsteinism be smuggled past him over the years. He was no friend of theory, yet judged much of what was presented to him very critically.
The letters Bernstein quotes from 1899 show Auer’s mind at work on the revisionist question. He doubted that a party with fifty years of literature, nearly forty years of organization, and a rich tradition could turn on a dime; the leading circles, he warned, would simply split the party. Yet he also told Bernstein that his articles and book had placed a milestone between the masses and revisionism, and that everyone must read the book. This is the reconciler’s instinct in action: holding the movement’s inheritance and its necessary changes in the same hand, refusing the clean break in either direction.
The same instinct appears in Auer’s handling of the May Day dispute of 1890, when he was held responsible for the phrase that the party had no interest in workers stopping work, and in his defense of the party executive’s organizational draft against a storm of attacks at the Halle congress. It appears again in his conduct at the 1894 Frankfurt congress, where he sided with the classical wing against the Bavarian deputies while insisting that it belongs to democrats to say: you are my comrades, but I must submit to your decisions. Bernstein notes that the party executive is a democratic college, not an autocratic one—a point that matters for understanding how Auer exercised influence without ever commanding.
The Cost of the Work
Bernstein does not sentimentalize the toll the movement took on its servants. The Schwerin years under the anti-socialist laws are among the book’s most affecting passages: unable to make a living as a journalist, Auer became a partner in his mother-in-law’s old-ware business, doing carpentry, upholstery, and furniture-polishing work, scraping by until the small deposits were used up and he stood at the end of those years, in Bernstein’s words, the same proletarian as before. He wrote later that he had grown old, and could not endure such hardships again. The history of the first twelve years of the Socialist Law, which the party commissioned from him, broke his nerves so badly that he literally could not hold the pen; Nuremberg party members, long the bearer of the party, collected a sum of workers’ groschen so that he could take a water cure and rest at Lake Geneva. The resulting book, Nach zehn Jahren, appeared at the start of 1890, and Bernstein calls it the only larger printed work Auer left the party—a monument, he says, assembled by a master-builder from stones others helped gather.
A Life as a Milestone
Bernstein’s memorial is itself a document of a particular moment in German Social Democracy: written in 1907, at the height of the party’s prewar strength, by one of its most controversial figures, about a friend who had died the year before. Its value to later readers lies less in the biographical facts, which Bernstein himself admits are sketched in outline, than in what it reveals about how the party understood its own history. Auer’s career—from the auctioned orphan to the first secretary of the largest socialist party in Europe—was offered as proof that the movement could raise up its own leaders from the poorest ranks. His method—the patient bridging of opposites, the submission to collective decisions even in disagreement, the willingness to take the blows that fall on whoever stands between quarrels—was offered as a model of political conduct.
The book closes where Auer’s own epigraph began: with the gravestone and the inscription he asked for. Bernstein’s final pages return to the reconciler’s vocation, to the striving to equalize and smooth over opposites that earned Auer his main reproach from the party’s left, and to his answer—that one cannot remove all opposites from the world, that whoever places himself between quarrels gets blows, and that he would gladly take these on himself. It is a modest ending for a modest subject, and Bernstein clearly intended it that way. The memoir keeps alive the image of a man who believed the movement’s unity was worth more than any argument he might win within it, and who spent his life proving it.
