Otto Bauer was a Socialist leader and the first foreign minister of the Austrian Republic (1918-1919). He was the son of an industrialist who joined the socialist movement. Together with others he founded the socialist monthly Der Kampf (1907), which became a forum of socialist ideas. As an intellectual he studied, and wrote about socialist problems, like nationality. He suggested a new definition for nation: “the totality of men united through a community of fate into a community of character”. Bauer advocated granting cultural autonomy to various national groups of people in the Austria-Hungary Empire (including the Jews who fullfilled a very important role in history but could not be a separate nation). His ideas about assimilation were unacceptable by the Zionist, who criticized him sharply. After WWI Bauer became foreign ministerof the new republic, but resigned after a year when his ideas of merger with Germany failed to materialize.
After Dolfuss took power (1934), Bauer was instrumental in the struggle of the Viennese workers against the government, and after its collapse he fled to Czechoslovakia. In May 1938 he fled to Paris from where he published in the News Chronicle of London “an appeal to world conscience in rescueing three hundred Jews from the Germans in Austria”. Otto Bauer died on the very his appeal was published. He was an intensive writer and published different books on Socialist topics.