Braunthal, Julius
BRAUNTHAL, JULIUS
BRAUNTHAL, JULIUS (1891–1972), Austrian journalist, historian, and socialist leader. The son of a bookkeeper who emigrated from Russia, Braunthal joined the Socialist youth movement in Vienna at the age of 15 when he was a bookbinder's apprentice. He participated in the mutiny of the Austro-Hungarian Navy at Cattaro (Boka Kotorska) at the end of World War i, and he was appointed adjutant to the undersecretary of state for the armed forces when the Austrian socialists joined the government. His journalistic activities covered a wide range. He was deputy-editor of the Arbeiterzeitung, the Austrian socialist daily, founder and editor of the popular daily Das kleine Blatt, and for many years editor of the socialist monthly Der Kampf. Braunthal was imprisoned for a year by the Austrian government in 1934, and after his release immigrated to England where he joined the staff of The Tribune, and later became editor of the International Socialist Forum. In 1939 he worked under Friedrich *Adler in the secretariat of the Labor and Socialist International in Brussels and after World War ii he became secretary of the reconstructed Socialist International.
Braunthal's enormous literary output includes a massive two-volume Geschichte der Internationale (1961–63) and biographies of Victor and Friedrich Adler and Otto *Bauer. He also compiled anthologies of the writings of Victor *Gollancz, Otto Bauer, Friedrich Austerlitz, and Zsigmund *Kunfi and was editor of the Yearbook of the International Socialist Labour Movement and of the Yearbook of the International Free Trade Union Movement. Braunthal supported Labor Zionism in the Vienna Socialist press. In his autobiography, In Search of the Millennium (1945), he stressed the roots of the socialist idea in Jewish messianism and discussed the impact of this Jewish background on certain socialist leaders.
add. bibliography:
A. Barkai, "The Austrian Social Democrats and the Jews," in: Wiener Library Bulletin, 24 (1970); J. Bunzl, "Arbeiterbewegung, 'Judenfrage' und Antisemitismus: am Beispiel des Wiener Bezirks Leopoldstadt," in: Bewegung und Klasse: Studien zur oesterreichischen Arbeitergeschichte (1979); H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture 1919–1934 (1991); J. Jacobs, On Socialists and the 'Jewish Question' after Marx (1992); A. Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (1983); R.S. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (1982).
[Robert Weltsch /
Lisa Silverman (2nd ed.)]