Ignaz Auer

Ignaz Auer (19 April 1846 – 10 April 1907) was a Bavarian Social Democratic politician who served as a member of the German Reichstag for the Glauchau-Meerane Reichstag constituency intermittently between 1884 and 1906. He was born in Dommelstadl in 1846, the son of a butcher,[1] and joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1866. In 1872, he moved to Berlin as a saddler,[2] where he met and became friends with Eduard Bernstein, later an influential Marxist theoretician.[3] He was an active participant in the unity congress of 1875 at Gotha, which founded the Social Democratic Party of Germany,[1] (SPD) and later became Party Secretary of the SPD. Though on the right of the party, Auer was a pragmatist and viewed attempts to formulate social democratic reformism theoretically as harmful to its real political practice.[4] He remarked to Bernstein during the controversy over the latter's theory of revisionism, "What you call for, my dear Ede, is something which one neither admits openly nor puts to a formal vote; one simply gets on with it."[5] Auer died in Berlin on 10 April 1907.[1]

Ignaz Auer in c. 1895