Unlike most utopians, Otto Neurath had a chance to change the world. One of the polymaths that fin de siècle Vienna seemed to produce in droves, Neurath – a leading philosopher, economist, designer, civil servant and curator – was appointed as head planner for the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.
This revolutionary state, which lasted little more than a month in the spring of 1919, emerged from the ruins of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, when the hardship and social unrest of the period helped foment the 1918-19 German Revolution. The new republic’s leaders confronted adverse circumstances not dissimilar from our own as they attempted to build a new society threatened by a pandemic, war and nascent fascism.
But Neurath was never able to enact his utopian plans because the Social Democratic government in Berlin dispatched the proto-Nazi Freikorps to strangle Bavarian socialism in its cradle. Unlike some of his peers, Neurath was lucky to survive the terror they wrought.
