Karl Bauer – My Father and the Legacy He Left to His Children

My father was a man who viewed the world not in short moments, but in long, sweeping lines. He urged us to „think beyond the present,“ to discern connections where others might only perceive isolated facts, and never to be satisfied with mere surfaces. This, he often emphasized, was not idle or detached philosophizing, but what he understood from Goethe’s Faust as “striving, earnest endeavor” – the prerequisite for achieving true inner fulfillment.

Born during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, he witnessed the proclamation of the First World War in 1914 as a child, perched on his father’s shoulders outside the provincial government building in Klagenfurt. He grew up during the turmoil and hardship of that war, which affected even the civilian population far from the battlefields. Nevertheless, in 1925, despite great financial hardship, he moved from Carinthia to Vienna to attend the Academy of Fine Arts.

After graduating and passing a teacher’s examination, he was caught up in the catastrophe of the Great Depression. A sustainable existence as an artist was nearly impossible. However, thanks to his pedagogical training, he secured a teaching position in Vienna – though without permanent security – and maintained a modest studio to continue his artistic work. In 1935, amidst political and economic upheaval, his teaching contract was not renewed. He returned to Carinthia, striving to earn a living through commercial graphic design.

His life was marked by ruptures and upheavals, shaped by historical forces that often demanded decisions born more of necessity than of conviction. His contact with National Socialism after losing his teaching post, and his subsequent joining of the NSDAP in 1938, were such decisions – driven not by ideology or fanaticism, but by the economic hardship of the time. In his notes, he wrote: „On the street, one often encountered young men carrying signs that read: ‚University graduate – will accept any work!'“.

Those were hard years, characterized by a struggle for mere existence. From Carinthia, he moved to Munich, attempting to build a livelihood as a newspaper illustrator, creating artwork for short stories and serialized historical features. His marriage in 1938 to Leopoldine, a woman from Vienna, awakened his determination to found and sustain a family and return to Vienna. Without party affiliation, however, secure employment was unattainable. His reinstatement as a teacher – now in Klosterneuburg – freed him from financial insecurity.

As a teacher, he witnessed the outbreak of the Second World War with profound dismay. Alongside his professional duties, he worked with great discipline on artistic questions, concentrating more deeply on the themes of form and color. For form, copper engraving proved to be the ideal medium; for color, he preferred pastel painting, which allowed for large formats, layered construction, and flexible corrections. During this productive period, he created around ten copper engravings and several pastel works.

Among the other major changes in his life were the death of his mother in 1941 and the birth of my sister Rotraud in the same year. In 1942, he was drafted into military service as an ordinary soldier. From 1943 to 1946, he was held as a prisoner of war – first in North Africa, later in the United States. Only there, in captivity, did he learn of the full extent of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. This realization deeply shook him.

Though his artistic work had never aligned itself with the regime, he later reflected critically on his party membership in his writings and conversations. This was not a matter of self-justification, but rather a silent, honest confrontation with responsibility, guilt, and the limits of human action under dictatorship.

His later turn toward philosophy and religion was also an attempt to find answers to the questions raised by those experiences – not for the world, but for himself. After all he had endured, he no longer sought employment that would bind him to rigid structures or endanger his intellectual freedom. He decided not to become a state official again but to live committed only to his own conscience – to his thoughts, his art, and his search for what endures when systems and ideologies pass away.

In 1955, during this existential new beginning after the war, I was born – he was already 50 years old. His search for enduring values was also reflected in what he left behind for my sister and me. He knew we would not read all the books that had shaped his thinking, but he wanted us to grasp their essence. Sitting at his typewriter, he prepared carefully selected excerpts. „These excerpts were made for you with clear intent,“ he wrote. „I told myself that my children do not need to read all these books – but perhaps the selections will inspire them to seek more!“

Among the works he excerpted were: Fritz Schachermeyr’s The Tragedy of Completion, Paul Davies’ God and Modern Physics, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, and Viktor E. Frankl’s The Suffering of a Meaningless Life. These books served him as impulses to critically question ideas and explore relationships between them. They reflect a historical consciousness – perhaps also the insight that cultures bloom and fade in cycles, that nothing we take for granted is everlasting, and that the world is made of recurring patterns, within which every person must find their place.

Yet my father’s legacy extends beyond the historical. The war and the years that followed led him into a deepened spiritual development. „A turn toward religion came to me only with the war,“ he wrote. He never claimed to have found final answers. Yet he recognized: „That which occupies our minds is not without importance. In the end, it is not success, not reputation, and not wealth that renders a life fulfilled, but those seemingly incidental things that accompany us quietly and then, at decisive moments, show themselves to be of utmost significance.“

„Work should be done well – it should retain its beauty and leave behind a sense of satisfaction,“ he often said. „And yet, those immeasurable things that happen unnoticed, seemingly useless, leave a deep and lasting imprint on our lives, often without our awareness. And at some future moment, they may prove decisive, determining whether this life was well lived.“

He did not believe in a punitive God. „And for this belief,“ he wrote to us, „we must be grateful, because it gives us the hope without which there can be no life.“ What guided him above all was the conviction that love stands supreme. „That love stands above all else – as the highest of these three – has always been among the most beautiful realizations for me,“ he wrote. „Only in its embrace do we find true security, like the Prodigal Son in the arms of the loving father, whom we perceive as God and Jesus, His Son.“ [see image of the Prodigal Son]

My father was not an easy man, but he was a passionate seeker. He searched in painting, he searched in philosophy, and he searched in faith. And this, above all, is what he sought to pass on to us: the ability to think beyond the present time, the strength to seek one’s own path, and the realization that, ultimately, it is not great achievements that matter, but what has shaped our inner being. His life, his excerpts, his thoughts, and his letters – they are not answers, but invitations to continue the search. Alongside his artistic work, these are his true legacy to us.

Herbert Bauer

14th February 2025