HILFERDING, RUDOLF

HILFERDING, RUDOLF (1877–1941), socialist politician and theorist. Born in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family, he studied medicine but practiced his profession only rarely and reluctantly. He joined the socialist movement as a student. In 1906 he moved to Berlin, where he was foreign news editor for the social democratic daily Vorwaerts until 1915. His main theoretical work, Das Finanzkapital (1910), often called the modern extension of Marx's Das Kapital, is one of the most important works of Austrian Marxism. At the outbreak of World War I he belonged to the minority in the German Socialist Party which was against the ratification of the war bonds, and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party, which opposed the war. From 1918 to 1922 he edited the party paper Freiheit. After his party's reunion with the socialist majority he played a leading role in the German Social Democratic Party, twice serving as minister of finance (Aug.–Oct. 1923 in the Stresemann cabinet; June 1928–Dec. 1929 in the cabinet of Hermann Mueller). From 1924 to 1933 he published Die Gesellschaft, Internationale Revue fuer Sozialismus und Politik. After Hitler seized power, Hilferding lived in Zurich until 1938 and later in Paris, during this time working regularly for Neuer Vorwaerts, the organ of the German Social Democrats. In February 1941 he was handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy police. There is some doubt about how he died: according to one account, he committed suicide in prison, but another relates that he was murdered by the Nazis. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braunthal, Auf der Suche nach dem Millennium (1948), index. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: H.Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture 1919–1934 (1991); E. Unger, Politische Koepfe des sozialistischen Deutschlands (1920), 80–84; Kersten, in: Deutsche Rundschau, 84 (1958), 843–54; R.S. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (1982).