Otto Neurath - Biography

Biography

Neurath was born in Vienna, the son of Wilhelm Neurath (1840–1901), a well-known political economist at the time. He studied mathematics in Vienna and gained his Ph.D. in the department of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin.

He married Anna Schapire in 1907. She died as a result of childbirth (Paul Neurath) in 1911, and he married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopher Olga Hahn. Perhaps because of his wife's blindness and then because of the outbreak of war, his son, Paul Neurath was sent to a children's home outside Vienna, where Neurath's mother lived, and returned to live with both of his parents when he was nine years old.

Neurath taught political economy at the Neue Wiener Handelsakademie (New College of Commerce, Vienna) until war broke out. Subsequently he became director of the Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later the Deutsches Wirtschaftsmuseum) at Leipzig. Wolfgang Schumann, known from the Dürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles, urged him to work out a plan for socialization. Neurath joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918-19 and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned but returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison he wrote "Anti-Spengler", a critical attack on Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West".

In Red Vienna, he joined the Social Democrats and became secretary of the Austrian Association for Housing and Small Gardens (Verband für Siedlungs-und Kleingartenwesen), a collection of self-help groups that set out to provide housing and garden plots to its members. In 1923, he founded a new museum for housing and city planning called Siedlungsmuseum. In 1925 he renamed it Gesellschafts-und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna) and founded an own association for it, in which the Vienna city administration, the trade unions, the Chamber of Workers and the Bank of Workers became members, then mayor Karl Seitz having acted as first proponent of the association. Julius Tandler, city councillor for welfare and health, served at the first board of the museum together with other prominent social democratic politicians. The museum was provided with exhibition rooms at buildings of the city administration, the most prominent being the People's Hall at the Vienna City Hall. To make the museum understandable for everybody, Neurath worked on graphic design and visual education. With the illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Marie Reidemeister (who he would marry in 1941), Neurath created Isotype, a symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. At international conventions of city planners, Neurath presented and promoted his communication tools.

During the 1920s, Neurath also became an ardent logical positivist, and was the main author of the Vienna Circle manifesto. He was the driving force behind the Unity of Science movement and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. During the 1930s, he also began promoting Isotype as an International Picture Language, connecting it both with the adult education movement and with the Internationalist passion for new and artificial languages, although he stressed in talks and correspondence that Isotype was not intended to be a stand-alone language, and was limited in what it could communicate.

During the Austrian Civil War of 1934, Neurath had been working in Moscow. Anticipating problems, he had asked to get a coded message in case it would be dangerous for him to return to Austria. As Marie Reidemeister reported later, after receiving the telegram "Carnap is waiting for you" Neurath chose to travel to The Hague instead of Vienna, where he could continue his international work. His Vienna team soon dispersed, the museum's work came to a hold.

His wife fled to Holland as well. There Olga Neurath died and after the Luftwaffe bombing of Rotterdam he fled with Marie Reidemeister to England, crossing the Channel with other refugees in an open boat. He and Reidemeister married in 1941, after a period interned on the Isle of Man (Neurath was in Onchan camp). In England, he and his wife set up the Isotype Institute in Oxford and he was asked to advise on, and design Isotype charts for, the intended redevelopment of the slums of Bilston, near Wolverhampton.

Neurath died, suddenly and unexpectedly in December 1945. After his death, Marie Neurath continued the work of the Isotype Institute, publishing Neurath's writings posthumously, completing projects he had started and writing many children's books using the Isotype system, until her death in the 1980s.