500 Schilling Otto Bauer

Otto Bauer, the Austro-Marxist theorist whose face appears on this coin, died in Paris in 1938 as a political exile — banned from the country that would eventually honor him on its currency. His expulsion followed the Austrian Civil War of February 1934, when Chancellor Dollfuss crushed the Social Democrats in four days of street fighting and outlawed the party entirely. The forty-seven-year gap between that suppression and this 1981 issue reflects how long Austrian politics took to formally rehabilitate its socialist tradition.