Karl Renner (1870–1950) is at once an imaginative scholar of multinationality and federalism, a pragmatic Austro–Marxist politician, a German nationalist nostalgic of the dual–monarchy, a legal relativist, and a proponent of economic democracy. Socialist, monarchist, and nationalist: it is difficult indeed to find a common denominator that would do justice to his long and complex career. Editor of the famous journal Der Kampf (the Austrian Social–Democrat twin of Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit), negotiator at the Treaty of Saint–Germain (1918), he served in several capacities. First chancellor of the First Republic after WW2 (1918–1920), he managed to play Stalin when he became first president of the Second Republic after WW2 (1945–1950) and save Austria from becoming a satellite of the Soviet Union. He campaigned against Engelbert Dollfuss’ Austro-Fascism in the 1930s but, convinced by Austria’s cultural unity with Germany, voted for the Anschluß in 1938.