Schlesinger, Karl (1889–1938)

Abstract

Karl Schlesinger was born in Budapest; in 1919, after Béla Kun’s communist revolution in Hungary, he moved to Vienna, where he committed suicide when Hitler occupied Austria in March 1938. As early as 1914 he had published his important work on monetary theory, Theorie der Geld- und Kreditwirtschaft, which went, however, more or less unnoticed at that time because it used mathematical tools and was written in German – a forbidding combination at a time when the only German-speaking economists interested in theory, the Austrians, were rather averse to mathematical economics. Schlesinger was also an exceptional figure in so far as he was not a university teacher but a banker and influential member of the financial community. Nevertheless, he became a respected member of the Vienna Economic Society and, in the 1930s, one of the most active participants in Karl Menger’s mathematical colloquium.