14 My Teaching Activities in Geneva

After thirty years of service, my position with the Handelskammer entitled me to retire with a lifetime pension of nearly 15,000 shillings per year. Every Handelskammer official received double credit for two and a half years of war service. In addition, I received credit for three years of prewar service. Since a service year that had begun was counted as a full year, I had earned the right to enter into retirement on October 1, 1932. I had always awaited the coming of this date with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I wanted to shed the obligations of my office in order to dedicate myself fully to scientific work. On the other hand, I had to admit that the pension promised to me seemed downright precarious in light of the general uncertainty of conditions.

The apparatus of the Handelskammer had become greatly uncomfortable for all political parties. This was largely due to the economic activity that had unfolded as a result of my efforts. The Handelskammer had always been a thorn in the side of the Social Democrats. The Großdeutschen saw an obstacle to the Anschluss in the intellectual ascendancy of the Viennese Handelskammer. Within the Christian Social Party, the agrarian wing, largely under Dollfuss’s leadership, had gained the upper hand. The agrarians saw in the Handelskammer the main opponent of their politics. The plan was to abolish the Handelskammer through special legislation in the course of the restructuring of economic society. The catchword “Ständestaat”¹ was quite meaningless in Austria. It did nothing but guard the aspirations of the Christian Socialist Party and its allied Heimwehr² in unchecked party rule. No one really knew enough to boast about what he imagined “Ständestaat” to mean. But everyone knew that the Chamber of Commerce, Handicrafts, and Industry was not a good fit for the Ständestaat, and as a liberal institution had best vanish.

Next to me there were only two officials in the Handelskammer who were in the position to fight for its preservation: Dr. Wilhelm Becker in Vienna, and Dr. Wilhelm Taucher in Graz, whose second job was that of an assistant professor at the University of Graz. In the fall of 1937 and during the first weeks of 1938 he was a member of Schuschnigg’s cabinet. Both men found cause for concern in my entering into retirement and induced me to take up the Handelskammer’s cause and defend our pension claims. At stake here were only our own personal interests. The internal struggle for Austria had come to an end with the banking crisis having made banks, and thereby big industry, directly dependent on the central bank.

In the spring of 1934 I received, most unexpectedly, the invitation to assume the chair for international economic relations at the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva for the academic year 1934–35. I accepted immediately. I did not formally resign from the Handelskammer. I retained the direction of the Handelskammer’s department of finance and promised to return to Vienna as often as it should become necessary. But I gave up two-thirds of my salary during my absence.

When I went to Geneva in 1934, I assumed that my appointment was only for one academic year. But my contract was renewed; I stayed in Geneva until the end of the 1939–1940 academic year.

I sensed liberation in the distance from the daily routines in the Handelskammer and from the political duties that I could not have escaped in Vienna. I was finally able to concern myself fully and almost exclusively with scientific problems.

The institute was a creation of its directors, William E. Rap-part and Paul Mantoux. The teaching load it imposed upon its faculty was minimal: one hour of lecture and two hours of seminar per week. An affectionate understanding reigned among teachers and students. The spirit of liberalism shone upon this unique institution.

That we were all fighting for a lost cause could not be mistaken. The flood of barbarism was rising around us.

The Geneva of those years will live on in history as the seat of the League of Nations. The League of Nations was never real. The diplomats had turned a great idea into a bureaucracy with several hundred employees. There were officials who had no interests other than retaining their positions. At the head of this bureaucracy was the unimaginative, small-minded French bureaucrat, M. Joseph Avenol. The officials were similar to their chief.

The League of Nations did not fail on account of the inability and indolence of its officials. It never came to life because it lacked the ideological foundation. In a liberal world, individual states and nations can cooperate peacefully without supranational organization. In a world pervaded by nationalism, neither treaties nor the creation of international agencies can eliminate conflict.

The failure of the League of Nations also paralyzed the development of the institute founded by Rapport and Mantoux. Young people who frequented it came to Geneva with more than the purpose of attending lectures and seminars alone. In Geneva they wanted to escape the narrow nationalism of their home countries and engage the spirit of international cooperation. But what they saw of the League of Nations filled them with dismay and robbed them of their courage. They found the atmosphere in Geneva unbearable. As much as the institute appealed to them, they were disappointed by everything they experienced of “international” life.

The outbreak of the new war limited the activity of the institute considerably. Its only students now were the Swiss and political refugees awaiting the opportunity to emigrate to America. Because I could no longer bear living in a country that considered my presence a political burden and a threat to its security, I left the Institut in July of 1940.