A Private Boom-Bust

Mises had been surprised and delighted by the failure of the general strike on July 15, 1927. What did not surprise him was the massacre that took place when the masses rallied in the streets of Vienna. One of his first thoughts was to alert Margit Serény of the danger. Under no circumstances should she let the children out. Margit was away during the day, however, and Mises left detailed instructions with the housekeeper.⁷⁷

When Margit returned in the late afternoon, she was deeply touched to learn how much Mises cared about her and her children. She had held him in great esteem, but in no way reciprocated the attentiveness he had bestowed on her during the two years since they had first met in Kaufmann's apartment. Red roses and expensive perfume could not conquer her heart. She just could not understand this man:

In the first years of our relationship, Lu was almost an enigma to me. I never had seen such modesty in a man before. He knew his value, but he never boasted.... I think it was the extreme honesty in Lu's feelings that attracted me so strongly to him. These feelings were so overpowering that he, who wrote thousands of pages about economics and money, could not find the words to talk about himself, and explain his feeling.⁷⁸

Fortunately, actions sometimes speak for themselves. On that day of July 1927, for the first time, Margit felt something like love for him and grew more open to his advances. It was the beginning of a short-lived boom in their friendship, which less than two months later ended in a resounding crash.

That night, Mises visited Margit to see if everything was in order. Telephone lines were down and he had been unable to call her. He took her for a walk on the Ringstrasse, where the turmoil of the day could still be felt: only men were out; she did not see another woman. At the end of their excursion he proposed to go dancing. When she said yes, he knew it indicated progress. Some days later, he held her hand for the first time, in a dance club, and on the following weekend, he kissed her for the first time in a dark corner of the Prater, Vienna's central park—like a couple of high school kids, as she would later recall. When she had to leave for Hamburg a few days later, he told her that he would ask her to marry him, but that he first had to make up his mind to be a stepfather to her children. They parted with plans to meet in Berchtesgaden, a resort town in the Bavarian Alps, at the end of August.

On August 25, she took the train from Munich to Berchtesgaden and was happily surprised when Mises suddenly entered the train at one of the intermediate stations. They took adjacent hotel rooms in Berchtesgaden. Concerned about appearances, Mises presented Margit as his sister. They enjoyed a wonderful training period for marriage, as he would say. They talked about the problems facing their potential union: she could not fulfill his wish to have a child together; she would have to become Jewish again to appease his mother; his mother would have to be kept out of all marriage preparations because she might jeopardize everything, as she had done on an earlier occasion.⁷⁹

On Sunday, September 4, they returned to Vienna, where events took a fateful turn. Mises had fallen ill without noticing at first. He met her for supper on the following Tuesday, and on Wednesday he saw her again, shaken by fever and a severe headache. Given these circumstances, he would not talk about marriage. He had to have a clear head to make the most important declaration of his life. Yet Margit felt she had already been waiting for quite a while and was growing impatient. She told him she would not wait a single day more and pressed him for a decision. He later wrote her of the event:

“Today or never! I will not allow you to postpone the decision by even a couple of hours.” No loving woman talks that way. A single warm word from you would have made me happy, would have bound me to you forever. But you said no such word. You did not meet me as a loving woman, but as a cold adversary.

It was the greatest disappointment of my life. I had hoped to find love and goodness in you, and I found hardness, uncompromising hardness. I had already overcome all prior apprehensions, which I have not hidden from you, because I thought true love was stronger than the difficulties that stood in the way of our union.⁸⁰

It seemed to be the end. They departed under the mutual declaration that the problems in their relationship were irreconcilable. She even returned the love letters he had written to her in Hamburg.

The next morning, Margit felt remorse and wrote to him, but he remained silent. She continued to write every day, without response, and a few days later finally got him on the phone. Mises reiterated what he had said on the preceding Wednesday. It was over, forever.

Not much later, he must have discovered the true cause of his fever—a rare condition known as acute surgical abdomen— and checked into the hospital for surgery.⁸¹ Margit had stopped writing him, but she sought news on the state of his health from his second cousin, Strisower, the doctor of her late husband. She even prayed to God for his recovery, admitting later that she had always thought of herself as an atheist, but this emergency had revealed otherwise.

Eventually she started writing him again. When he did not reply, she begged Professor Adler, her physician, to ask Mises to write and explain in full the reasons for his obstinacy. With this request coming from a colleague as a quasi-official request, Mises felt he had to comply. He wrote a strongly worded and unflattering letter, and emphasized that he would have preferred to spare her the embarrassment of reading his account. Margit sent the letter back, saying it was unworthy of him.

At some point in late 1927 or 1928, he started calling her again. He would not speak. He just let her answer the phone and listened to her voice, sometimes twice a day. And then one day he showed up again at her apartment, without any explanation, and they continued the relationship where they had left off in September 1927. She still waited for him to propose, but he was still unable to make this step. Later she wrote:

Before we married, this love must have been a very distressing factor in his life—so upsetting that he knew he could fight a battle in the Carpathian Alps but could never win the battle against himself.⁸²

Eventually, she could not bear it any more. She left Vienna and went to London for work as a translator. She would return to Vienna only after she had met him again on the Thames.

Mises in profile