Ludwig Bettelheim-Gabillon

Ludwig Bettelheim-Gabillon was born on 25 November 1882 in Vienna, the son of the literary historian Anton Bettelheim, who came from a Jewish family, and of the writer Helene Bettelheim, née Gabillon. Through the maternal line he was a grandson of the Burgtheater stars Ludwig and Zerline Gabillon; the family home at Weimarer Straße 71 in the Döbling district of Vienna was a meeting place of cultural Vienna. He bore the double surname Bettelheim-Gabillon, as his mother had before him, to preserve the Burgtheater heritage of the Gabillon line. After acting lessons with Ferdinand Gregori, he made his stage debut in the autumn of 1905, quickly took on leading classical roles such as Ferdinand in 'Kabale und Liebe' (Intrigue and Love), Hamlet, and Orestes, and performed in Cologne and Düsseldorf, among other places. Before the First World War he gave up his acting career, served in the war, and embarked on a career as a civil servant in the Austrian finance administration, in which he rose to the rank of Ministerialrat (senior ministerial councillor). He demonstrably held a doctorate, though the field of study cannot be established unambiguously from the sources; given his later service in the finance administration and in keeping with the family line (his father had received a doctorate in law, Dr. iur., in 1873), study of law at the University of Vienna is likely. In the 1930s he turned to research in economic history and worked on an extensive study of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk as finance minister of the Habsburg monarchy. Two advance chapters appeared in the 'Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie' (Journal of Economics), edited by Hans Mayer, Oskar Morgenstern, and Richard Strigl: in 1936 on the Brussels Sugar Convention of 1903, and in 1937 on the conversion of the unified state debt. Direct participation in Mises's private seminar or in the Geist-Kreis is not documented, but the place of publication situates him within the wider institutional environment of the Austrian School of Economics. After the 'Anschluss' of 1938, Bettelheim-Gabillon was persecuted under the Nuremberg Laws despite his Roman Catholic faith, and the book manuscript of the Böhm-Bawerk monograph was lost in the process. On 9 October 1942 he was deported, together with his sister Friederike Bunzel, on transport IV/13 to Theresienstadt, and died there on 28 February 1943, officially of 'degeneration of the heart muscle', in fact of the conditions in the camp.