Richard Kerschagl

Richard Kerschagl was born on 25 May 1896 in Vienna, the son of a municipal secondary-school headmaster and writer on music who came from a Carinthian peasant family. After taking the Matura (school-leaving examination) at the Schottengymnasium in 1914 and serving in the war as a reserve lieutenant, he studied law and political science at the University of Vienna, earning a doctorate in law (Dr. iur.) in 1919 and a doctorate in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) in 1922. His dissertation in political science was supervised by Othmar Spann, to whose universalist school Kerschagl was close during the 1920s without holding formal membership of the inner circle. From 1920 Kerschagl worked as a currency expert at the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and in 1923 he moved to the new Austrian National Bank as legal consultant and economic officer, where he later headed the statistics, publishing, and library departments. In academic terms, he qualified as a university lecturer (habilitation) in political economy at the Hochschule für Welthandel (College of World Trade) in 1922, became an associate professor in 1929 and a full professor of trade policy in 1937. In parallel, from 1928 he taught at the Consular Academy, where from 1930 he worked as professor of trade policy and in 1933 headed the Institute for Economic Policy. In 1933 he founded the Seminar for Monetary Research at the Hochschule für Welthandel. Politically, Kerschagl joined the Vienna Heimwehr in 1929, fought on the government's side in February 1934, and belonged to the Council of State and the Federal Diet of the Austrofascist corporate state (Ständestaat) from 1 November 1934 to 12 March 1938. With the Anschluss he was arrested on 13 March 1938 and held in custody until 29 July 1938; in August he was dismissed under the Civil Service Law (Berufsbeamtengesetz), served with a regional ban (Gauverbot), and in March 1940 retired on reduced pay. Until 1944 he worked in Berlin and as a bank manager in occupied Poland, then returned to Carinthia and joined the resistance movement. After 1945 he was immediately rehabilitated and advised the British military government as an economic expert; at the same time he was the government commissioner for western Carinthia. He returned to the Hochschule für Welthandel as full professor and head of the institute, served as its rector from 1947 to 1949 and from 1960 to 1962, was honorary professor at the University of Vienna from 1952, and was granted emeritus status in 1967. Until his death on 30 December 1976 in Hermagor, he was president of the Association of Austrian Adult Education Centres and of the Austrian UNESCO Commission. His scholarly output comprises more than 80 publications on money, banking, currency, and public finance; within the fabric of Viennese economics he stands between the Spann school and academic monetary theory, without ever having been part of the narrower Mises-Hayek line.