The Collapse of Interwar Vienna: Oskar Morgenstern's Community, 1925–50

Using as a window the life and career of one of its members, Oskar Morgenstern, this essay explores the development and demise of the economics community of interwar Vienna. As product of the Austrian school of economics, director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, and promoter of the mathematical economics of Karl Menger and Abraham Wald, Morgenstern played a central role in Viennese economic life. His involvements cast light on the community's constituent groups, on the tensions that pervaded them, and on the ultimate demise of Viennese intellectual life with the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938.