Richard Kerschagl’s Silber is a raw-material monograph whose thesis is that silver can be understood only where mineral occurrence, extraction technology, and monetary history intersect. Its sequence—properties and chemistry, metallurgy, currency and price history, industrial uses, and geography of deposits—turns an encyclopedic survey into an argument about historical reversal. Silver begins as the prestige currency metal of Europe and the Mediterranean, but by 1960 it has become chiefly an industrial and by-product metal. Kerschagl’s central move is to redefine the silver problem as geological-economic rather than merely monetary.
Das Silber ist das typische Währungsmetall des Altertums sowie des Mittelalters gewesen
English translation: Silver was the typical monetary metal of antiquity and of the Middle Ages.
The economic history is built around that sentence. Athens, Rome, the Carolingian system, the taler, Spanish-American mining, and nineteenth-century bimetallic unions appear as stages in silver’s long monetary career. Every monetary episode is checked against production facts—New World mine output, amalgamation, by-product recovery, hoards, and later industrial demand. The decline of silver is treated as the consequence of changing extraction, changing uses, and the impossibility of stabilizing a metal whose supply is not governed by monetary demand alone.
The mineralogical chapters are therefore integral to the argument. Kerschagl describes native silver, argentite, sulfosalts, halides, and complex ores, but the decisive modern fact is association: silver appears with lead, zinc, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, nickel, and uranium. Ore formations become economic categories, since they determine whether silver is mined as a main product, recovered incidentally, or ignored.
Die größte Bedeutung besitzt die Blei-Silber-Zink-Formation
English translation: The lead-silver-zinc formation is of the greatest importance.
This geological judgment becomes the foundation of Kerschagl’s price theory. The metallurgy chapter—amalgamation, dry lead processes, cupellation, cyanidation, thiosulfate methods, electrolysis—shows that silver extraction is governed by host ores, fuel, capital costs, purity requirements, and recovery losses. The crucial point is that modern silver is not simply mined in response to the silver price.
Da Silber zu mehr als vier Fünftel nicht aus eigentlichen Silbererzen, sondern nur aus anderen Erzen als Beimetall gewonnen wird
English translation: Since more than four-fifths of silver is not obtained from silver ores proper, but only from other ores as a by-metal.
The monetary chapters form the intellectual center of the volume. Kerschagl reconstructs the Latin and Scandinavian monetary unions, remonetization schemes, American silver legislation, and the long price decline. His target is the belief that silver can be rescued by fixing a new gold-silver relation or reviving full-value silver money. Against such plans he argues that no one can know the true relation, that hoards react unpredictably, and that by-product supply escapes monetary planning.
Es hat, erstens, ein direkter Zusammenhang zwischen der Höhe der Silberproduktion und der Höhe des Silberpreises etwa im Sinne irgendeiner Quantitätstheorie nicht bestanden.
English translation: First, there has not existed any direct connection between the level of silver production and the level of the silver price in the sense of some quantity theory.
Kerschagl is especially critical of the United States. The Thomas Amendment, Silver Purchase Act, home silver policy, Silver Certificates, and wartime Treasury silver are read as a mixture of monetary experiment and producer subsidy. The real turning point is not remonetization but wartime and postwar industrial absorption: electrical equipment, contacts, hard solders, photography, medicine, coatings, mirrors, petroleum refining, atomic technology, and armaments. The market stabilizes when silver is drawn out of the old currency imagination and into technical demand.
Das Silber ist vorläufig in geordnete industrielle Bahnen hinübergelenkt worden und seine monetäre Wiederverwendung weder ein echtes noch auch nur ein sinnvolles Problem mehr.
English translation: Silver has for the time being been diverted into orderly industrial channels, and its monetary reuse is no longer a genuine or even a meaningful problem.
The geographical survey confirms the thesis. Mexico, the United States, and Canada dominate; Peru, Bolivia, Australia, parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia follow, but nearly everywhere production is tied to lead-zinc, copper, gold, or tin operations. Historic silver lands and modern silver output no longer coincide: China and India hold great hoards but produce little; Africa is central for gold but marginal for silver; Europe’s medieval centers survive mostly as by-product districts.
The work remains relevant as a synthesis of mineral science, metallurgy, and monetary economics. Kerschagl’s silver is technically valuable because of its conductivity, malleability, and chemical behavior, but politically resistant to simple monetary schemes because of its geology and mode of production. The book’s final conceptual move is to replace the drama of silver as fallen money with a sober account of silver as industrial raw material.
Die Rückkehr des Silbers zu seiner industriellen Verwendung ist in jeder Hinsicht zu begrüßen
English translation: The return of silver to its industrial use is to be welcomed in every respect.
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