Landesberger’s 1915 lecture presents the First World War as a crisis of the whole national economy rather than as a merely diplomatic or military event. Speaking as a political economist and banker, he deliberately reverses his announced title:
Ich muß damit beginnen, daß ich den Titel dieses Vortrages umkehre: Die Volkswirtschaft und der Krieg.
English translation: I must begin by reversing the title of this lecture: the national economy and the war.
This inversion governs the argument. The war is explained through credit, trade routes, colonial rivalry, banking structures, food supply, industrial organization, and public borrowing. Landesberger’s politics are openly Central Powers apologetics: Germany and Austria-Hungary appear as economically vigorous states forced into conflict by hostile encirclement, while Britain is treated as the decisive power choosing war to defend its command of world commerce.
France and Russia are interpreted chiefly through finance and access to markets. France’s alliance with Russia rests, in Landesberger’s account, on investment and debt as much as on revanche; French capital finances Russian development while domestic industry stagnates.
Frankreich hat im letzten Jahrzehnt auch die russische Industrie, die einen sehr erheblichen Aufschwung nahm, finanziert, während es die Industrialisierung des eigenen Landes vernachlässigte.
English translation: In the last decade France also financed Russian industry, which experienced a very considerable upswing, while neglecting the industrialization of its own country.
Russia’s South Slav policy is likewise subordinated to material aims: outlets to the sea, the Straits, grain exports, and geopolitical control over routes. Britain, in turn, embodies maritime capitalism. Its wealth, colonies, shipping, insurance, and clearing functions make it the center of the world economy, but also make German industrial advance appear intolerable. Landesberger contrasts this with German capitalism’s adaptability: science-based industry, technical education, close relations between banks and firms, and the ability to tailor goods to foreign markets.
The lecture’s most concrete analysis concerns the immediate economic shock of war. Mobilization interrupts international payments, closes credit channels, encourages hoarding, and slows circulation just as armies and governments demand unprecedented liquidity. Landesberger summarizes the squeeze in a striking metaphor:
Die Kerze wird von zwei Seiten angezündet.
English translation: The candle is being lit from both ends.
From this point the lecture becomes a survey of emergency economic administration. Germany’s Darlehenskassen and Reichsbank expansion, Austria-Hungary’s moratorium, closed stock exchanges, export bans, tariff suspensions, food regulations, raw-material offices, labor placement, and war-credit institutions are all treated as attempts to keep a disrupted economy functioning. Landesberger defends many such measures as necessary, but he does not trivialize their legal and commercial dangers.
Allerdings aber ist und bleibt ein Moratorium ein starker und empfindlicher Eingriff in die Rechtsordnung.
English translation: To be sure, however, a moratorium is and remains a strong and painful encroachment upon the legal order.
He is especially attentive to the difference between private gain and national welfare. Army demand may enrich some producers; inventories may be sold at favorable prices; agriculture may receive cash while losing horses, labor, and productive capacity. Yet these advantages can mask depletion. War may convert goods into money without restoring the material basis of production.
Der Krieg kann für den Einzelnen unter Umständen eine Konjunktur bilden, für die Volkswirtschaft im Ganzen ist er es selbstverständlich, auch abgesehen von seinen Zerstörungen, nicht.
English translation: War can under certain circumstances constitute a boom for the individual; for the national economy as a whole, however, it is obviously not one, quite apart from its destructions.
The closing sections connect exchange rates, note issue, inflation, and war loans. Landesberger argues that foreign-exchange weakness does not by itself prove internal inflation, since import needs and broken credit relations distort normal mechanisms. Successful German and Austro-Hungarian war loans, however, demonstrate public financial capacity, absorb emergency money, and prepare a return to normal circulation.
The pamphlet’s lasting interest lies in its fusion of wartime polemic with institutional economic analysis. Its causal story is nationalist and anti-British, but its framework is modern: total war appears as a test of banking systems, supply chains, technical capacity, administrative coordination, and public trust. War, for Landesberger, is fought by armies only because it is sustained by the entire organized economy.
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