Schumpeters Brief an den Dekan. Bonn, 31. März 1932

This file is a short primary letter: Joseph A. Schumpeter’s 31 March 1932 communication from Bonn to the dean, written to explain and defend an article he had published in the Lloyds Review on Franco-German economic relations. Its scope is narrow but revealing: Schumpeter responds to a press attack, reconstructs the article’s origin and argument, and authorizes the dean and faculty to use the letter if controversy spreads.

He first frames the publication as reluctant and patriotic, not as an unsolicited political provocation. The commission came through Lloyds-Bank circles and Sir William Dampier, after Schumpeter initially refused:

Ich hatte keine Lust, mich dieser Mühe zu unterziehen und lehnte ab. Darauf erhielt ich einen Brief von Dampier, in welchem er unter Appell an mein Nationalgefühl mich bat, die Aufgabe trotzdem zu übernehmen.

English translation: I had no wish to take on this trouble and declined. Thereupon I received a letter from Dampier in which, appealing to my national feeling, he asked me to undertake the task nonetheless.

The letter’s structure then becomes a compressed defense of the absent article. Schumpeter downplays its scientific ambition while identifying its real point: analysis of Franco-German economic relations and skepticism toward credit as a solution to the crisis.

Ich gab nach und schrieb den beigeschlossenen Aufsatz, dessen bescheidenes Interesse – wissenschaftlich kommt er nicht in Betracht – in der genauen Analyse der deutsch-französischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen im Abschnitt 3 und 4 und in dem kurzen Argument des Abschnittes 5 liegt, welcher nachweisen will, dass die gegenwärtige Lage durch Kreditgewährungen nur für den Augenblick gebessert werden könnte.

English translation: I gave in and wrote the enclosed essay, whose modest interest—scientifically it is of no account—lies in the detailed analysis of Franco-German economic relations in sections 3 and 4, and in the brief argument of section 5, which seeks to show that the present situation could be improved by the granting of credits only for the moment.

The central conceptual move is transfer-theoretical and political-economic: reparations cannot be treated as a mere legal demand if the world economy prevents Germany from earning the foreign exchange needed to pay them. Schumpeter presents this not as a novel doctrine but as an already familiar German argument made effective for foreign readers.

Im Abschnitt 2 ist die Reparationsfrage ganz kurz gestreift und zwar wird da versucht, die Unmöglichkeit weiterer Reparationszahlungen in der sattsam bekannten und übrigens im Ausland einzig wirksamen Weise kurz dadurch zu begründen, dass sich die ganze Welt dem Reparationsexport verschließt und dadurch einerseits die gegenwärtigen Störungen in den Geldsystemen aller Länder wesentlich zu erklären sind und andererseits die Reparationszahlungen unmöglich werden.

English translation: In section 2 the reparations question is touched upon only very briefly; the attempt is made to justify the impossibility of further reparations payments, in the well-worn and (incidentally) only manner effective abroad, by pointing out that the whole world closes itself off to reparations exports, whereby on the one hand the present disturbances in every country's monetary system are essentially to be explained, and on the other reparations payments become impossible.

The decisive implication is that creditor insistence on reparations must be tested against willingness to accept German exports. France’s quota policy and the broader protectionist turn become the practical contradiction of the reparations demand.

Wenn das Bestehen auf der Reparationsforderung keine böse Schikane sein soll, so müsste sich die Welt im Allgemeinen vom Protektionismus abwenden und Frankreich im besonderen seine Kontingentierungspolitik aufgeben, was das wahre Kriterium der Annahmewilligkeit und doch nicht unmöglich wäre.

English translation: If insistence on the reparations claim is not to be sheer malicious harassment, then the world in general would have to turn away from protectionism, and France in particular would have to abandon its quota policy—which would be the true criterion of a willingness to accept payment, and yet would not be impossible.

Schumpeter’s grievance is hermeneutic as much as political. The hostile reading, he argues, isolates a conditional discussion of possibility and converts it into the opposite of his claim. The scandal thus rests on excerpting a complex argument from its transfer-economic context.

Ew. Spectabilität sehen, dass damit ein bei uns nun schon orthodox gewordenes Argument dargeboten wird, welches im übrigen nur ein Gemeinplatz ist. Aber zugleich auch, dass diese Stelle (Seite 20 oben) wenn aus dem Zusammenhang herausgerissen, wie nicht anders möglich, nicht von Unmöglichkeit, sondern von Möglichkeit spricht.

English translation: Your Spectability will see that what is here presented is an argument that has by now become orthodox among us, and which for the rest is nothing but a commonplace. But also that this passage (top of page 20), if torn out of context—as cannot be avoided—speaks not of impossibility but of possibility.

The letter is therefore both a personal defense and a document of Weimar intellectual politics. Schumpeter distances himself from the intelligence of the nationalist press without distancing himself from the national case against reparations under protectionism. Its relevance lies in showing how he translated international economics into public controversy: reparations, trade barriers, monetary disorder, and credit policy appear as parts of one system. The closing makes the letter usable as institutional evidence, not private reassurance:

Dieser Brief ist in keiner Richtung vertraulich.

English translation: This letter is in no respect confidential.