Felix Kaufmann, The Grenadier of the Marginal Utility School

Felix Kaufmann’s comic song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and arrangement, sets a parody of scholarly loyalty to music by Robert Schumann, with an acknowledged debt to Heinrich Heine. Its narrative turns the supposed death of marginal utility theory into a mock-heroic drama: an economist trained in Vienna travels to Germany for an academic position, only to discover that his intellectual school apparently has no future.

My books! What’s to become of them? Editions printed, no demand. I might well burn them straight away— Wisdom’s met its final stand.

The lament makes intellectual defeat inseparable from professional disappointment. The economist mourns both a doctrine and his unsold publications; the language of demand brings the market’s verdict ironically to bear on economic learning itself. His grandiose response—ritual suicide—becomes still more comic when he insists on approaching it reasonably and choosing the proper moment for sacrifice.

From the treasury of Menger’s works, I lay a volume on my breast. Now pen in hand, my dagger dear, With it my soul may find its rest.

Menger’s book becomes a protective or devotional object, while the pen becomes a weapon. This conversion of scholarship into martial allegiance prepares the reversal: “complementary goods” sound a battle cry, and Böhm Bawerk’s polemics awaken the apparently defeated economist.

Armed, I rise up, burst my enclave, Put not Marginal Utility asunder!

The song moves from exile and lament through imagined burial to militant revival. Its force lies less in defending marginal utility analytically than in dramatizing the emotional bonds sustaining a school of thought. Kaufmann affectionately exposes the proximity of theoretical conviction, wounded academic pride, and heroic self-fashioning: intellectual survival arrives as renewed controversy.