Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with a folk-song setting, turns Mises’s departure into a lament for the dispersal of his intellectual circle. Its four stanzas move from personal anxiety about the seminar to Vienna’s institutional losses, the exile of Mises’s adherents, and a final tribute to the departing teacher.
What is going to become of the Mises-Kreis — In the year that’s coming.
The opening makes intellectual continuity a practical and emotional question. Geneva cannot accommodate everyone; the seminar’s importance lies in a shared life that relocation threatens to break. The second stanza widens this loss to Vienna’s faculty as departures for England and the United States accumulate.
And for all those who so bravely fought For Mises’ many teachings, For whom import taxes anger wrought, While truth forever reaching.
The third stanza identifies the circle through both allegiance and economic conviction. Opposition to import taxes becomes a compact marker of its commitments, while the language of struggle and truth presents its members as misunderstood defenders of a common cause.
The repeated Latin lament, “O quæ mutatio rerum,” gives the separations a communal, performable form. The final stanza shifts from anxiety toward hope: Mises carries Vienna’s lessons to another chair, and the invocation of Wilson’s dream links that transfer to an international aspiration. The song’s significance lies in this affectionate self-portrait of a scholarly community confronting dispersal.
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