Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Der Selbstmord eines Volkes. Wirtschaft in Oesterreich (1923)

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s short review of Siegfried Strakosch’s 1922 book presents an emphatically approving diagnosis of Austria’s postwar economic crisis. Published in 1923, the review moves from an endorsement of Strakosch’s scientific and practical authority to an account of socialist labour policy, administrative burdens, and the disruption of regional trade. Its central claim is that policies promising emancipation instead undermined production and deepened social disintegration.

He shows in practice the working of Marxian doctrines in Austria and proves their illusions and their pernicious results.

This assertion establishes the review’s polemical stance: Schwiedland treats Strakosch’s conclusions as demonstrated rather than as propositions requiring scrutiny. His praise of the author’s agricultural and industrial experience reinforces the contrast between practical economic knowledge and doctrinaire politics. Yet the explanation is not exclusively domestic. Schwiedland identifies the peace settlement, especially the Treaty of St. Germain, as the condition that made socialist promises attractive to a distressed population.

Dogmatic politics proved to be a cause of moral dissolution as well as an economic disaster.

The coupling of moral and economic decline governs the ensuing account. Shorter working days, protection against dismissal, works councils, unemployment payments, and wage adjustments are represented as privileges that reduce workers’ efficiency. Particularly revealing is Schwiedland’s treatment of the wage increases secured in 1922: protection against inflation becomes, in his description, a “curious monopoly” of wage-earners and salaried employees. Social security is thus recast as a sectional advantage rather than a collective remedy. Business efficiency, meanwhile, is said to suffer from proliferating regulations, administrative work, and uncertainty.

The review broadens this critique by placing domestic policy alongside new frontiers, transport costs, neighbouring states’ tariffs, inflation, and exchange-rate fluctuations. Schwiedland describes these forces as mutually reinforcing, although he gives socialist legislation the dominant interpretive role. His closing judgment returns from these interacting pressures to the failure of anti-capitalist reform:

The anti-capitalistic legislation has not cured the labour unrest, but has created a growing malaise and a dangerous uncertainty in business.

The final reference to financial disaster and the ruin of the former middle classes makes clear whose losses anchor the review’s assessment. Its historical relevance lies in this sharply partisan interpretation of postwar reconstruction: labour protections appear as impediments to productive recovery, while the authority of economic expertise is mobilized against socialist political expectations. The review offers a compressed argument about policy failure, not a detailed evidentiary examination of Strakosch’s findings.