The archive.

Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.

Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.

English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”

Should monetary recovery restore gold parity or stabilize domestic purchasing power—and how much practical guidance did postwar economists offer for either course? Richard Kerschagl’s 1925 literature review reconnects German-speaking readers with foreign scholarship, giving priority to untranslated works. He identifies Anglo-American proposals for managing credit and prices as a significant policy development, yet questions whether their advocates explain adequately how such management would work. His comparisons distinguish agreement on stabilization from agreement about deflation’s costs or feasibility. Equally revealing is his separation of theoretical merit from documentary value: an unreliable explanation may accompany indispensable evidence. The review offers both a critical map of competing monetary remedies and an account of why historical studies and international statistics mattered to their assessment.

Method and subject matter mutually determine one another: define the economy as a system of means for ends, as causal regularity, or as functional relation, and you have already chosen a different object. That thesis governs this study of how pure economics can be scientific, appearing here in its third edition of 1948—delayed, its preface records, by the author's arrest, imprisonment, and dismissal from his teaching post. Kerschagl compresses the history of method from the Physiocrats through the classics, the historical school's cry of “back to reality,” and Menger's restoration of exact theory, then turns to its problems: what reality a science can claim, exactness without mathematical calculation, necessity replaced by probability and conditional validity. Methodological monism, he concludes, is a logical utopia; causal and teleological analysis both belong to a science of purposeful economic life.

Wirklichkeit ist ihrem Wesen nach das Wesentliche und nicht das Vollständige.

English translation: “Reality is, in its essence, the essential, not the complete.”

A stable exchange rate did not necessarily mean a restored gold currency. In this 1927 article, Richard Kerschagl examines European monetary recovery by separating legal gold definitions, reserve accumulation, exchange controls, and actual redemption practices. Switzerland’s proximity to gold parity without gold redemption and Poland’s renewed depreciation after reform expose the limits of declaring stabilization complete. Austria and Germany supply his most sustained examples of reconstruction through successive institutional changes rather than a single legislative act. Cautiously optimistic, Kerschagl nevertheless presents recovery as uneven and reversible. His comparisons let readers distinguish the practical arrangements concealed beneath the language of a “return to gold,” while his closing comparison of European and American reserves places national reforms within an increasingly unequal international monetary order.

The monarchy had collapsed, but its bank still issued notes, maintained branches, and owed obligations across new national borders. Richard Kerschagl’s 1927 article follows the Austro-Hungarian Bank from the war’s end to the opening of liquidation in 1920, asking whether political separation had to entail monetary disintegration. Writing from acknowledged professional proximity, he presents the bank’s administrative network as a resource for recovery that successor governments needed even as they displaced its authority. Negotiations over regional offices, the stamping of banknotes, and seizures of branches make the conflict between national sovereignty and contractual continuity concrete. His institutional defence also exposes a practical dilemma: restricting note issuance might check inflation, yet threaten immediate social disorder. Readers encounter monetary fragmentation through the operations and obligations of the institution being dismantled.

No single economic doctrine, this textbook insists, can honestly be presented as the last word; the older theories remain indispensable for understanding the present. So Kerschagl leads beginners through the whole succession—mercantilism and physiocracy, Smith and Ricardo, the German historical school and the Methodenstreit, utopian and Marxian socialism, the socialization schemes of interwar Vienna, and the Austrian marginal utility school of Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk with its problem of imputation. Money theory runs from Bodin's early quantity doctrine through the Currency and Banking controversy to chartalism and metallism, and the closing chapters take up Spann's universalism, Cassel, Liefmann, Pesch's Catholic solidarism and Keynes on the end of laissez-faire. Here in its second unchanged edition, it treats the economy as a means to higher human ends, never an end in itself.

Nur wer die Dogmen der Volkswirtschaftslehre kennt, kennt überhaupt „Volkswirtschaftslehre“.

English translation: “Only he who knows the doctrines of economics knows "economics" at all.”

Institutions charged with monetary stability learned much of their statistical craft from inflation. This paradox anchors Richard Kerschagl’s 1928 article on the Paris conference of central-bank statisticians. He treats the meeting not chiefly as a collection of resolutions, but as a step from national data gathering toward international economic intelligence. For Kerschagl, practical cooperation to stabilize currencies requires more than goodwill: banks need usable information and working relationships between those who produce it. Yet statistical machinery cannot substitute for skilled interpretation or eliminate policy mistakes. This brief article offers a concrete account of how monetary disorder helped expand central-bank research—and why exchanging figures became part of the technical groundwork of cooperation.

A fixed gold price is not the same thing as stable purchasing power: this distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s review of Edmund Herzfelder’s attack on the gold standard. Kerschagl argues that Herzfelder mistakes the maintenance of exchange rates for a promise to hold gold’s economic value constant. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he tests Herzfelder’s proposed replacement of gold reserves with government obligations: would changing the reserve asset actually free countries from the pressures of international payments? Readers encounter a defence of monetary constraints rather than an unconditional defence of gold. Kerschagl remains open to central-bank cooperation and reduced gold dependence, while demanding that reformers explain how domestic price policy can coexist with stable external exchange rates.

Out of the wreck of the Habsburg monetary union came a scatter of new currencies, and this survey sets them side by side as they steadied toward the end of the 1920s: Austria's Schilling, Hungary's Pengő, the Czechoslovak crown forged in Rašín's stamping experiment, Poland's twice-stabilised Zloty, the lira, dinar, lei and, after hyperinflation, the German Reichsmark. Kerschagl narrates each path from collapse to reform, then appends the machinery behind them—gold-parity tables computed from fine-gold weights, statutory redemption and reserve rules, and central-bank balance sheets as of March 1929. One principle recurs across the reforms: sound reconstruction meant barring further state credit from the note press. Issued under the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag, it serves as much as a reference apparatus as a history.

Die wichtigste Bestimmung war die, daß jede weitere direkte oder indirekte Kreditgewährung an den Staat unzulässig sei.

English translation: “The most important provision was that any further direct or indirect extension of credit to the state was inadmissible.”

Possessing monetary instruments is not the same as controlling their effects. This distinction gives Richard Kerschagl’s 1929 review of Anglo-American and German monetary literature its critical edge. Against Irving Fisher’s promises for stable purchasing power, Kerschagl sets accounts of Federal Reserve practice that stress the difficulty of tracing credit uses and predicting intervention’s results. He also weighs competing commitments to managed currency and an automatic gold standard, without treating either as an uncontested solution. His perspective is comparative rather than programmatic: the reader encounters disagreements not merely over policy technique, but over what stability means and what institutions can achieve it. The German discussions of currency restoration and money creation sharpen the question of whether price stabilization is a manageable technical task or depends on deeper assumptions about production and economic organization.

As the European gold-exchange order broke apart in the early 1930s, states began seizing, centralizing, and rationing foreign means of payment—and Kerschagl sets out to explain, in strictly economic terms, why. Foreign-exchange control (Devisenbewirtschaftung) is treated here not as a currency system but as an emergency bridge forced by the convergence of trade deficits, capital flight, and reserve losses across the trade balance, the payments balance, and what he calls the Währungsbilanz. Its defining move—allocating scarce exchange—is a form of partial planning that inevitably reaches into imports, production, and consumption. Clearing arrangements, priority lists, and blocked accounts follow the same logic of restriction. Controls can buy time, he argues, but cannot themselves restore the equilibrium whose absence created them.

Der Weg zu dauernd gesunden Währungen führt über wirtschaftliche Vernunft.

English translation: “The road to permanently sound currencies leads through economic reason.”

Austria's spring 1933 gold-clause and foreign-exchange ordinances did not revalue every gold debt at a stroke; they built a classified transition from nominal schilling parity to regulated value payment. Writing as the paper schilling broke openly from gold—127.49 paper schillings for 100 gold schillings on 28 March—Kerschagl turns a vague “gold clause” controversy into a sequence of legal tests: whether an obligation is effective or merely a value clause, whether it sounds in foreign valuta or gold schillings, what kind of debt it is, and whether its Stichtag has arrived. His reading of the Goldschuldenerleichterungsverordnung shows the pattern plainly—revalued mortgage capital paired with longer maturities and reduced interest, temporal redistribution rather than repudiation. Throughout, he insists that technical wording is distributive power.

Also mithin: bei Hypothekentilgung: gleiche Raten, aber mehr Raten, bei Pfandbriefen: aufgewertetes, aber später zu leistendes Kapital.

English translation: “Thus, in short: for the amortization of mortgages, equal installments, but more of them; for mortgage bonds, revalued capital, but payable at a later date.”