Oskar Engländer

Oskar Engländer was born on 31 October 1876 into a Jewish family in Pardubice in Bohemia. He studied law at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague and joined the Austrian State Railways in 1900. This practical work soon gave rise to studies on railway law and transport, with which he qualified as a university lecturer (habilitation) at the University of Prague in 1918. After the First World War, Engländer combined an unusual double career: from 1921 to 1927 he was director of the Reichenberg-Tannwald Railway Company, and from 1924 to 1927 he simultaneously headed the research department of the Prague banking house Petschek & Co. In parallel, from 1922 he taught political economy, economics, and public finance as an associate professor at the German University of Prague. In 1927 he was appointed to the chair, which he held until his death. Intellectually, Engländer was introduced to the Viennese marginal-utility doctrine by Friedrich von Wieser and Robert Zuckerkandl. He gradually moved from subjects in law and transport engineering towards pure theory. His essay on Carl Menger's "Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre" (Principles of Economics) in Schmollers Jahrbuch (1927) is a fundamental appreciation of the school's founder. The two-volume "Theorie der Volkswirtschaft" (Theory of the National Economy) (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1929) became his main work and treats price formation, money, and capital in an independent synthesis enriched by Schumpeterian and Wieserian motifs. Although anchored in Prague, Engländer remained part of the Viennese network of discussion. On 16 April 1931 he lectured at the Vienna Economic Society (Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft) on "Kritik der Preistheorien" (Critique of Price Theories); Klausinger counts him, alongside Adam Heydel and Johan Koopmans, among the important guest lecturers from the formerly German-speaking parts of the Habsburg empire. In the 1930s further studies appeared on the business cycle, taxation, and monetary policy. In 1936 a Festschrift was dedicated to him for his 60th birthday, supported by professional colleagues, friends, and students from Brünn (today Brno), Leipzig, and Vienna. Engländer died on 31 December 1936 in Prague, shortly after the Festschrift appeared; his work on money, "Das Geld in Volks- und Weltwirtschaft" (Money in the National and World Economy), appeared posthumously in 1937. He is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov.