Theodor Prager

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Theodor Prager (born May 17, 1917 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died February 22, 1986 in Vienna) was an Austrian economist and journalist .

Life

Theodor Prager was the son of the wealthy Viennese bank clerk and stockbroker Josef Prager and Gisela Fischer, his brother Friedrich (Fred) Prager (1911-1993) became a photographer. The parents were members of the Jewish community, but the Jewish religion played no role in the life of the family. Prager only found out when he started school that others called him a Jew for anti-Semitic reasons. He joined the Association of Socialist Middle School Students (VSM) at an early age . After social democracy was banned in Austria, he, like his brother, did not join the Revolutionary Socialists , but the communists, which were also banned. In 1934 he was sentenced to a police sentence for distributing leaflets from an illegal organization, which in Austria would have blocked his way to school . In 1935, when he was 17, Prager emigrated to Great Britain and studied at the London School of Economics (LSE) , which had been relocated to Cambridge during the war . Despite an interruption due to internment as an enemy , he obtained a doctorate in economics (PhD) in 1943 with a banking thesis on German Banking in Depression and Recovery .

In November 1945 "Teddy" Prager (as he was now commonly called) returned to Vienna and worked full-time from 1946 to 1963 as an employee of the Central Committee of the KPÖ . In 1963 he became an employee of the economics department of the Vienna Chamber of Labor founded by Eduard März . Prager, along with Ernst Fischer and Franz Marek, was considered to be one of the KPÖ's prime intellectuals, but by the end of the 1950s it was suspected of revisionism . The pragmatic left Keynesian Prager was friends with economists such as Joan Robinson , Nicholas Kaldor , Maurice Dobb , Piero Sraffa , with the economic historian Eric Hobsbawm and the sociologist and Labor politician Michael Young . In the course of the party crisis of the KPÖ after the invasion of the Warsaw signatory states in Prague, he resigned from the KPÖ in December 1969. Afterwards he belonged to the circle around the Vienna Diary . With an international aid campaign in 1964, Prager ensured that his brother Fred, who had emigrated to South Africa in 1936, was released from custody under the apartheid regime and was finally able to emigrate to Austria.

Fonts (selection)

  • There's Work for All (with Michael Young), London 1945.
  • Economic miracle or none . European publishing house Vienna 1963.
  • Critique of a Critique of Marx . In: Marxist sheets. Special issue 2/1967. Marxist sheets 1967, pp. 68–74.
  • Between London and Moscow. Confessions of a revisionist Vienna 1975.

literature

  • Günther Chaloupek : Theodor Prager. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter branch. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , p. 541 ff.
  • Gabriele Anderl: Fred Prager: A Viennese photographer in the South African army and in the fight against apartheid. In: Margit Franz, Heimo Halbrainer (ed.): Going east - going south: Austrian exile in Asia and Africa . Graz: Clio, 2014 ISBN 978-3-902542-34-2 , pp. 361-387
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 574

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gabriele Anderl: Fred Prager , 2014
  2. ↑ Gabriele Anderl: Fred Prager , 2014, p. 362
  3. ↑ Hobsbawm mentioned Prager several times in his autobiography Interesting Times : see: WUG
  4. ↑ Gabriele Anderl: Fred Prager , 2014, pp. 383–387
personal data
SURNAME Prager, Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian economist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1986
Place of death Vienna