Richard Kerschagl, Die Währungstrennung in den Nationalstaaten (1920)

Kerschagl’s 1920 study reconstructs the monetary breakup of Austria-Hungary as it was still unfolding. Its announced aim is descriptive, but its thesis is clear: the successor states did not simply replace banknotes; by stamping, exchanging, withholding, and discounting the notes of the Österreichisch-ungarische Bank, they converted a common payments area into separate fiscal sovereignties. His guiding formula frames the whole undertaking:

Der Verfasser hat versucht, darzustellen, wie die Währung von gestern zu den Währungen von heute wurde. Was schließlich morgen daraus werden wird, das kann nur die Zukunft lehren.

English translation: The author has tried to depict how yesterday's currency became the currencies of today. What will finally become of it tomorrow, only the future can teach.

The opening chapter frames currency separation as the economic consequence of political nationalism. Kerschagl stresses that the old monetary unity had been part of a larger Central European economic organism, and that its rupture followed directly from political collapse:

Mit dem politischen Zusammenbruch der alten Monarchie wurde auch gewaltsam und jäh der ökonomische und finanzielle Zusammenhalt der Nationen, welche früher vereint waren, gelöst.

English translation: With the political collapse of the old monarchy, the economic and financial cohesion of the nations that had previously been united was also violently and abruptly dissolved.

Money became one of the instruments through which the new national priority was enforced. The book then proceeds by national chapters—Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Italy, Hungary, Deutschösterreich—before turning to the unstamped note and to Article 206 of Saint-Germain.

Czechoslovakia is Kerschagl’s first and most important case. Rašin’s policy combined stamping with a forced loan and an anti-inflationary program: to create a separate national currency, reduce circulation, and raise confidence abroad. The quantitative hopes were only partly fulfilled, and stamp forgeries caused serious disruption; nevertheless, Kerschagl sees Czechoslovakia as the best prepared successor state, aided by industry, coal, agriculture, and administrative readiness. Its new Bankamt becomes for him a theoretical lesson: monetary order can rest on state organization and economic strength rather than metal reserves, a verdict he expects the future to ratify:

Wie immer auch die Zukunft über unsere Zeit urteilen mag, sie wird in diesem Ausweis des Bankamtes in Prag ein Stück praktischen Nominalismus verkörpert finden und auch die nächste Auflage der „Staatlichen Theorie" wird wohl kaum stumm an dieser Erscheinung vorübergehen.

English translation: However the future may judge our age, it will find in this statement of the Prague Bankamt a piece of practical nominalism embodied, and even the next edition of the "State Theory of Money" will hardly pass over this phenomenon in silence.

Yugoslavia and Poland show less orderly paths. The S.H.S. state first stamped for “statistical” purposes, then marked notes again, and finally created double-denominated Krone-Dinar notes to bridge Serbian dinar traditions and the crown habits of Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia. Poland begins in still greater chaos, with marks, crowns, rubles, and Karbowanzen circulating together; the Polish mark becomes viable only as part of a broader reconstruction of fields, mines, petroleum, and coal. Romania and Italy are treated more cautiously: both reveal how exchange ratios, frontier uncertainty, and local politics shaped confidence as much as formal law did.

Hungary and Deutschösterreich provide the book’s most difficult cases. Hungary’s Bolshevik period produced counterfeit notes, postal-savings money, and depreciated “Rätenoten”; the later forced-loan stamping imitated Rašin without his conditions of success. Kerschagl warns especially against state paper, since public psychology would read it as unlimited debt. In Austria the old bank survives only as a provisional national bank and as the liquidating remnant of a vanished world:

Der Traum der Donaukonföderation war der letzte Traum der Österreichisch-ungarischen Bank.

English translation: The dream of a Danubian confederation was the last dream of the Austro-Hungarian Bank.

The Austrian case condenses the ruin of political form, economic base, and monetary credibility:

16 Milliarden Notenumlauf auf 6 Millionen Einwohner!

English translation: 16 billion in note circulation for 6 million inhabitants!

The chapter on the unstamped note makes explicit Kerschagl’s central conceptual move: stamping is not a mere technical mark but an act by which states assume, transform, or deny claims against the old bank. The same paper can become legal money, speculative refuse, or liquidation claim depending on jurisdiction and certification. Hence his formulation that the successor states, by stamping, had made the settlement with the bank a state affair:

Sie haben dadurch de facto erklärt, daß sie die Auseinandersetzung mit der Österreichisch-ungarischen Bank zur Angelegenheit des Staates machen, das heißt, die Ansprüche der Inhaber gegen die Bank übernehmen und ihnen als Entschädigung hierfür die Garantie geben, daß die abgestempelte Note als gesetzliches Zahlungsmittel auf ihrem Territorium zu gelten habe.

English translation: They have thereby declared de facto that they make the settlement with the Austro-Hungarian Bank an affair of the state — that is, that they assume the holders' claims against the bank and, in compensation for this, give them the guarantee that the stamped note shall count as legal tender in their territory.

Article 206 is therefore the juridical climax. Kerschagl argues that the treaty treats the bank as if it were a state institution, ignores shareholders and private-law claims, and demands distinctions among notes by issue date and cover that circulation practice made technically impossible. On Article 206 his final verdict is unsparing:

Wir sehen, daß man beim besten Willen nur zu einem Schluß über den Artikel 206 kommen kann: entschuldigt durch die außerordentliche Hast der Herstellung, durch teilweise Unkenntnis des gesamten Organismus der Bank, vielleicht auch teilweise getäuscht durch falsche Informationen „Bedrückern" entkommener Staaten, hat sich die Friedenskonferenz verleiten lassen, ein Gebilde zu schaffen, welches eine geordnete Liquidierung der Bank zur Unmöglichkeit macht, ganz abgesehen von der Unbill, welche Österreich und Ungarn dabei aufgeladen wird.

English translation: We see that, with the best will, one can come to only one conclusion about Article 206: excused by the extraordinary haste of its making, by partial ignorance of the whole organism of the bank, and perhaps partly deceived by false information from states escaped from their "oppressors," the Peace Conference let itself be led into creating a structure that makes an orderly liquidation of the bank impossible, quite apart from the injustice thereby loaded upon Austria and Hungary.

The work remains valuable because it treats currency separation as state formation enacted on paper. Kerschagl’s lasting insight is that monetary sovereignty can be declared quickly, but it endures only where production, fiscal credibility, administration, and trust can sustain it.