Lösch, August

Biographical Background

Lösch was born on October 15, 1906, in the small town of Öhrin gen in southwestern Germany. Two years later, the family moved to Heidenheim, where the young man passed Abitur, the German version of the high school final, in 1925. After an apprenticeship with a local industrial firm, he began his studies at the University of Tübingen. “A royal feeling,” he writes, in youthful idealism, in his diary in July 1927, “to be free for all that is noble and true. To be on your own in research and in life!”

He continued his studies at the University of Freiburg and moved on to Bonn in 1930. There, he met professors Arthur Spiethoff and Joseph Schumpeter, who admitted him to his seminar and to a special philo sophical–sociological workshop. Lösch received his doctorate in 1932, based on a thesis on the question, “What to Think about the Fall in Birthrate,” an earlier version of which had already won a prize in 1931. He used the prize money to publish the manuscript under the original German title of Was ist vom Geburtenrückgang zu halten?

During the following years, Lösch concentrated his research on the interrelationships between the development paths of population and the economy. This interest continued into his first visit to the United States, where he went in the fall of 1934 on a one-year Rockefeller fellowship. After his return to Bonn, Lösch passed habilitation—in the German tradition, the prerequisite for a university career—in 1936 based on the manuscript of his new book on population waves and business cycles, Bevölkerungswellen und Wechsellagen.

In this book, he analyzes the differing impacts of popul ation growth on the business cycle in economies dominated by the agricultural or industrial sectors. In the former case, a close relationship between demographic and economic variables can be clearly shown, but the interaction is not as strict in the latter. Here, the political frame conditions for technological and economic development are more important.

[Page 473]In 1936, Lösch's Rockefeller fellowship was extended for another year. During his U.S. visit, he met again with Schumpeter, who had moved to Harvard and who received him “like a father.” In Schumpeter's seminar, he met old friends like Wolfgang Stolper—whom he knew from Schumpeter's seminar in Bonn—and made new ones—like Edgar M. Hoover, Jr., then Schumpeter's assistant. Deeply impressed by the diversity of the country, where he traveled rather extensively during his second visit, and by the spirit of freedom in America, Lösch began research on the topic of economic regions.

In 1933, after Machtergreifung by the Nazi party, Lösch wrote in his diary: “I will walk upright through these hopeless times.” Many of his friends decided to leave Germany for good, and his birthrate book had been indexed by the German authorities in 1936. Nevertheless, he returned to his home country in 1937. “What would become of Germany, if all of us were leaving?” he asked.

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