My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

sion at Littauer Hall, the students asking questions about his lecture
of the previous night. In the evening he gave another lecture at
Fletcher Hall. In those years he never seemed to get tired. The
same mont~ in 1940 he also lectured as a guest in Princeton and
had lunch with Winfield W. RiefIer at the Institute for Advanced
Study. I remember Lu once told me that RiefIer~s job was the only
position that really would have made him happy.
Riefl.er had worked for some time in Geneva, where he was a
frequent guest at our house. Lu always enjoyed his presence. RiefIer
had written a book about the Federal Reserve System, which
was very much talked about. Consequently, he became one of the
permanent members of the Institute for Advanced' Study, the job
Lu had spoken about. Later he moved to the Federal Reserve
Board as an adviser.
It was very unusual for Lu to express a longing for something
out of' his reach. It was more revealing to me than any other remark
or complaint he might have made. Mostly I had to feel my way,
search in the dark like a mole digging its way underground. Questioning
would have made him lock the door of his soul. When I
told Fritz Machlup-much, much later-about Lu~s wish, hereplied,
"And he would have been the right man at the right place."
Why did no one ever think of it?
From the moment we came to the United States-even before we
had our own apartment and still lived in a small furnished place or
in the hotel on Riverside Drive-Lu wanted company in the evening.
He needed people, he needed discussions, he needed to air his
opinions and hear the reactions of different minds.
In the beginning we saw more Europeans than Americans, but
after a few years this changed automatically. There was a group of
Europeans who had been Lu~s
students in Vienna, and another
group of friends whom he had met socially. Among them was the
famous psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann and his wife, Dora, who,
when she came to the u.s. was a pediatrician, but later became a
specialist in. psychoanalysis of young adults. These evenings were
among the most interesting I can remember, as Dr. Hartmann-a
former student of Freud-was always analyzing Hitler, trying to
get to the bottom of his soul and discover his future plans. Then
there was Dr. Felix Kaufmann, the witty and genial philospher of
the social sciences, who once wrote a poem about the Mises seminar
(reprinted in the Mont Pelerin Quarterly of October 16, 1961)
as a tribute on Lu~s eightieth birthday. We saw also quite a bit of
Dr. Stephy Brown, an always enthusiastic, gay, and energetic former
student' of Lu~s, who later became a full-time professor at
Brooklyn College. Fritz Machlup, in 1940 a professor at the Uni-
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