The War Economy and the War Museum: Otto Neurath and the Museum of War Economy in Leipzig, c. 1918

For over three decades, scholars have been well aware of the fact that Otto Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy did not have its origins in the Museum of Settlement and Town Planning, as previously had been believed, but in the German Museum of War Economy, which Neurath directed for a brief period during the latter half of 1918, at the end of the first World War. This museum sought to furnish the public with an understanding of the social, economic, and administrative dimensions of wartime struggle. During its existence, Neurath divided his time between Vienna, where he headed the General War and Economics Section of the Scientific Committee for War Economy in the Austrian War Ministry, and Leipzig, site of the Museum of War Economy. As Wolfgang Schumann (1973) characterized the period,

toward the end of the war when Neurath worked at the War Ministry in Vienna, he was also appointed director of the Museum of War Economy in Leipzig, which was a venture of the Chamber of Commerce there. I became its general secretary. Models and charts were in the making. This was the beginning of those activities of visualization which Neurath continued and fully developed in his Social and Economic Museum in Vienna.