PETER F. DRUCKER BIOGRAPHY

DRUCKER`S EMIGRATION

TO ENGLAND

Immediately after Hitler took power in 1933 Drucker left Germany for London, where he found work first as a trainee with an insurance company, and then as chief economist of a private bank. Through the director of the bank, who was also from Austria, Drucker secured in 1934/35 a place in the legendary seminar of John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, which he remembers as a theatrical one-man show.

In London Drucker reconnected with Doris Schmitz, born in Mainz, whom he had gotten to know at his international law seminar at the University of Frankfurt. They married in 1934.

Already immediately after the takeover of the National Socialists, Drucker began to record and analyse the experiences he had in Germany. In 1936 a first version was published with a Viennese publisher; then, in the spring of 1939, Drucker's analysis appeared in an enlarged edition and in English, with the title The End of Economic Man.

Drucker's analysis met with a broad and positive response, including from Winston Churchill, who praised the book and its author in the Times Literary Supplement. Hayek, in his own analysis of totalitarianism, The Road to Serfdom, referred in two places to Drucker's book.

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