Chapter 1 A Singular Education
Peter Drucker's earliest memory captures one of the worst moments of the twentieth century. He was in the children's bathroom, just above his father's study, and through the heating register he could hear three voices. One belonged to his father, the senior civil servant in the Ministry of Economics of the Austro-Hungarian government; the second to his uncle, one of Vienna's leading jurists; the third to Thomas Masaryk, the future president of Czechoslovakia. Not yet five, Peter couldn't be sure who, but one of them clearly said, "This is the end not just of Austria, but of civilization." It was August 1914. The Great War had just begun.
Earlier that summer the Druckers -- his father, Adolph, his mother, Caroline, and his younger brother, Gerhart -- taking a long-planned vacation on the Adriatic seashore, had barely settled on the beach when news came of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in Sarejevo. The assassin was a terrorist operating from (though not, as it turned out, for), the independent country of Serbia, which bordered Bosnia, a province of Austria-Hungary since 1908. Serbia was protected by Russia, which was tied by treaty to France as France was to Britain and as Austria-Hungary was to Germany. The war party in Vienna seized on the assassination, for which they held Serbia responsible, as a pretext for crushing Serbia, a long-time imperial goal. The twisting fuse of alliances, however, worked against localization of the conflict to the Balkans. Any Austrian retaliation against Serbia risked general European war.
A colleague sent Adolph Drucker a telegram urging him to return to Vienna immediately to stop the rush toward war. (So Adolph later told his son, who remembered only his mother's funny bathing suit from that shrouded holiday.) The "known liberals and pacifists" in the ranks of the senior civil servants, Adolph said, had taken it upon themselves "to lobby our ministers, buttonhole politicians, try to get to the old emperor through the wall of equally old courtiers," to head off the catastrophe. They failed: by declaring war on Serbia and shelling the Serbian capital, Belgrade, Austria-Hungary struck the fateful match.
The war haunted Peter Drucker's childhood, though, as we will see, it also expedited his career as a writer. He and his friends taught themselves to read "by scanning the casualty lists and the obituaries with the big black borders, looking for names we knew, names of people we loved and missed." To them war was a permanent condition of the world. "None of us could imagine that the war would ever end," Drucker recalls. "Indeed every boy my age knew that 'When I grow up' meant 'When I get drafted and sent to the front.'"
A few years later, when Drucker was a senior in high school, his class was assigned to review the first crop of books to appear on the war. "When we then discussed these...in class, one of my fellow students said, 'Every one of these books says that the Great War was a war of total military incompetence. Why was it?' Our teacher did not hesitate a second but shot right back, 'Because not enough generals were killed; they stayed way behind the lines and let others do the fighting and dying.'" In this the members of Drucker's generation shared something in common with the generals. They were spared. Drucker is conscious of his luck in being too young to be used as cannon fodder by those murderously incompetent generals. "Those of us who have been spared the horrors in which our age specializes," he wrote in Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959), "who have never suffered total war, slave-labor camp or police terror, not only owe thanks; we owe charity and compassion."
If the war brought fear, the peace brought hunger. The winter of 1919-1920 was grim. "Like practically every child in Vienna," Drucker writes in his sparkling autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander (1979), "I was saved by Herbert Hoover whose feeding organization provided school lunches. They left me with a lasting aversion to porridge and cocoa -- but definitely saved my life and that of millions of children throughout Continental Europe." An "organization" did all that good. One sees the biographical roots of Drucker's concept of organization as an instrument of human creativity.
The Hoover mission, noteworthily, was also a triumph of management, though the word was unknown in its current sense then. As we will see, Peter Drucker would explore one of the largest organizations in the world, General Motors, in his career-long inquiry into history's first "society of organizations" and the role of management in that society. More, in the "manager" he would discover an unacknowledged author of modernity, a culture hero to rival the totemic figure of the artist.
The Druckers lived in suburban Vienna in a modish house built for them by a prominent Viennese architect. Through the mansard window of his first grown-up room under the eaves, Peter could see, past the local vineyards, the hills of the Vienna Woods. The Druckers were "good class" professional people. Adolph was an economist and lawyer; Caroline had studied medicine -- quite rare for a woman in the Austria of those days, and they shared their professional interests with their children. "My father had a dinner party every Monday," Drucker says. "There were often economists, ranking civil servants, even a major international lawyer." Later in the week, his mother held a medical dinner. There were musical dinners (his grandmother was a soloist with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Gustav Mahler) and literary dinners. Improbably, there were even mathematics dinners: "My father and mother were very interested in mathematics and philosophy." Imagine trying to wring conviviality out of calculus.
At one dinner he heard a medical eminence attack Freud, then the most famous man in Vienna, for his unfeeling detachment from his suffering patients -- a breach of the physician's "sacred duty" to be a compassionate healer. At another a "moderately pro-Freudian" psychologist and young Oskar Morgenstern, destined for Princeton, where he became "the foremost authority on statistical theory," debated a study of the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis, the psychologist saying it showed promising results, Morgenstern entering a statistical demur: "Not so, if you go by the figures, then there are either no emotional illnesses at all or the trust of the patient in any method makes the patient feel better, regardless of method." To which another dinner guest, a surgeon (inevitably), responded, "In either case there is as yet no valid Freudian psychotherapy which a physician can recommend or use in good conscience." Readers of Drucker, curious about his penchant for scientific and, especially, medical metaphors, need look no further than those evenings.
His literary allusions -- Jane Austen nimbly surfacing in a discussion of the evolution of military technology; or Henry James adding a dollop of unlikely relevance on the topic of the industrial working class -- spring from a similar social-cultural source. Besides the standard elevated fare he was fed at home, young Peter was also a habitué of a salon presided over by one of the Druckers' closest friends. There he heard the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, discuss current affairs; saw Count Helmuth Moltke, who would be "at the center of the resistance to Hitler," display "the magnetism of the born leader"; and listened, bored, as Thomas Mann read his short novel Disorder and Early Sorrow. Culture was also heavily laid on every Christmas and New Years, when a leading Viennese actress, Maria Mueller, dined with the Druckers and then recited from memory scenes from Greek tragedy, Goethe, Schiller, and, in English, from Shakespeare: "King Lear, The Tempest and -- her favorite as well a