Eugen Schmalenbach

Eugen Schmalenbach (20 August 1873 – 20 February 1955) was a German academic and economist. He was born in Halver, and attended the Leipzig College of Commerce starting in 1898. The college later became part of Leipzig University, only to emerge again as the Handelshochschule Leipzig.

Schmalenbach is best known as a professor at the University of Cologne, and as a contributor to German language journals on the subjects of economics, and the emerging fields of Business Management and financial accounting. He retired from active university life in 1933; one reason for this was to avoid attention, since his wife, Marianne Sachs, was Jewish. The couple had two children, Marian and Fritz. He died in Cologne in 1955.

He was the founder of the Schmalenbach Society, which works to create closer links between research in business economics and the world of business. The society still exists, but fused with another organization in 1978.

Eugen Schmalenbach is sometimes confused with his brother, Herman Schmalenbach, a philosopher and sociologist known for his sociological concept of the bund, or communion, cf., Kevin Hetherington ('The Contemporary Significance of Schmalenbach's Concept of the Bund'), and Howard G. Schneiderman ('Herman Schmalenbach,' in The Encyclopedia of Community).