A Lucky Escape
In his memoirs, Corden (2018: 17) states that he was aware of the anti-semitic attitudes at the time stirred up by Nazi propaganda but that he himself did not experience it directly.
However, when his father was sacked from his post as manager and made unemployed, the family began to make active preparations to emigrate. As part of this process, Max was also sent to England in early 1938 where he was met by his Aunt Elli and, like his older brother, enrolled in an English preparatory school. It is noteworthy that at the tender age of ten, Max travelled alone to England by boat and train. In Corden (ibid.: 12-13), he describes the adventure in matter-of-fact terms, but it vividly illustrates his resilience and determination.Things came to a head for the family after the terrible events of Kristallnacht on the 9 November 1938. All over Germany, Jewish synagogues and businesses were sacked and destroyed. Thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Max's father, Rudolf, was one of them: he was imprisoned in Buchenwald. However, luck was at hand for the family in the person of Aunt Elli. She had managed to secure visas for the family to emigrate from Germany to Australia. With these precious visas in hand, Max's mother was able to get Rudolf released from Buchenwald. The parents then went to England and met up with their two sons. On 16 December 1938, they all boarded a liner at Southampton bound for Australia, finally settling in Melbourne towards the end of January 1939.
Unfortunately, a much more tragic fate awaited Max's Uncle Willy Cohn and his family. Willy was a high school teacher who lost his job when the Nazis came to power because he was an active social democrat. Willy was a historian and author of numerous articles about the history of German Jews. He was also an avid diarist who documented in great detail life for the Jewish community in Breslau under the Nazis.
Unlike Rudolf, Willy was very reluctant to leave Germany though his three older children did so.[173] When he had made up his mind to leave, war broke out. Willy, his second wife, Trudi, and their two youngest daughters, Susanne (aged nine) and Tamara (aged three), were rounded up with a thousand other Jews from Breslau on 21 November 1941. They were shipped by train to Kaunas (in Lithuania) where they were all murdered on arrival by an extermination squad. Miraculously, Willy's diaries survived the war and were later published first in Israel and then in Germany.[174] They are regarded as one of the most compelling descriptions of what life was like for Jews in Germany under the Nazis.After the family had settled in Melbourne, they quickly anglicised their names: Cohn became Corden, Werner became Warner, Gerhart became Gerald. However, Corden (ibid.: 46) makes it clear that Warner never stuck as his first name and he was always henceforth known as “Max”. In 1942, Corden entered Melbourne High School, a selective State school, and he graduated from it in 1945, winning a prize as well as a scholarship to the University of Melbourne. His favourite subject at school was history. But, as he recounts in his memoirs, his father advised him against studying history at university. Instead, he urged Max to study commerce with the aim of getting a well-paid job after graduation. Luckily the commerce course at Melbourne University involved a lot of economics so that is how Corden became an economist. History's loss was to prove economics' gain, thanks to the wise advice of Rudolf Corden.[175]
His development as an economist during his undergraduate years was much influenced by his careful reading of two seminal books: The Economics of Imperfect Competition by Joan Robinson and The Economics of Welfare by A.C. Pigou. In a conversation about his life and work, Corden testified about the impact these books had on his life's work: ‘The first launched me into partial equilibrium diagrams and the second, with its emphasis on market failure and the use of taxes and subsidies to correct for externalities, became a kind of ancestor of my later book Trade Policy and Economic Welfare’ (Corden in Coleman 2006: 381).
After graduating with a First in 1949, Corden did not initially consider an academic career. Instead, he joined the management and research unit of a major Melbourne newspaper, The Argus, and explored the possibility of becoming a journalist. But he kept his academic options open too by enrolling part-time for a Master's degree at Melbourne. His thesis topic was “The Economics of the Australian Press”. It resulted in Corden's first published economics article—Corden (1952-1953)—in the prestigious British journal, the Review of Economic Studies. This article also had a bonus effect of catching the eye of two leading international economists who were later to become key mentors for Corden: Harry Johnson and James Meade.
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