Hugo Bettauer's 1922 Dystopian Satire The City Without Jews
& Austrian Antisemitism
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Hugo Bettauer's 1922 dystopian satire Die Stadt ohne Juden: Ein Roman von Ubermorgen was translated by Salomea Neumark Brainin as The City Without Jews: A Novel of Our Time (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1926). An earlier novel of Bettauer's was the basis for G. W. Pabst's silent film classic The Joyless Street (1925) which propelled Greta Garbo to fame; that novel was issued by McCauley as Viennese Love (1924). City Without Jews is well known in Europe, though it is only little-known to English readers.
The English first edition is rare, but it was reprinted in trade paperback in 1997 & that edition is still in print. This work of speculative fiction foreshadowed the Holocaust when postulating a time when Vienna passes a law making it illegal for any Jew to be in the city. Bettauer with colorful humor reinvents the nature of Vienna sans Jews. It is not a work of propaganda but a sincere comic fantasy, so well measured that it could not help but satirize antisemitism as ridiculous.
But Bettauer did not live to see Austrian antisemitism become far more than merely ridiculous. Austrians were swift to embrace Nazism & the country became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Third Reich. There was no post-war Nuremberg treatment of Austria's fascists, who were never forced to confront publicly & legally what they had done. Hence the same rulers who assisted in the slaughter of Jews still ruled post-war Austria. The nation is even today one of the most virulent in its antisemitism & xenophobia. The Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism & Xenophobia published in December 1999 a report on Austria & Switzerland as the two most racist countries in Western Europe; so it is not only outsiders & Jews who have noticed the severity of Austria's illness.
Jews in Vienna had always been creative, dynamic, productive & contributory; even today, 90% of Austria's lingering little Jewish community lives in Vienna. As Bettauer's alternate history projected, Vienna, once among the most vital & wealthy cosmopolitan centers in the world, destroyed itself with it's own fatal flaw in failing to value the centuries-old history of its Jewish citizenry. Fifty years after the Viennese so happily colluded with the Nazis, the city retains it's post-War second-rate status in arts & education. The country's own great loss over the deportations & mass-murders of Austrian Jews did not teach Austrians that such scapegoating practically defines the modern notion of "Evil." Never having had to pay for their infamy in the public light of trials & deserved humiliation, Austria remains to this day a nation that can elect among their leaders men who are as Nazi as they come.
In the 1970s Austria had a Jewish chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. Kreisky had fled Austria during the Nazi years, but unlike so many Jews, he had to return to the country he loved & try to direct her onto a more humanitarian path. As a socialist his leadership rankled many Austrians. Anti-communist sentiments encouraged by western-block countries became in Austria intertwined with anti-Jewish sentiments. At the end of the Cold War, the true heart of Austria resurfaced with only scanty attempts to disguise an old agenda for a new one. Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, who had been a wartime agent for Germany, provoked fresh outbreaks of antisemitism in the 1980s. He was the leader of the Volkspartei (People's Party). Because "Volks" was the prefix for some thirteen Nazi-affiliated organizations, it does not mean "people" in common vernacular. It has connotations of race & ethnicity which inclusive political parties never embrace. At the ceremony celebrating Waldheim's 1986 election as president of Austria, Peoples Party officials flaunted their Nazi decorations & medals. We can only imagine an American counterpart. Remember Pat Buchanan's famous Republican Convention keynote address in which he called for an "ethnic cleansing" in America, this at a time when the term connotated mass murder in the Balkins. Now suppose his own presidential bid had been successful & the KKK showed up in full Klan regalia to celebrate "their" win. That's what the Volkspartei celebration was like. Several leaders of other nations would not interact with Waldheim whose presidency was a blight on all Europe. But Austrian response to international sentiments was to embrace him with increasing warmth, knowing full well that to censor Waldheim's Nazi affinity was to censor the majority in Austria who shared his disease.
As if Waldheim wasn't extremist enough for the antisemitic majority vote, there followed Jorg Haider, leader of the Freedom Party -- "freedom" from Jews, freedom from gypsies, freedom from all foreign immigration & Balkin refugees. Haider repeatedly expressed open admiration for the Third Reich. In 1995 he characterized SS officers as "men of character" who sent criminals to "punishment camps." In the wake of the international backlash against him he made a half-hearted clumsy apology. But in Austria itself, his popularity skyrocketed, & his party was soon incorporated into a coalition government. Seventy thousand young Austrians immediately took to the streets, marching under the credo "No Coalition With Racism," understanding perfectly that the acceptance of Haider & his party as a normal part of government reinforced Austria's persisting tendency in the direction of authoritarianism, racism & xenophobia. But since when have youths ever been listened to? The fact is, Freedom Party & "Volks" Party were natural bedpartners.
Before the Holocaust, Vienna was a center of arts & literature. It has never bounced back. Authors who were not killed for being Jews or for Jewish sympathies survived only by leaving Vienna & never returning. Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, Hermann Broch, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elias Canetti, Leo Perutz, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus were forced to flee -- the cream of Austrian intellectuality & artistry were skimmed away. All who failed to flee in time were "deported to the east" into Polish death-camps. Goebbels' Ordinance of February 1936 denied Jews even access to museums as visitors. The deletion from Austrian & German culture of anything with the "taint" of Jewish participation was a central concern of nazism. By 1938 the world of Hugo Bettauer's prophetic dystopian novel had come to pass; Vienna had become The City Without Jews.
His novel was in great part about the signal importance of Austrian Jews played in keeping Vienna at the forefront of the arts. In his fantasy of Jews being purged, he fancied Vienna killing it's own soul, a city rendered dead to the world of arts, it's publishing a sinkhole of dullness, its universities tenth-rate. What Hugo never imagined was that his fantasy was not sufficiently absurd that every Viennese would agree it was lunacy, but would embrace ideas so stupid & destructive that Bettauer had believed only a mean clown could accept such ideas. Bettauer had actually fantasized Vienna quickly realizing the error. The idea that the tenth-rate status of Viennese arts, education, & literature would last into the following millennium was beyond his imagining.
Hugo Bettauer was not really a political writer & as a satirist was writing about something all too obvious to his humane outlook. His sweetness of approach to his material arose out of his gut-feeling that antisemitism was so absurd it was funny. Therefore he naively imagined that once Vienna realized how essential Jews were to the city's continued cosmopolitan well-being, there would be a city-wide outcry for the return of the Jews, a sentimental nostalgia for the Good Old Days causing Jewish physicians, teachers, artists, & journalists to return with honors -- resulting in a happy-ever-after ending.
Certainly the existence of Hugo Bettauer, who was Protestant, & more recently of those 70,000 outraged Austrian youths who protested the rise of Jorg Haider, reminds us not to despise all Austrians as invariably ignorant antisemites. But Bettauer's own fate does not argue that great rewards await those who would laugh in the face of hatred & stupidity. Hugo paid severely for his humor. In March of 1925, a self-proclaimed "Nordic," believing Bettauer a menace to German "Kultur," shot Hugo Bettauer & killed him. At the murderer's trial, he was unrepentant, as Vienna is unrepentant today.