The City Without Jews — Douglas Smith on life inside Vienna’s catastrophe
An extraordinary archive gives a victim’s eye view of how the Nazis eradicated Europe’s most thriving Jewish community
Vienna was once a city in which Jews did not have to be Jews. To be Viennese meant stepping beyond the limits of one’s identity into a cosmopolitan world of Kultur, where race and religion could be hidden behind a veil of refinement and achievement.
It was an ideal that built the Austrian capital into one of the great centres of Jewish life in Europe in the late 19th century. There Jews excelled in art, science, finance and much else. The more they succeeded, the louder the shrill cries of antisemites grew. But they seemed a marginal sect.
The Viennese writer Hugo Bettauer satirised their ambitions in his best-selling 1922 novel The City Without Jews. In his telling, the Jews are expelled from Austria amid popular jubilation, accompanied by a sea of swastikas and cries of “Heil!” But it all goes awry and the Jews are invited back to Vienna to save it. Bettauer described it as “a very amusing little novel” written as “a most frivolous, thoroughly unserious mischief-maker”.
In 1925 Bettauer was shot dead in his office by a young Nazi. Eight years later Hitler took power in Germany. In 1938 he swallowed Austria whole, extending a shroud of official antisemitism over Vienna. Just four years later the new authorities declared it Judenrein — a city without Jews.
There is little levity in historian Douglas Smith’s The City Without Jews. It is no novel, but a true account of how one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations was annihilated. It is a depressingly familiar story within the wider context of the Holocaust, but one that Smith has brought alive with forensic detail and a truly gripping narrative focused on the life and relations of Mignon Langnas.
Within her story, “one of loss, fear, terror, despair, longing, and even hope, is written the larger history of Austria’s Jews under the Nazis”. Smith has told it in unprecedented detail with access to her family archive.
Mignon and her family moved to Vienna at the beginning of the first world war from Austrian-ruled Galicia (now split between Poland and Ukraine). They built a life in the capital. Mignon married Leon Langnas in 1928. He built a business. They had two children. Siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and friends — many of whom feature as characters throughout — did the same.
After the Anschluss their lives began to crumble, each in their own way. The state no longer saw them as citizens, but as Jews. Their businesses — like Leon’s lumberyard — were expropriated. Neighbours and employees turned on them. They were beaten and humiliated by uniformed men, forced to scrub the streets on their hands and knees.
It did not take long for most Viennese Jews to realise they had to leave. Nor did it take long for the Nazis to repurpose the city’s official Jewish community into an instrument for emigration. Despite labyrinthine bureaucratic hurdles, it would facilitate the escape of around 120,000 Austrian Jews by 1940. That included Leon and Mignon’s two children, but not Mignon herself.
America’s entry into the war in late 1941 meant “Vienna’s Jews were effectively cut off from the outside world” just as the Nazi regime turned to more radical methods of destruction. Trains began to carry away Vienna’s Jews by the thousands in 1941, intensifying in 1942. At the end of that year there were only 7,989 Jews left in Vienna. There had once been 200,000.
Mignon was one of the few who remained. She served as a nurse for the official Jewish community from 1940. It gave her protection, but her survival was also largely luck. In January 1945 the family home was struck by an American bomb. She stood a few steps away from death.
Mignon Langnas survived the war alongside a few thousand other Viennese Jews. But unlike in Bettauer’s novel, there was no triumphant recovery. Sixty-six thousand had perished in the Holocaust. Most of the rest had left, never to return. Mignon was among them.
Most had nothing to return to. Cosmopolitan Vienna had been replaced by a decidedly more provincial city where Jews reminded people of uncomfortable history everyone did their best to forget. Smith’s book hopes to ensure it will not be.