The City Without Jews! It sounds almost like a jest, a paradox. The cosmopolitan will smile at the title; yet both Jews and Christians will prick up their ears and wonder: “Does such a thing exist?”
Some will consider this book merely a clever fantasy. Still, the reading of it will make them feel that The City Without Jews is symptomatic of our time.
One fine day a law is passed in the great city, Vienna (but it might just as well have been New York or London), expelling all Jews from the country. Not only Jews and converted Jews must leave, but also those of Jewish origin: that is, the children of mixed marriages.
The law, which the most rabid Ku Klux Klansman, Hakenkreuzler, or anti-Semite could not have conceived more skilfully even in his wildest dreams, is rigorously enforced. “Unregistered merchants, retail-dealers and so-called commission agents must leave the country within three months of the passage of the law; registered proprietors of firms, clerks, civil service employes, and manual laborers, within four months; artists, scholars, physicians, attorneys and the like, within five months. Directors of corporations, banks, and industries that paid taxes on an income of more than two hundred million kronen in the past year, are given six months’ time.”
After six months, the city without Jews comes into being.
As for Hugo Bettauer, its author—this whimsical flight of his fancy cost him his life. In March, 1925, not long after the publication of the novel, he was killed by a zealous twenty-year old ‘Nordic’. At the trial, the murderer declared himself content with his deed, as he had resolved to save German Kultur from degeneration, and believed that Bettauer was a menace to this Kultur.
But curiously enough Hugo Bettauer was himself a good Christian, the scion of a Protestant Viennese merchant family. Not a Jew—not an interested propagandist! A talented journalist of the Danube City, whose versatile pen mastered the novel as well as the feuilleton.
What was Bettauer’s crime? He wrote a novel of our time. His journalistic temperament, his many travels and adventures had brought him in contact with all spheres of society. Twelve years of his life were spent in New York—he knew metropolitan life in both hemispheres, knew it as thoroughly and intimately as only a finely discerning observer can. That is why Bettauer’s City Without Jews became a universal novel, transcending the geographical boundaries of Austria. That is also why Bettauer’s Vienna will seem so familiar to New Yorkers, Londoners, even Parisians.
Wittily, fascinatingly, colorfully, Hugo Bettauer builds the city without Jews. With a sure touch he raises the curtain behind which this hundred per cent Christian city works and plays. Nonchalantly, with an ironic smile, the Viennese artist takes us to the stock exchange, the theatre, the great department stores, shows us the night life, the middle-class Viennese home, the Parliament and the café. We see and enjoy the city without Jews in all its phases. Dispassionately, Bettauer paints a modern picture that lives and breathes. But why do we read the novel as though it were a thrilling episode in contemporary history? And why did Hugo Bettauer receive the fatal bullet as royalty for his novel?
An attempt to answer this scientifically would bring us to the fundamental question of the mutual adaptability of Jews and non-Jews. It would touch upon the race problem that still torments the world—now more than ever—and which Bettauer knew so well. Propagandist phrases could easily slip in, phrases that would again stir up the ancient controversy between the Jewish and the Christian Weltanschauung.
It would be unfair toward the author of this book. For Bettauer successfully escaped the temptation to propagandize.
The City Without Jews was built by Bettauer, the fearless Christian. Explanation, comment, or an analysis of his purpose, would be out of place, and might be interpreted as an attempt to use his novel as political propaganda.
In Europe, The City Without Jews, is arousing an unabating interest. In less than a year, a quarter of a million copies of the novel have been sold, an unprecedented figure in German modern literature. The translation for the American edition was made from the fifty-fourth edition, following exactly the simple, unaffected style of the original.
