THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS

Empty streets.

Before World War I, Vienna was, for several decades, “one of the cradles of modernism,” writes Smith, a historian and translator as well as the author of Rasputin (2016) and Former People (2012). But the city was also the crucible of antisemitism. In this powerful and well-researched history of the city, Smith traces the roots of Vienna’s antisemitic society from the late-19th through mid-20th centuries. Beginning with the vicious policies of the city’s mayor, Karl Lueger, at the turn of the century and working through the plight of a demoralized Austria after World War I, Smith turns to the city that “birthed Hitler’s dream, and Europe’s nightmare.” The nascent nationalisms simmering in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire bubbled into resentment against the successful Jewish families of Vienna. By the late 1930s, deportation was in full swing. Josef Löwenherz, personally appointed by Adolf Eichmann—the architect of the Holocaust—as head of the Jewish community in 1938, vividly “likened himself to a piece of paper caught in a pair of scissors,” Smith writes. By 1941, Jews were being arrested daily. Then we get to the heart of the book: the evidence of personal documents, letters, and journals of the long-forgotten men and women whose lives were snipped in two. Reading the stories of Vienna’s Jews in their own voices leaves an indelible scar. You can’t but feel marked by the yellow star yourself, can’t but feel the dislocations of transport and incarceration. This is a book of civic history on both the personal and the grand scale. Archives have been opened, “incorporating all the new findings of recent decades in a broad history of the subject.” Smith lets the dead speak for themselves. And, after all, isn’t that what history is supposed to do?

A magnificent history of Vienna’s antisemitic past, told through the voices of those who lived and died there.