By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In 1922, Hugo Bettauer, an Austrian writer of Jewish origin, published a satirical anti-utopia, the novel The City Without Jews. The book was published 47 times in seven languages. The author wrote: “The people have chosen a political savior, Dr. Karl Schwertfeger of the Christian Social Party.” The writer was referring to Karl Lueger, an antisemite who was mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910.
In 1899 Lueger said: “The Jews have created ‘unimaginable terrorism’ against the masses through the control of capital and the press.” He called for the “liberation of Christian nations from Jewish domination” because “the Jews are predatory beasts in the image of men,” and “antisemitism will disappear when the last Jew dies.” Bettauer wrote: “It was a warm June day. Crowds of people were sweating in the sun and repeatedly shouting political slogans. They shouted, “Jews out!” and “Long live Dr. Karl Schwertfeger! Long live the savior of Austria!” […] He climbs the stairs of the Austrian parliament, where he will speak in defense of the long-planned “Law for the Expulsion of Non-Aryans from Austria.” Antisemitism in Austria in 1922 was palpable, but Viennese Jews lived comfortably and did not fear for their lives and well-being. Unexpectedly, the scandalous, sensation-loving writer Bettauer turned out to be a prophet: the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna took place, but seventeen years later. He sharply criticized Austrian society and the mob, and warned against the pernicious effects of antisemitism, but he himself did not see his work as prophetic.
According to the German Jewish writer Jacob Wasserman, in Vienna at the turn of the century “all social life was in Jewish hands. Banks. The press, the theater, literature, social organizations, were all in Jewish hands. […] I was amazed at how many Jews there were among doctors, lawyers, club-goers, snobs, dandies, proletarians, actors, newspapermen and poets.” Among financiers 71% were Jews, among lawyers 65% were Jews, among doctors – 59%, and among the Viennese journalists half of them were Jews. According to Bettauer, Schwertfeger is trying to rally the population by inciting antisemitism: “Let us look at our little Austria today. In whose hands is the press, and therefore also public opinion? In the hands of a Jew! Who has accumulated billions and billions since the cursed year 1914? The Jew! Who handles vast sums of our money, who sits in director’s chairs in big banks, who heads almost all industries? A Jew! Who owns the theaters? Jew!” The “Savior” decides to expel the Jews and to deport children of mixed marriages and crossbreeders. Those who try to remain secretly in Vienna are to be executed: “At one o’clock in the afternoon whistles signaled that the last train with Jews had left Vienna, and at six o’clock in the evening […] all the church bells rang, warning the citizens that not a single Jew remained in Austria.”
Stefan Zweig describes the situation of the Jews as follows: “In recent years, Viennese Jewry – like Spanish Jewry before the same tragic exodus – has become creatively prolific, creating art that is not specifically Jewish, but instead deeply and emphatically Austrian, Viennese in essence. […] Freud and other major scholars forced the view that the Jews – scientists, virtuosos, artists, directors, architects, writers – unquestionably asserted a high and supreme place in the spiritual life of Vienna. Because of their passionate love for this city, their desire for assimilation, they were firmly established here and ready to serve the glory of Austria; they felt their Austrianness as a destiny.” Judeophobia posed an obstacle for Jews, but it was also a challenge: Further entrenchment and consolidation of Jewish status required a secular education through which they entered the circle of the liberal bourgeoisie. In 1880, the Jewish deputy of the Reichstag, Ludwig Bamberger, noted the “extraordinary thirst for knowledge” of Jews and their “obvious haste” to receive the education that for so many years had been forbidden to them. He argued that “the revival of hatred of the Jews is closely connected with their thirst for knowledge and the rapid pace of its acquisition.”
The flourishing of life in Vienna put many Jews to sleep, but Bettauer warned of a storm. The “Savior” Schwertfeger explains the expulsion by saying that Austrians are “naive, kind, simple-minded people” and that the Jews “have become our masters and have seized control of all our economic and cultural life.” Bettauer commits a provocation, warning society against the terrible consequences of antisemitism, but gives the idea to the Jew-haters. He draws a caricature to show the Austrians what a ridiculous and harmful extreme Judophobia can take them to, but gives the antisemites an effective recipe for dealing with the Jews, implemented seventeen years after the Anschluss. Despite, or perhaps in part because of, Bettauer’s warning, Vienna became a city of Nazi darkness.
Hugo Bettauer was born into the Jewish family of a stockbroker in 1872. He attended a prestigious Viennese grammar school, after which he took a job as a journalist and editor of the Neues Wiener Journal. At the age of 18, Bettauer decided to become a soldier. To get into the army, he was baptized and became a Protestant. But his military career did not work out: because of a conflict with the officers he dropped out of the army after five months. After the army, Bettauer moved to Zurich and then with his wife Olga Steiner immigrated to the United States, but in 1899 the Bettauers, who received American citizenship, returned to Berlin. Adventurism and literary talent led Hugo back into journalism. He took a job as editor of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper and gained fame as a scandalous journalist with outbursts against major public figures. He divorced Olga, who did not share his love of dangerous scandals and a nomadic life. After the divorce, Bettauer married nineteen-year-old Helen Muller and moved to the United States with her. Hugo took a job in New York as a journalist, then editor of a German magazine and in 1907 published five works. Despite his success in the U.S., in 1908, Hugo returned to Vienna and became editor of the newspaper Neue Freie Presse, whose editor in the near past was Herzl.
In 1924, Bettauer, together with the journalist Rudolf Olden, began publishing “He and She. A Weekly Culture of Life and Eroticism.” The publication was a great success because of its enlightening and provocative content. The magazine advocated the right to divorce, abortion, and non-criminalization of homosexuality. The magazine discussed free love and women’s rights, which Bettauer sought to “pull out of the mire of pseudo-morality and raise to a moral, free height”. The magazine quickly became popular. Within two months, circulation tripled, reaching 60,000. Austrian Chancellor Ignatz Seipel said that the magazine had become “a poison to the people”. Intermittent closures of the editorial office and a ban on circulation bankrupted the publication. But Hugo started a new magazine, “Bettauer’s Weekly of Life Issues” and continued in the same vein. “No other European city is so steeped in pornography, not even Paris,” an Austrian state newspaper wrote of Vienna. The responsibility for society’s “moral decline” was placed mainly on Bettauer. For his journalism and sexual education activities the writer was accused of being tabloid and lowbrow, and his journal was confiscated.
The Nazis called Bettauer a “red poet” and a “shameless seducer of youth.” There were calls in right-wing publications for “radical self-help” and a “lynch mob trial against the desecrators of our people”. On the morning of March 10, 1925, Otto Rothstock, a twenty-one-year-old unemployed dental technician and Nazi sympathizer, entered the building where Bettauer worked. He walked into Hugo’s office, pulled out a revolver, and shot him five times at point-blank range. Bettauer died on March 26, the first victim of Nazism in Austria. At the trial, Rothstock said that “as a good Christian,” he should have “sent Bettauer to the other world for the protection of his people.”
After the Anschluss in 1938, highly educated, successful and well-to-do Jews, the color of the country, were deprived of basic civil rights, robbed and dismissed from all educational institutions and scientific and cultural institutions. All the owners of businesses, banks and stores were arrested by the Gestapo and forced to give up ownership of their property. They were arrested, beaten, humiliated and deported. In Vienna, 42 synagogues were burned. Huge contributions were imposed on the Jews. More than half of Austria’s Jews emigrated. At least 60,000 Jews of Austria were exterminated. Bettauer’s son died in Auschwitz in 1942.
Stefan Zweig, in his memoirs, describes what was happening to European Jewry this way: “As long as they were united by religion, they were still a community and therefore a strength; when they were repulsed and expelled, they atoned for the fact that with their religion, with their customs, they themselves had consciously separated themselves from the other peoples. But the Jews of the twentieth century were no longer a community. They had no common faith, they saw their Jewishness as a burden rather than pride, and they were not aware of any predestination. They lived apart from the commandments of their formerly sacred books and did not want to know the ancient common language. To coexist, to blend in with the peoples around them, to dissolve into the universal has always been their cherished and most passionate desire, only to find shelter from all persecution, a refuge in perpetual flight. Thus, having mingled with other peoples, some did not understand others, long ago more French, Germans, English, Russians, than Jews.
Only now, when they were huddled together and swept up like garbage in the streets – bank directors from their Berlin palaces and synagogue servants from orthodox communities, Parisian philosophy professors and Romanian cabbies, dead men and Nobel Prize winners, concert singers and funeral mourners, writers and distillers, owners and non-profits, great and small, believers and free thinkers, moneylenders and wise men, Zionists and assimilators, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, righteous and sinners, and behind them, still bewildered, the crowd of those who thought they had long since escaped the curse, baptized and mixed – now, for the first time in hundreds of years, Jews were being forced back into a community they had not felt in a long time – a community of exile that had returned again and again since Egypt. They asked each other as they fled – why me, why you? Why am I with you, whom I do not know, whose language I do not understand, whose way of thinking I do not comprehend, with you, with whom I have nothing in common? Why us all?”
Hugo Bettauer did not live to see this question and the realization of his fantastic, monstrous and satirically described plot. As he lay severely wounded in the hospital for 16 days, did he have time to realize what he was dying for?
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.