The City Without Jews by Douglas Smith: How Vienna turned on a once-thriving community

City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna

Author: Douglas Smith

ISBN-13: 978-1529090864

Publisher: Picador

Guideline Price: £30; 538pp

Vienna wasn’t always friendly to Jews – they were persecuted and tolerated in turn by successive Habsburgs. But in 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph granted them citizenship and, until the end of the empire in 1918, Vienna was the centre of a European culture and civilisation in which Jewish influence was quite disproportionate to their numbers.

Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler ... The names of Viennese Jews are many among the makers of modernism. And in finance, medicine, law – “Everything was in the hands of the Jews,” wrote awed Jewish novelist Jacob Wassermann.

Vienna was also Hitler’s city. In 1938 it came under Eichmann’s control, earmarked as a laboratory for the annihilation of Jews. By war’s end Vienna’s Jewish population of 200,000 was reduced to about 2,000, mainly by forced emigration or murder.

With the Anschluss formerly “nice” non-Jews “changed in an instant”. Age-old grudges and hatreds resurfaced in a campaign of wanton humiliation. Crowds jeered as Jews were made to scrub the streets on their hands and knees. Individuals as well as the state indulged in mass theft. Jewish businesses were seized, their shops and apartments appropriated, often by their neighbours. They were banned from public parks, then from cinemas, theatres, trams. In an atmosphere of open violence, Kristallnacht in Vienna was “the most successful” in all the Reich.

Next the attempts, frantic and belated, to flee, preferably to the US, and a tortuous bureaucracy to negotiate. Those who failed faced deportation in sealed trains to an unknown fate. And the ever fewer who remained in Vienna systematically starved.

Meticulously, rivetingly documenting the terror, provoked by malice and greed, Douglas Smith focuses on the testimony of Mignon Langnas, who stayed behind when her family emigrated, nursing fellow Jews and pouring her anguish into her diaries and letters. She lived; but always tormented by “dark shadows that traverse my soul”.

Time was when you could take some comfort in the belief that such iniquity belonged to another time and place and a vanquished ideology. The world had learned its lessons. But here we are, wringing our hands as forms of it are re-enacted enacted in front of our eyes, most glaringly and poignantly in Palestine. It must make us despair of us.

Anne Haverty is a novelist and poet