3 h 23 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a city gets the expulsion it demands—and begins to lose the life it depends on?
In Hugo Bettauer’s The City Without Jews, a country struggling after war looks for someone to blame. Chancellor Karl Schwerdtfeger turns hatred of Jews into political power. An expulsion law sends a whole community away, and the city begins to discover what its leaders refuse to see: prejudice carries a cost for everyone.
Alongside the politics runs a love story. Leo Strakosch, a young Jewish man, loves Lotte, whose non-Jewish family has ties to the political world. The law forces him out, while she remains in a poorer, angrier city. Their separation gives this quick, dryly comic satire a personal stake: what happens to love when hatred becomes law?
What you’ll discover
- Hatred turned into law Watch a persuasive chancellor turn a troubled country’s search for blame into an order of expulsion.
- A city losing itself Follow the small losses that reveal how deeply a community sustains the place it calls home.
- Love across the divide Meet Leo and Lotte, whose bond faces the force of a law built on prejudice.
- Comedy with a sharp edge Find dry humor in a political thought experiment that exposes the folly of antisemitism.
- The cost of exclusion Explore Bettauer’s central warning: a society harms itself when it drives a whole group away.
Is it for you?
This book suits readers of political satire, of Vienna between the wars, and of how prejudice becomes policy. It is a light, quick novel, so readers who want deep character studies or subtle prose may find it thin.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A troubled country looks for someone to blame
- A chancellor builds his power on hatred
- The law passes and the trains begin to leave
- The empty city loses its life and its money
- A love story and a stranger who comes back
- What the satire says and how it is told
Who’s who
- Karl SchwerdtfegerThe chancellor of Utopia, a forceful and persuasive leader who blames the Jews for the nation's troubles and drives the law of expulsion.
- Leo StrakoschA young Jewish man of Athen who loves Lotte, is forced out by the law, and wants to find his way back to her.
- LotteA young woman of Athen who loves Leo and must live in the poorer, angrier city that remains after the law is carried out.
- The Jews of AthenA varied community of bankers, artists, shopkeepers and professionals who are ordered to leave the only home many of them have known.
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The City Without Jews
by Hugo Bettauer· 1922
Vienna expels its Jews and faces the consequences.
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Language: English
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 6
A troubled country looks for someone to blame
The story opens in Vienna, in the years after a great war. It is the once proud heart of an empire that has shrunk to a single struggling city. Prices rise every week, wages cannot keep up, and ordinary families feel they are sliding downward. Bettauer paints this mood with a journalist's eye, and the reader quickly sees why people are angry.
In that anger a familiar voice grows louder. Newspapers, speakers and party men say that the country's troubles are the work of the Jews. They claim that Jewish bankers, shopkeepers, doctors and writers have grown rich while honest people suffer. The charge is simple and it needs no proof, which is exactly why it spreads so well.
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The author
Hugo Bettauer
1872–1925 · Austrian novelist
Hugo Bettauer was an Austrian writer born in Baden, near Vienna, in 1872. He lived in Austria, Germany and the United States. He worked as a journalist and wrote novels. The City Without Jews was published in 1922. He died in Vienna in 1925 after being shot.
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What is The City Without Jews about?
It is a satire about a country that expels all its Jewish citizens. As the Jews leave, the city loses its trade, its culture and its comfort, and the folly of the law becomes plain.
Is The City Without Jews a true story?
No, it is fiction. Hugo Bettauer published it in Vienna in 1922 as a satire and a warning, setting it in Vienna. It imagines events that had not happened, in response to real antisemitism.
Where is the novel set?
It is set in Vienna, the capital of Austria, after the First World War. Readers of the time recognized their own city and its politics.
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