Award-winning historian Douglas Smith joins us with a gripping account of the destruction of Jewish Vienna, as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary woman who witnessed it all.
About the Book
In 1922, Hugo Bettauer published the novel The City Without Jews, a satirical critique of Austrian antisemitism. Three years later he would be killed by an early follower of the Nazi Party, and in 1938, the novel’s terrifying vision of a Vienna emptied of Jews began to unfold in real life. German troops poured into the glittering city, marking the beginning of seven years of unfathomable state-sanctioned violence against the Jewish population, culminating in the Shoah.
A work of great power and urgency, The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna tells the dramatic story of these seven years as they have never been told before. Drawing on hundreds of sources, many of which have lain untouched for decades, the historian Douglas Smith captures with novelistic immediacy the intertwined lives of those who experienced this age of extremes.
Of all these voices, one stands out: a middle-aged nurse named Mignon Langnas, a Jewish woman who would see all her friends and family, and her entire world, disappear. The only Jew who spent the entire seven years in Nazi Vienna and left behind such a detailed record of her life, Mignon shows herself to be a woman of exceptional strength, compassion, and dignity, seeking to make sense of the once-vibrant city that had now turned against her.
Both intimate and epic, The City Without Jews tells the story of the destruction of Jewish Vienna in previously untapped breadth and detail. Even more than a work of history, it is a reminder and a warning—of the consequences of forgetting a past whose legacy refuses to die.
About the Speakers
Douglas Smith is an award-winning historian and translator, and the author of Rasputin, Former People (a Sunday Times bestseller), and The City Without Jews. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has written for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and has appeared in documentaries with the BBC, National Geographic, and Netflix. Before becoming a historian, he worked for the US State Department in the Soviet Union and as a Russian affairs analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He lives in Seattle.
Kirsten Menger-Anderson is the author of Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, a collection of short stories that was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in fiction and one of Time Out Chicago’s top ten books of the year. Her debut novel, The Expert of Subtle Revisions, was published last year. Kirsten’s stories and essays have appeared in publications including Ploughshares, the Southwest Review, LitHub, and Undark. She currently lives in San Francisco with her family.
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