The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna
By Douglas Smith
"Sweeping . . . A vivid, granular portrait of the Jews of Vienna and their demise . . . It is just as easy today as it was in Roth’s time to be enchanted by the opulent beauty of Vienna’s Hapsburg palaces, the perfectly preserved homeyness of its old-fashioned cafés, and the haunted shadows of the Leopoldstadt neighborhood . . . But Smith’s book helped me understand why, underneath that old-world allure, I detected a certain airlessness: When Vienna lost its Jews, it lost its soul.” —Casey Schwartz, The Atlantic
"Douglas Smith, an award-winning American historian, recounts the grim story of the destruction of Viennese Jewry with insight and empathy, keeping the human story to the fore. This is an important and deeply researched book. By focusing in depth on one key city, it substantially adds to our understanding of how the Nazi system of genocide and plunder operated . . . Smith carefully examines the most problematic aspect of any history of the Holocaust—the Jewish organisations’ relations with the Nazis—with sensitivity and insight." —Adam LeBor, The Times (UK)
"A true account of how one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations was annihilated . . . one that Smith has brought alive with forensic detail and a truly gripping narrative focused on the life and relations of Mignon Langnas." —Luka Ivan Jukic, The Financial Times
From an award-winning historian, the gripping, singular story of the destruction of Jewish Vienna as seen through the letters and diaries of an extraordinary woman who witnessed it all.
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. More than a decade later, in March 1938, the novel's terrifying vision of a Vienna emptied of Jews would begin to be realized. German troops poured into the glittering city, marking the beginning of seven years of unfathomable state-sanctioned violence against the Jewish population.
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. And 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, in her letters and diaries, 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.
By turns heartbreakingly intimate and dazzlingly 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.
Hardcover
560 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026
6.5 x 1.7 x 9.35 inches
ISBN 9780374606558
Nonfiction, History