What Vienna Lost When It Lost Its Jews
· The Atlantic
In 2022, I went to Vienna to write about Joseph Roth, who had come to the city of Mozart and Beethoven more than a century earlier to fashion himself into a cosmopolitan writer, down to the three-piece suit and monocle. Vienna, for Roth, was a midpoint between the shtetls of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he’d been born, and the glimmering centers of sophistication he’d later live in and write about, including Berlin and Paris.
In the Austrian capital, I was overcome with an unexpected urge: to see Jewish graves. On the eve of World War II, Vienna had a Jewish population of nearly 200,000. During the Nazi occupation of the city, which the Vienna Gestapo chief declared “by far the most Jewified metropolis in the German Reich,” this number was reduced to only a few thousand. Today, it still hovers around 12,000. The task of finding these graves was harder than I’d expected. The Nazis desecrated most Jewish burial grounds, and the Central Cemetery, which contains a Jewish section, had ongoing construction. At the Jewish Museum Vienna, I was handed a brochure that directed me to the address of a nursing home at Seegasse 9.
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When I got there, a young woman directed me out back. I saw a pit of mud and grass, behind a locked gate, out of which projected old, precariously tilted gravestones with Hebrew lettering. Later, I’d learn that some of these graves dated back to the mid-16th century, a reflection of how deeply rooted Jews were in this city before the Nazis arrived. But nowhere did I see any information about what this place was, or about the once-thriving community it served. I wasn’t there alone. A man in a wheelchair, presumably one of the nursing-home residents, looked down at the graves impassively. He was the right age, I thought, to have been a little boy among the rapturous crowds that greeted the Nazis in 1938, cheering from Heldenplatz Square as Hitler announced the Anschluss from a balcony at the Hofburg palace.
Seegasse 9 figures briefly but significantly in Douglas Smith’s sweeping new history, The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna; its rooftop was one of the few places where Jews found ways to gather amid the Nazi crackdown.
Smith, whose previous work has focused largely on Russian history, in this book offers a vivid, granular portrait of the Jews of Vienna and their demise, starting with the first Jew assassinated by a member of the Nazi Party: a writer named Hugo Bettauer, who was killed in 1925. (His murderer was acquitted.) Bettauer was the author of a 1922 novel titled The City Without Jews: A Novel From the Day After Tomorrow, from which Smith takes his own title. The idea at the core of Bettauer’s novel, which The New York Times derided as unconvincing and “cheap,” was simple: The expulsion of Vienna’s Jews would yield disaster as it became apparent that the people whose influence was despised in the city had in fact been essential to both the city’s function and its charm. A little more than 100 years later, Smith’s book suggests an even simpler and more painful idea: that Bettauer was right, because the Holocaust destroyed not just Vienna’s Jews but something essential in the city itself.
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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—known as “matzah island,” Smith writes, for the influx of Jewish refugees who gathered there when the Austro-Hungarian empire crumbled. 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. The truth of the city I saw lay not only in its grandeur but also in a pit of mud filled with shattered headstones.
Smith’s account is filled with formidable members of the Viennese Jewish community, such as the novelist Stefan Zweig, a contemporary of Roth’s, who belonged to a highly assimilated, educated Jewish milieu that worshipped at the altar of Kultur, not religion. Zweig would warn Jewish friends amid threats of German invasion in 1937: “You can understand how the cheerfulness and enjoyment—the light mindedness—in Vienna infuriated me—a carnival over a volcano.”
Vienna’s most famous Jew, Sigmund Freud, refused to consider leaving Vienna until the SS arrived at his home three days after German troops marched into Austria in March of 1938. As Smith writes, word reached the U.S. consul, John Cooper Wiley, who sent his wife, Irena, straight to the Freud residence at Berggasse 19. Once she talked her way past the SS guards, Irena discovered, she wrote, “a scene of vandalism and destruction” in which “six SS men were pulling books off the shelves, tearing out the pages, and throwing them on the floor.” Other troops “were breaking the furniture.”
Freud, 81, sat at his desk in the library, staring at his collection of Egyptian statuettes in a “staggering show of philosophical detachment,” Irena wrote. When, a week later, his daughter Anna was arrested by the Gestapo, the psychoanalyst wept, his stoicism finally cracking. Freud, once a symbol of Viennese cosmopolitanism, fled with his family to London, not entirely happily: “One had still very much loved the prison from which one has been released,” he wrote. He died of cancer the next year.
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When I visited Berggasse 19 in 2022, I felt very little trace of living history. Freud’s famous couch, his leather-bound library, the desk where he sat to compose his canonical texts—all of these are in London. At Berggasse 19, only outlines on the wall denote the furniture that is no longer there. It’s not just the lack of furnishings that creates a sense of ghostly vacancy. The empty home evokes the members of the Freud family who weren’t able to escape: Freud’s four sisters, to whom he gave a small fortune before he left, hoping it would enable them to survive. It was promptly stolen, Smith writes.
One sister, Rosa, was moved into the nursing home at Seegasse 9, where residents lived 10 to a room. There, Smith writes, she likely met Mignon Langnas, whose diaries and letters, previously unpublished in English, are central to Smith’s new book. Langnas, who was in her mid-30s when the Nazis marched in, was one of only a few thousand Jews to survive the war inside Vienna. She sent her children—Georg, age 4, and Manuela, age 6—to New York; her husband, Leon, also escaped. But Langnas herself chose to remain in Vienna to care for her elderly, ailing parents. Eventually she became a nurse working at Seegasse 9, before the remaining residents, including Rosa Freud, were deported (all of the Freud sisters would die in concentration camps), and the building became a base for the Waffen-SS.
“I am utterly alone,” Langnas wrote as her community disappeared around her. And yet, amid the horrific losses she experienced and witnessed, she could still be moved by kindness, like that of the neighbor who would sit with her father when Langnas had to be at work. “Still I must clap my hands together anew every day,” she wrote in 1943, and “ask myself in shame how so much humanity is possible.”
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On my last day in Vienna, I returned to Seegasse 9. The young woman at the front desk—an immigrant from Sudan—told me that every day, at least one person came to see the graves. The gate to the cemetery was again locked, but I leaped over it. A visceral sense of absence had underscored my days in the city as I studied the life of Roth, whose evocations of a vanished world had drawn me there. Roth died in Paris in 1939, of alcoholism. I wondered, standing among the stones, if he had felt as if the death of the Vienna he knew was, in some way, also his own.
After the war, Smith writes, the Austrian government quickly claimed the mantle of “Hitler’s first victim.” Only in 1991 did the Austrian chancellor apologize for the country’s role in the Holocaust. One year after my visit, the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery was lit on fire and desecrated with swastikas. The following year, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, originally founded by former members of the SS, won the largest percentage of votes in the parliamentary elections.
Langnas died in New York City in 1949, from an illness that had begun during the war years. She had survived the Nazis only in the most technical sense—long enough to reunite with her children but also to find that the separation of seven years had opened a chasm between her and those “incredibly sweet creatures.”
Her son—now 91 and going by the Americanized name George—had, like his sister, not recognized his mother when she stepped off the boat. Decades after her death, he discovered her writing, her journals, her letters, and began to piece together the lost world he will never know, except for on the page.