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ADreamofaWhiteViennaafterWorldWarI: Hugo Bettauer’s The City Without Jews and The Blue Stain Peter Höyng Four years after the end of World War I, the then-popular Austrian journalist and author Hugo Bettauer (1872–1925) published two novels in which racist ideologies in Vienna are put to the test. Bettauer utilizessatiricalmeansinDie Stadt ohne Juden(The City Without Jews, 1922) to prove that anti-Semitism in Vienna is not viable because the burgeoning metropolis presumably cannot afford to exist without its Jewish population. In Das blaue Mal (The Blue Stain), also published in 1922, he agitates again for a politics of ethnic diversity, only this time outside of Vienna and with an ironical inversion. Whereas in Die Stadt ohne Juden anti-Semitism informs the Viennese sociopolitical landscape, Bettauer portrays racism as absent in the Vienna of Das blaue Mal and instead “exports” it to the United States. Rather than shrug off this apparent contradiction between the two narratives as simply authorial prerogative or caprice, the dichotomy can be read as a discursive symptom of a divided society in crisis. After all, the first Republic of Austria was founded upon the disillusionment of a lost war and the demise of the multiethnic and multinational Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Specific as the following discussion is in terms of history and topography, its locus centers on post–WorldWarIAustriainwhichBettauer’stwonarrativespresent, Peter Höyng 30 above all, an exemplary understanding of Vienna’s Jewish minority and their mediation of a specific discourse of whiteness. Bettauer, in the midst of condemning anti-Semitism and racism in general, dreams unconsciously of a white Vienna and thus is not free of the racist ideology that he decries. Furthermore, Bettauer’s own unconscious contradictions in regard to his liberal positions help to unveil what otherwise remains invisible: the powerful politics of whiteness in the age of anti-Semitism prior to the Shoah. A general historical comprehension of post–World War I Austria is essential to understanding and positioning Hugo Bettauer and his novels within the context of whiteness to which they accede. Disillusionments and Lingering Anti-Semitism in Post–Word War I Austria AfterfouryearsofmenkillingeachotheronthebattlefieldsofWestern and Eastern Europe, and after ten million soldiers had died for no particular “cause” other than nationalistic chauvinism run rampant, the end of World War I became a catalyst for fundamental changes in the Orient and Occident. What had once seemed stable for centuries collapsed within weeks in November 1918. Three major European monarchies—the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, and the Romanovs— that had ruled the German, the Austrian-Hungarian, and the Russian Empires respectively were either ousted into exile or, as in the case of the Romanovs, murdered. The implosions of these three empires brought about manifold, unforeseen social consequences for individuals and societies at-large in Central and Eastern Europe. The first Republic of Austria was founded upon disillusionment because the vast territories of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary were split into several nation-states. Citizens of the much smaller Austria had to learn to step out of the shadows of the patriarchal society so strongly embodied by the figure of Franz Joseph I, who reigned over Austria-Hungary for no less than sixty-eight years, from 1848 to 1916. In “his” parliamentarian dual monarchy, he presided over a large but fragile state with as many as twelve ethnicities and/or nationalities —Czechoslovakians, Moravians, Slovakians, Poles, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Serbians, Slovenians, Italians, A Dream of a White Vienna after World War I 31 and Germans. Jews and Gypsies constituted the two ethnic groups that were not considered “nationalities” since the determining factor for being of or from a discrete “nation” was language. But Jews within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire spoke the language of their “host” nation, or, depending on their Jewish identity, Yiddish, Hebrew, or German—or a combination of all three. Establishing the first Republic of Austria meant not only downsizing its former territory but also transforming it into a seemingly monoethnic democratic state with a German ethnicity, language, and culture more dominant than ever before. According to Marsha Rozenblit, nation reformation caused “the most complicated identity crisis” for the Jews in Vienna: The dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and the creation of German-Austria called into question all the fundamental assumptions on which the identity of the majority of Vienna’s Jews rested. They no longer lived in the capital of a large, multinational empire that was not obsessed with its German identity, but in a city that seemed too big for...

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