Douglas Smith with George Langnas: The City Without Jews

Overview

Award-winning historian Douglas Smith talks to George Langnas about Smith’s new book, The City Without Jews — an intimate history of the destruction of Jewish Vienna, told through the personal archives of Langnas’ mother.

In 1922, Austrian Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer published The City Without Jews, a darkly comic satire imagining a Vienna that expelled its entire Jewish population. Within little more than a decade, the grotesque premise had become reality. Borrowing the title for his harrowing new book, Smith tells the true story of Mignon Langnas, a Jewish nurse who remained in Vienna throughout more than seven years of Nazi rule. Separated from her husband and young children in America by her responsibility for her ailing parents — and, eventually, by the closing avenues of escape — Langnas recorded what she saw and endured with astonishing immediacy. The hundreds of pages she left behind offer a rare, richly detailed account of persecution as it unfolded, day by day, alongside the ordinary textures of family, work, fear, hope, and survival.

For decades, this extraordinary record was safeguarded in New York by her son, George. Now Smith draws on it to illuminate both one woman’s life and Vienna’s chilling transformation into a proving ground for policies that would spread across the Nazi Reich.

In a candid, powerful conversation, Smith and Langnas come together to discuss history as it is lived and history as it is preserved: what a diary can reveal that hindsight cannot, the fragile journey by which private memory becomes public record, and the process by which a son entrusted his mother’s voice to history.

“A truly major work, both deeply moving and incredibly powerful. A masterpiece.” — Antony Beevor