Written in 1923, this uncanny prophetic novel imagines Vienna without its Jewish population, and discovers something devastating: the city collapses not because it has lost some group to pity, but because it has lost the very engine of its civilization. Hugo Bettauer was not Jewish, but he understood something essential about Vienna in the years before the Nazi rise: that the city had been built, in no small part, by the people now marked for expulsion. The novel follows the anti-Semitic Chancellor Schwertfeger as he achieves his "victory," and then watches with dark, sardonic precision as theaters close, newspapers die, businesses fail, and the promised utopia becomes a hollow ruin. Bettauer is less interested in individual suffering than in the absurdist logic of intolerance itself, what happens when a society removes the wrong people and discovers it has removed everyone who made it work. The result is chilling, darkly funny, and reads less like historical fiction than like tomorrow's newspaper.
