author
Hugo Bettauer
1872–1925
A bestselling Austrian writer and journalist, he mixed sharp social criticism with page-turning storytelling. His most famous novel, The City Without Jews, now reads as an eerie warning about antisemitism and political hatred.
2 Audiobooks
Die Stadt ohne Juden: Ein Roman von übermorgen
by Hugo Bettauer
The city without Jews : A novel of our time
by Hugo Bettauer
About the author
Born in Baden near Vienna in 1872, Hugo Bettauer became known for popular, provocative fiction and lively journalism. He spent time in Zurich and the United States before building his career in the German-speaking world, and his work often tackled modern urban life, inequality, sexuality, and the tensions of postwar society.
Bettauer wrote quickly and for a wide audience, but his books were never just light entertainment. Novels such as The Joyless Street and The City Without Jews combined sensation with social critique, taking on prostitution, poverty, and especially antisemitism. The latter became his best-known work, imagining the expulsion of Jews from Vienna and exposing the cruelty and absurdity of that politics.
His outspokenness made him influential and controversial in equal measure. In 1925, after sustained attacks from the far right, Bettauer was murdered by a Nazi sympathizer. That violent end has become part of his story, but so has the lasting force of his writing: urgent, accessible, and unsettlingly ahead of its time.