Review by Choice Review
This well-written account chronicles the decline of a once-great city. Mining Nazi and Austrian newspapers, interviews, and unpublished documents from Austrian and German archives, Weyr shows how Adolf Hitler, who described Vienna in 1938 as the "pearl," relegated the former Habsburg capital to the status of the "Hamburg of the Southeast," a port city with little cultural significance. The forced emigration and mass murder of Jews destroyed the city's great artistic patrons and cultural innovators. The Aryan residents welcomed the Nazis and anti-Jewish persecution, but took longer to accept the city's secondary or tertiary place behind Berlin. Weyr employs the biographies of Gauleiters (regional Nazi party leaders) Joseph Buerckel and Baldur von Schirach to illustrate Nazi cultural politics. While the oafish Buerckel was unpopular with the Viennese, Schirach was in tune with their desire to play the leading cultural role in the Reich. Although Weyr ably documents the persecution of Vienna's Jews, he does not discuss the possible implications of the "Vienna model" (as proposed by Hans Safrian) for the Holocaust. This volume complements Evan Bukey's Hitler's Austria (CH, May'00, 37-5306), which is inexplicably absent from the bibliography. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels. J. R. White University of Maryland University College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
In recent years, some Austrians have claimed their nation was the "first victim" of Hitler's expansionist drive in eastern and central Europe. A less charitable view regards the Austrians as willing, even eager accomplices to the crimes of the Nazis; after all, Hitler and other top Nazis were Austrian born, and the Anschluss0 (union) with Germany had considerable popular support. Journalist Weyr was born and reared in Vienna, and in his portrait of his native city under Nazi rule, he writes with a moving mixture of sympathy, outrage, and regret as he views the material and spiritual destruction of this once-glittering cultural center. He begins with a description of the tumultuous events of March 1938, when the Austrian government, pressured by domestic Nazis and Hitler's threats, acquiesced to a shotgun marriage. Inevitably, anti-Semitic outrages became commonplace in Vienna's streets. He then shows the steady decline of the city during the war, as political indoctrination and repression escalate, the Jews are deported, and the Russians turn the tide and inexorably advance. Weyr takes a balanced approach; he does not avoid condemnation of those who supported the Nazis, passively or actively, but he also shows us how most ordinary people merely tried to survive a conflict that they barely understood. This is a superbly written work and an excellent addition to World War II collections. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Even before the end of WWII, the Allies declared Austria the first victim of German aggression. Austrians have savored this designation, which gave them a halo of innocence and spared them the full force of postwar occupation and control. Weyr isn't so sure the Austrians deserved to be so well treated. In this fast-paced chronicle of the destruction of the city's cultural and political life, he shows that most Austrians happily accepted the 1938 union with Germany and the benefits of the pillaging of Europe in the war's first years. Many Viennese exercised their basest instincts through the public humiliation of Jews. For Weyr, Nazi domination led to the destruction of the glittering culture of Vienna, the city of Freud, Klimt, Loos and so many other intellectual and artistic luminaries. That city had been, Weyr says, "largely a Jewish creation," the fruit of a multiethnic, tolerant milieu. Weyr, a native of Vienna and longtime reporter for UPI and Newsweek, mourns the passing of that world as he provides a decent account of the city's history, drawing on memoirs and autobiographies that give the work a rich texture. But to gain deeper understanding of Viennese culture and the effects of Nazi rule, readers are better off with the notable studies by Carl Schorske, Gary B. Cohen, Evan Bukey, Marsha Rozenblitt and others. 25 b&w illus. Agent, Carl Brandt. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Largely sustained by a vibrant and prosperous Jewish community, fin-de-si?cle Vienna was considered the epicenter of European high culture. Journalist Weyr (Hispanic U.S.A.: Breaking the Melting Pot) explores the Austrian capital's fall from its exalted position during World War II in this thorough and often personal account. Hitler proclaimed his intention to make Vienna the "pearl" in his thousand-year Reich, and many Teutonic Austrians embraced the German occupation and eagerly joined in the persecution of the Jews. The dictator's minions, however, were unable to maintain the prewar level of cultural activity. The brutal expulsion of Vienna's Jews simply sucked the lifeblood out of the city (which has never quite recovered). Weyr intermixes personal interviews, newspaper accounts, and a range of secondary sources to evoke a sense of life in Vienna during World War II; he laments that the anti-Semitic impulse still influences Austrian politics in the 21st century. The only study of its kind, this book should be in every European history collection.-Jim Doyle, Sara Hightower Regional Lib., Rome, GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In 1938, that year of Anschluss, Adolf Hitler promised that he would "give a proper setting" to the pearl that was Vienna. He remade the city indeed, writes Vienna native and now American journalist Weyr, but with far from lustrous results. Vienna, Hitler and company knew, was a great Jewish center: Before the Annexation, Adolf Eichmann's euphemistically named Central Office for Jewish Emigration estimated that "175,000 religious Jews had lived in 'totally Jew-infested' Vienna and at least another 120,000 'Nuremberg' Jews--agnostics, atheists, or Christians but who could not muster the requisite number of Aryan grandparents." One of the earliest acts of the new regime after Nazi Germany annexed Austria was to remove Jews from the city's newspapers and other media so as to "get the Nazi message out to the world from day one." Jews in other walks of life quickly followed. The Nazis, Weyr (Hispanic U.S.A., 1988, etc.) writes, also introduced sweeping changes to remake other aspects of Viennese life; for instance, the government decertified Catholic schools, cut support to churches, required religious teaching to be done in accordance with National Socialist dogma and exerted pressure on Catholics--who had tended toward the right wing, but a decidedly Austrian one--to leave the church. The anti-Catholic campaign was far less successful than the anti-Jewish one, Weyr documents, but it had far-reaching consequences. So, too, did Hitler's determination that Vienna take second place to Berlin, which had been something of a backwater by comparison; with the removal of Jews from its cultural life, and thus the destruction of so much of its culture, Vienna became ever more provincial. Weyr cites his journalist father's return to the city after the war, "appalled by what he found": Though the non-Jewish people had the same names, they now looked "Alpine-Nordic" and "spoke a foreign language from which the magic of the Viennese dialect had totally disappeared." Vienna remains provincial and unimportant, Weyr writes, and "the city's culture in the twenty-first century is all in the past," another victim of a tragic time. A solid, well-written history of a city undone. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
