Programming note: please join me tomorrow, Saturday, for another edition of my weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs at 5pm UK/6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Ahead of that, welcome to the seventy-eighth audio entertainment in our series Tales for Our Time. We are in our ninth season, and we've built a spectacular archive that runs the gamut from A to Z ...well, not quite, but certainly A to W - Jane Austen to P G Wodehouse.
For our first serialisation of the new year, I've chosen a novel by Hugo Bettauer published in Vienna in 1922: Die Stadt ohne Juden - which means The City without Jews. There is an obvious specific topicality. From The Guardian:
Discussions are reportedly under way within Donald Trump's administration about the US possibly granting asylum to Jewish people from the UK
- although you might want to think twice about settling in Mamdani's New York or Ilhan Omar's Minnesota. Meanwhile, an announcement from His Majesty's Australian Government:
Establishment of Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
- as if it's a great mystery why Jews are getting gunned down on Bondi Beach and will require years of investigation.
As I said, that's the obvious and specific topicality. However, it's possible to hear echoes of more general application in this tale. A week or two back, I chanced to catch a YouTube discussion about the need for mass deportations. As you know, I do not think France, England, Sweden and most other western nations can be saved without what is now called "remigration", and of millions. But I was interested to see how, at least on the Internet, the debate is galloping on, to the point where there are apparently serious back-and-forths about whether a chap with an Irish mother is sufficiently English to be permitted to remain. That reminded me of something I'd read long ago, and eventually I remembered it was this novel, with its characteristically Teutonic micro-regulatory regime on who has to go and who can be permitted to stay.
Herr Bettauer's satire got a lot of things right about his time, and, as I discuss in my introduction, the poor chap paid a high price for his percipience. In tonight's opening episode an historic debate is about to begin in the Austrian legislature:
A solid human wall, extending from the University to the Bellaria, surrounded the beautiful and imposing Parliament Building. All Vienna seemed to have assembled on this June morning to witness an historic event of incalculable importance. Businessmen and laborers, fashionable ladies and women of the people, half-grown boys and old men, young girls, little children, invalids in rolling chairs—all were intermingled, shouting, debating, and perspiring. And ever and again someone suddenly felt the urge to deliver a speech before his neighbors, ever and again there burst forth the cry: "Throw out the Jews!"
Ordinarily it happened at such demonstrations that people with hooked noses or conspicuously black hair were given a thorough beating. But this time nothing of the sort occurred, for not a Jew was in sight; and the cafés and banking-houses of the Franzensring and Schottenring sagely taking into account all possibilities, had closed their doors and pulled down their shades.
What follows echoes down a century. To hear me read a double-dose opening installment of The City without Jews by Hugo Bettauer, please click here and log-in.
~We launched The Mark Steyn Club over eight-and-a-half years ago, and I'm immensely heartened by all those SteynOnline supporters across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone - all my columns, audio output, video content, every movie feature and Song of the Week.
That said, we have introduced a few bonuses for our members - not locking up our regular content, which will always be free, but admitting members to a few experimental features, such as this series of audio adventures. In Tales for Our Time I revisit some classic fiction I've mentioned in books and columns over the years - old stories that nevertheless speak to our own age. Our first serialisation was The Tragedy of the Korosko by the aforementioned Arthur Conan Doyle; next came The Time Machine by H G Wells; and then The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, and The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. Two of those I've since updated in contemporary iterations. I always liked reading stories, and I did do a little of it professionally a zillion years ago. So, if it works, we may release them as audio books on CD or Audible a ways down the road. But for the moment they're an exclusive bonus for Mark Steyn Club members.
If you'd like to hear this Tale, all you need to do is join the Club - either for a full year or, if you suspect we're some fly-by-night shifty Canuck scamsters and you want to see how it goes, a mere experimental quarter. And, aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
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~Advance booking for my live appearances such as our annual Mark Steyn Cruise;
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~and the chance to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget our gift membership. It makes a perfect birthday present for anyone who enjoys classic fiction.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you like or dislike this Tale for Our Time, or consider my reading of it a bust, then feel free to comment away below. I weigh in on the comment threads myself from time to time, but I regard it as principally your turf, to have at it as you so desire. And do join us tomorrow for Part Two of The City without Jews.
