Here we go with Part Four of our brand new Tale for Our Time - our New Year adaptation of Hugo Bettauer's satire of 1922, The City without Jews.
In tonight's episode, Christmastide is unusually festive this year:
At one o'clock in the afternoon whistles proclaimed that the last trainload of Jews had left Vienna, and at six o'clock in the evening all the church bells rang to announce that there were no more Jews in all Austria.
Then Vienna began to celebrate its great festival of emancipation. Red and white striped flags fluttered over a hundred thousand roofs, all the shops were decorated with these colors, Japanese lanterns burned before every window. On this frosty starlit night a million people walked over the creaking snow to form processions. Men, women, and children carried lanterns, the various district parades were headed by bands, loud rejoicing filled the air...
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Four of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
Thank you for all your kind comments on this latest serialisation. First Week Founding Member Laurence Jarvik says simply:
Thank you for recording this book!
My pleasure, Laurence, if that's the word. Vienna was one of the great cities of the world, and the Habsburg Empire a protean multicultural state - and one they made a better fist of than most of western Europe does today. When I was wandering around the formerly Jewish parts of Transcarpathia and the Bukovina (now in Ukraine), I was struck by how a Jew in a broken-down no-account burg on the edge of the Russian Empire could take a shot at becoming a psychiatrist or a playwright just by taking a train to the Habsburg capital. As the first part of today's episode suggests, Jews in Vienna were among the most "integrated" in Europe. Even more than Britain, with its Jewish marquesses and whatnot, the Habsburgs had a bona fide "Jewish nobility". Thirtysomething years ago, in the Café Sacher, under a portrait of the Emperor, I spoke with one of its members, Marcel Prawy, a courtly man of the theatre, about the de-Jewing of Austrian operetta, which didn't work out too well for that particular art-form - although we could have had a similar conversation about many other areas of endeavour. (More from Herr Prawy here.) Vienna today is a much diminished city - even before it contemplates its new demographic reality.
~Tales for Our Time is now in its ninth season. So, if you've a friend who might be partial to our classic fiction outings, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio yarns, also includes video poetry, live music and more.
Please join me tomorrow evening for Part Five of The City without Jews.
