Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm Greenwich Mean Time) please join me for our Clubland Q&A, on which I'll be taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Hope you can swing by.
~Our New Year Tale for Our Time, and the seventy-eighth of our Steyn Club audio adventures, is my serialisation of The City without Jews, Hugo Bettauer's satire from 1922 - which wound up costing him his life.
In tonight's vignette from a deJewed Vienna, the formerly glittering department store of Zwieback is having a hard time of it haute couture-wise:
Smetana bowed. "I can give you an idea, Herr von Habietnik. People are going in for coarse woolens and other durable stuffs nowadays—as you saw yourself, there's even a demand for cotton goods. What do you say to filling up a few show-windows with woolens, rough wool skirts, cotton and flannel underwear? And a nice poster to go with it, and a lot of advertisements announcing: Rough Woolens, Cotton, Muslin, and Flannel—the Latest Paris Fashion!"
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Five of our adventure simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes of The City without Jews can be found here, and previous Tales for Our Time here.
If you'd like to join The Mark Steyn Club, we'd love to have you: please see here. And, if you've a chum who enjoys classic fiction, we've introduced a special Steyn Gift Membership: you'll find more details here. Oh, and we also do video poetry - and an annual Mark Steyn Cruise.
Please join me tomorrow evening for Part Six of The City without Jews.
