Setting of the Pearl

When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city "a pearl to which he would give a proper setting." But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction—a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wasteland.
Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative, we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik; proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel, who hacked Austria into seven pieces, and Baldur von Schirach, who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube—and failed miserably. More painfully, Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder, exile, and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today, Weyr concludes, only the monuments remain—beautiful but lifeless.
This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler, those who resisted, and the many who merely, in the local phrase, "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends, plus extensive documentary research, to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once-great city lost its soul under Hitler.

When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city "a pearl to which he would give a proper setting." But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction—a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wasteland.
Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative, we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik; proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel, who hacked Austria into seven pieces, and Baldur von Schirach, who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube—and failed miserably. More painfully, Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder, exile, and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today, Weyr concludes, only the monuments remain—beautiful but lifeless.
This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler, those who resisted, and the many who merely, in the local phrase, "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends, plus extensive documentary research, to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once-great city lost its soul under Hitler.

Publishers Weekly

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.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Thomas Weyr is native of Vienna and was educated at Columbia University, the Sorbonne, and the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate. He has worked for many years as a journalist and has written and translated ten books. He lives in Bronxville, New York.