Hugo Bettauer

He was thus not only one of the most controversial, but also one of the most successful writers of his time. In the film version of Die freudlose Gasse (G. W. Pabst, 1925), Greta Garbo made her international screen debut, and in Stadt ohne Juden, which was filmed in 1924 under the director Hans Karl Breslauer, both Hans Moser and Ferdinand Maierhofer made theirs.

In 1924 he worked together with R. Olden as a publisher of the magazine "Er und Sie. Wochenschrift fuer Lebenskultur und Erotik" (A weekly magazine for life culture and erotic), which was discontinued after 5 issues.

His famous novel was "Die freudlose Gasse" (The Street of Sorrow), 1924, which was made into a film in 1925 by the Austrian film director G. W. Pabst in Berlin. This made Greta Garbo famous in Germany.

His best-known novel was Die Stadt ohne Juden ("The City Without Jews") from 1922, a satire on the acutely topical subject of antisemitism. In the book, a fictional politician orders the expulsion of all Jews from Vienna. One writer noted that "in scenes that are frighteningly prophetic, Austria borrows thirty stock car trains from neighboring countries to help in the expulsion (to the east) of the Jews and their belongings." In the book, the citizens of Vienna initially celebrated the expulsion, but sentiment changed as theaters went bankrupt and department stores, hotels and resorts suffered. The economy declined to such an extent that a popular movement arose demanding the return of the Jews. Without the Jews to blame, the ruling party collapsed; the expulsion law was repealed, and the Jews were welcomed back to Vienna.

In Berlin Bettauer worked as a journalist and made a name for himself in connection with the exposure of a number of scandals. Among other things he wrote in the aftermath of one such scandal the book Bobbie, which appeared in 1921, in which he described a rich and powerful child abductor.

Immediately after the war Bettauer worked as a correspondent for various New York papers, and started an aid programme in New York for the people of Vienna. From 1920 he produced novels in great quantity, publishing four or five every year. He specialised in crime stories with a social message, which were extremely popular. Another reason for the popularity of his novels was that they were not only set in Vienna but also in Berlin and New York.

In 1918, after an altercation caused by a defective typewriter, he was fired from the Neue Freie Presse.

From 1914 to 1918 he was an editor for the "Neue Freie Presse" (The New Free Press).

In 1910 he returned to his home country Austria.

After his first marriage had ended in divorce, Bettauer became acquainted in Hamburg with his future second wife, Helene Müller, who at the time was aged 16. In 1904 they eloped to America. They married during the crossing, and in the same year their son Reginald Parker Bettauer was born. In New York Bettauer worked as a newspaper journalist, and also began to write serial novels for newspaper publication.

In 1901 after the suicide of the director of the Berliner Hoftheater, whom he had accused of corruption, Bettauer was expelled from Kingdom of Prussia. He then moved to Munich, where he worked in the cabaret Die Elf Scharfrichter ("The eleven executioners") and in the autumn of 1901 went to Hamburg to become director of the specialist publication Küche und Keller ("Kitchen and Cellar").

Hugo Maximilian Bettauer was born in Baden near Vienna (Austria). He was an Austrian-American author and journalist. In 1899 he immigrated to New York and became an American citizen. He was a correspondent and an editor for various newspapers in the US. He was famous for writing "Fortsetzungsromane" (novels in magazines, to be continued).

After five months in Tyrol he left the army again, due to difficulties with his superiors. Together with his mother he moved to Zürich and in 1896, aged 24, gained possession of his substantial inheritance from his father.

In 1890 Bettauer converted from the Jewish faith to the Evangelical (Lutheran) church. In the same year he joined the Kaiserjäger (Imperial mountain infantry) as a one-year volunteer. The change of religion was presumably connected with the fact that Jewish soldiers who lacked noble status found it virtually impossible to make any kind of career in the military, and for conversion purposes the Evangelical Church was preferable to the Roman Catholic Church.

Hugo Bettauer (18 August 1872 – 26 March 1925), born Maximilian Hugo Bettauer, was a prolific Austrian writer and journalist, who was murdered by a Nazi Party follower on account of his opposition to antisemitism. He was well known in his lifetime; many of his books were bestsellers and in the 1920s a number were made into films, most notably Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1925), which dealt with prostitution, and Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, directed by Hans Karl Breslauer, 1924), a satire against antisemitism.