- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: OUP USA; 1st Edition edition (28 April 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0195146794
- ISBN-13: 978-0195146790
- Product Dimensions: 24.3 x 16.3 x 3.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 736,436 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
"The book will fascinate both specialists and those who have visited Vienna." (Catholic Herald )
Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This study of Vienna in the 1930s and 1940s strikes a good balance between criticism of Austria's illiberal and pro-Nazi tendencies in that period and the recognition that Hitler bears primary responsibility for the disasters that befell the Austrian state and people. In many respects the book is a lament for an innovative, outward-looking, cosmopolitan Vienna that, because of the Nazi experience, is now irrevocably lost, having retreated into a moody provincialism that makes it a less lively and confident place than Prague or Budapest. The book is not a disciplined piece of academic research, but it is pleasantly written and its judgements are pretty sound. Worth a read.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
A well-researched and good book
14 Oct 2005
Format:Hardcover
The author was born in Vienna but left when he was 11. After the war he returned, to get his university education, and served as a correspondent for United press, ABC, and Newsweek. This is an account of the occupation of Austria by Hitler, and what Vienna went through while part of Nazidom. The account of the takeover by Hitler is of high interest and well-told. The account of the war years is also well done but it was not as interesting. In the final chapter Weyl gives a good account of Austria since the war, and shows that many Austrians exaggerate their resistance to Hitler. This is a book well worth reading if you want to know about Austria's fall and the dreary war years in Vienna, and the post-war course of Austria. One is glad that so much that was destroyed in the war has been reconstituted.
2 of 17 people found the following review helpful
The Setting of the Pearl
24 Feb 2006
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The author uses a lot of words to describe something that could be said in much fewer words. He has a very difficult reading style.
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