One fine day a law is passed in the great city, Vienna (but it might just as well have been New York or London), expelling all Jews from the country. Not only Jews and converted Jews must leave, but also those of Jewish origin: that is, the children of mixed marriages. The law, which the most rabid Ku Klux Klansman, _Hakenkreuzler_, or anti-Semite could not have conceived more skilfully even in his wildest dreams, is rigorously enforced. “Unregistered merchants, retail-dealers and so-called commission agents must leave the country within three months of the passage of the law; registered proprietors of firms, clerks, civil service employes, and manual laborers, within four months; artists, scholars, physicians, attorneys and the like, within five months. Directors of corporations, banks, and industries that paid taxes on an income of more than two hundred million kronen in the past year, are given six months’ time.” After six months, the city without Jews comes into being. As for Hugo Bettauer, its author--this whimsical flight of his fancy cost him his life. In March, 1925, not long after the publication of the novel, he was killed by a zealous twenty-year old ‘Nordic’. At the trial, the murderer declared himself content with his deed, as he had resolved to save German _Kultur_ from degeneration, and believed that Bettauer was a menace to this _Kultur_. But curiously enough Hugo Bettauer was himself a good Christian, the scion of a Protestant Viennese merchant family. Not a Jew--not an interested propagandist! A talented journalist of the Danube City, whose versatile pen mastered the novel as well as the feuilleton. What was Bettauer’s crime? He wrote a novel of our time. His journalistic temperament, his many travels and adventures had brought him in contact with all spheres of society. Twelve years of his life were spent in New York--he knew metropolitan life in both hemispheres, knew it as thoroughly and intimately as only a finely discerning observer can. That is why Bettauer’s _City Without Jews_ became a universal novel, transcending the geographical boundaries of Austria. That is also why Bettauer’s Vienna will seem so familiar to New Yorkers, Londoners, even Parisians. Wittily, fascinatingly, colorfully, Hugo Bettauer builds the city without Jews. With a sure touch he raises the curtain behind which this hundred per cent Christian city works and plays. Nonchalantly, with an ironic smile, the Viennese artist takes us to the stock exchange, the theatre, the great department stores, shows us the night life, the middle-class Viennese home, the Parliament and the café. We see and enjoy the city without Jews in all its phases. Dispassionately, Bettauer paints a modern picture that lives and breathes. But why do we read the novel as though it were a thrilling episode in contemporary history? And why did Hugo Bettauer receive the fatal bullet as royalty for his novel?