Hugo Bettauer Imagines America

by Tres Lambert, Gettysburg College.

Born in 1872 in Baden bei Wien, author, editor, and journalist Hugo Bettauer was no stranger to controversy. His knack for social critique and investigative journalism regularly placed him in direct conflict with powerful people and institutions, making him a lightning rod for cultural and political debate across Austria. His short-lived weekly periodical, Er und Sie. Wochenschrift für Lebenskulture und Erotik (1924) and later Bettauers Wochenschrift, which ran from May 1924 until August 1927, underscore Bettauer’s eager willingness to engage in the “culture wars” of his time. The former, which advocated for sexual liberation, while defending homosexuality and abortion rights, was grounds for Bettauer to face pornography charges in Vienna, though he was eventually acquitted. Ultimately, Bettauer’s outspoken personality and his strident support for the Viennese social-democratic government colloquially dubbed “Red Vienna” precipitated his politically-motivated murder in 1925 by Nazi Party Member Otto Rothstock in his office in the Lange Gasse, giving Bettauer the dubious distinction as the first Austrian victim of political violence perpetuated by the Nazis in Austria. Beyond his status as political martyr and cultural maverick, Bettauer left behind a series of celebrated novels that delivered incisive critiques, specifically of Viennese life and culture. These works include the apocryphal The City Without Jews (1922), The Battle for Vienna (1923) and The Joyless Street (1924; later adapted by GW Pabst).

In the headline of a New York Times report announcing the attack, however, Bettauer is described as one of their own: “New Yorker is Shot by Vienna Dentist.” How is it that one of America’s leading publications came to regard one of Red Vienna’s most polarizing figures not as an Austrian, but as an American? My interest in Bettauer as both an author and cultural tastemaker within the social-democratic milieu of Red Vienna lies precisely in his double-identity as Austrian and American, and especially on the impact that his intensive lived experiences in the United States and the influence of two periods of American residency had on his interwar novels. Given his notoriety and cultural prominence, Bettauer’s fictional representations of the United States helped to sculpt the Viennese reception of American culture during the interwar period. In this blog entry, I will trace Bettauer’s American connections alongside prevailing attitudes towards America and American cultural imports among working-class individuals during Red Vienna. As a concrete illustration of Bettauer’s American representations, I also examine The Battle for Vienna as a novelistic attempt to negotiate between his love for America and aspirations for the nascent Austrian state.

Americanism in Red Vienna

At first glance, the affinity between Vienna and America during the interwar period seems both culturally and politically to be a contradiction in terms. Devoted to rebuilding Viennese society in the face of sobering economic conditions after World War I, and with its proletarian socio-political orientation, Red Vienna bears little semblance to the stylized pop culture images of the Roaring Twenties that dominate the popular imagination of the US (and even Berlin) during this period. Particularly in the economic sphere, social democratic leaders were challenged to reject American labor initiatives like Fordism and industrialization under the keyword of Rationalisierung, the ruthless logic of production efficiency that threatened the stability of the working-class labor market.

At the same time, the interwar period marked the emergence of the United States as a cultural powerhouse capable of exporting its products globally. American products featured prominently in Vienna’s vibrant social-democratic media landscape, where authors like Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis enjoyed reviews and reprints of their works in translation. Check-out statistics from the city’s Workers’ Libraries offer clear documentation of the popularity of American authors known for their investigative muckraking journalism.

The influence of these American writers was also not limited to the reach of their translated literary products. Beyond Bettauer, author and translator Hermynia Zur Mühlen—nicknamed  “The Red Countess”—enjoyed an exclusive role as the sole German-language translator for Upton Sinclair, while also publishing serialized detective novels set in the United States under the pseudonym Lawrence Desberry. Zur Mühlen’s American imaginations stand alongside works from contemporary peers like Joseph Roth, Felix Salten, Else Feldmann, and Stefan Zweig in a crowded cohort of authors who envisioned fictional American worlds that highlighted issues like racism, economic inequality, worker’s rights, and criminality alongside marveling descriptions of opulent architecture and dazzling landscapes.

Illustrated magazines offered a visual counterpart to the literary prominence of American authors and themes. Lifestyle periodicals like Der Kuckuck provided readers with firsthand travel accounts, political, and human interest stories accompanied by captivating photojournalistic spreads. As in the novels of the period, the cultural magnetism of America as conveyed by Hollywood actors, skyscraper-punctuated skylines, and technological progress is tempered by vivid explorations of American racial injustice, poverty, and militarism.

These contradictory depictions of American life and culture highlight Red Vienna’s ambivalent cultural response to America as an aesthetic, social, or economic blueprint. On the one hand, the foreign cultural context of America offers an aspirational model for the civilization of the future, and on the other, a geographic and political “other” for displaced cultural criticism that provides a relatable yet mediated framework within which Red Vienna’s own social and cultural obstacles can be depicted, debated, and critiqued. By occupying a paradoxical, divided status as icon and enemy, foreign and familiar, America yields a diffuse cultural mythology that captivates and stimulates the creative imagination of Red Vienna.

Bettauer’s American Experiences

In the late 1890s, a young Bettauer deserted from this military assignment in Austria and eventually sought to establish himself as a journalist in the United States. In his turbulent time in America, Bettauer lost his fortune in a Chicago stock market crash but also successfully gained American citizenship, only to return to Europe after failing to find meaningful employment. Back in Europe, Bettauer took up editorial roles first in Berlin at the Berliner Morgenpost, before returning to the US where he contributed to the German-language Morgenjournal, Deutsche Zeitung, and New Yorker Staatszeitung in New York City. This second American residency also yielded the conception of Bettauer’s “New York novels,” a collection of five novels set in America that explore socio-political themes and cliches of the day, ranging from greed and economic exploitation to American geopolitical anxieties.

In 1910, Bettauer returned to Austria permanently, holding positions first with Die Zeit and later Die Neue Freie Presse, though he also continued to publish situationally as a correspondent for German American publications in the US including the Philadelphia Tagblatt. Despite taking up permanent residence in Vienna, Bettauer’s American experiences continued to inspire his worldview and literary output. His 1922 novel The Blue Stain (1922) returns to an American setting as a means for exploring racial discrimination against African Americans. The novel delivers an earnest critique of American race relations, while also insinuating the superiority of European cultural tolerance. Bettauer’s critical take on American society positions The Blue Stain as a pioneering text that shaped Red Vienna’s ambivalent and contradictory attempts to come to terms with American influence. Bettauer’s literary return to the American idiom also fueled the republication of his New York novels in Bettauers Wochenschrift, a process that continued in posthumous editions of the periodical.

The Battle for Vienna (1923)

In the second of his major “city novels” set in and based on the Austrian capital in the immediate post-WWI era, Bettauer does not simply imagine a classic American tale that unfolds across the Atlantic, but rather, envisions a version of Vienna where American imaginations and postwar Austrian realities collide. Bettauer’s plot centers on wealthy lumber mogul, Patrick Ralph O’Flanagan, the American son of a Viennese and Irish immigrant, who recently inherited his father’s business conglomerate, and with it, a fortune that would make a Rockefeller blush. Altruistically minded and driven by a feeling of obligation to the memory of his recently deceased mother, O’Flanagan travels to his mother’s hometown in hopes of restoring the Austrian state economy through his immense financial resources. Wary of wasting his money to prop up special interests but struck by the woeful living conditions in worker’s districts like Favoriten and Meidling, O’Flanagan searches—mostly without success—for opportunities to invest in the public good. Instead, news of his wealth and aspirations become public, and bad actors begin unscrupulously competing for O’Flanagan’s financial benevolence. National banks and government entities seek to bankroll a new wave of capitalist investment, while a band of Hungarian fascists attempt to push Austria towards an ethno-nationalist dictatorship that would also align Austria with Catholic Bavaria. The nascent government of Red Vienna is largely sidelined in the novel’s plot, which rapidly devolves into violence with the kidnapping of O’Flanagan’s Viennese love interest, Hilde Wehningen.

As a stand-in for American foreign policy, O’Flanagan occupies a crucial tipping point in Bettauer’s novel: his decisions can determine the fate of the social-democratic experiment and the future of Austria as a whole. Symbolically, he embodies both the risk-inclined spirit of Gatsby-esque American capitalism and the equally problematic patronage of the lower classes to a group of wealthy elites. The autobiographical parallels can hardly be ignored: the motif of the returning son, the allure of financial investment, and the commitment to the social democratic project present an imagination of the ideal American, and perhaps a self-fashioned autobiographical fantasy of the ideal Bettauer as well. Despite his wealth, O’Flanagan refutes typical American cultural stereotypes in his attunement to social equity and working-class issues and his thorough rejection of a “profit first” mentality.

Negative American stereotypes do appear in Bettauer’s novel via the ridiculous husband-wife pair of Mr. and Mrs. Underwood. Mr. Underwood attempts to purchase the entire collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum while his militantly protestant spouse seeks to convert Catholic missionaries in the Austrian capital. Bettauer’s views on race relations are also present via the inclusion of Sam, O’Flanagan’s African American attendant, who heralds the increased social acceptance and opportunities available to him as a person of color living in Vienna. Bettauer also includes several parting shots targeting the journalism profession and the relatively higher social esteem that the career garners in the European context.

But the overall tenor of Bettauer’s American imagination is strongly positive and signals the state of Austrian-American relations around its time of publication. When the US Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles in favor of independent peace deals with Austria and their other WWI adversaries, it forged a unique relationship with Austria compared to the other Allied Powers. The reconfiguration of the friend-foe binary and the economic turmoil that the Treaty of Versailles ushered in helped precipitate the Vienna worker’s riots of 1921, which Bettauer positions as the provocation for The Battle for Vienna. In the riots, starving workers targeted in particular wealthy foreigners residing in affluent parts of the city. The international press, however, suggested that American citizens were offered some level of reprieve. A New York Times article from December 3, 1921 goes as far as to claim that “… an American woman living at the Bristol saved herself and her personal property by standing in the doorway waving a small American flag, which is probably the most useful armament for tourists to carry around Central Europe this Red Winter.” The Austrian public was seemingly inclined to acknowledge the distinctive status of Austrian-American relations, and this sentiment carries over into Bettauer’s novel.

Despite the exceptional status of the Austrian-American relationship, however, O’Flanagan’s efforts ultimately come to naught. He refrains from making a major investment in the future of either the Austrian state or Red Vienna more specifically and instead returns to the US with his newlywed wife Hilde to spend their daily lives in a country with a more obvious upward trajectory. In the titular “Battle for Vienna,” America ultimately proves to be a non-combatant. In this sense, Bettauer’s novel is exemplary of Red Vienna’s American imaginations: it is simultaneously an affirmation of a special bond and the acknowledgment of its hollowness; an inspiring aesthetic promise with muted implementation. Mirroring the historical reality, Red Vienna is forced to determine its own path, left only with its American dreams.

Works Cited

“Bettauer, Hugo.” https://litkult1920er.aau.at/litkult-lexikon/bettauer-hugo/

Britta McEwen, “Emotional Expression and the Construction of Heterosexuality: Hugo Bettauer’s Viennese Advice Columns.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 25 (1), 2016.

Hugo Bettauer, “Autobiographie.” Nachlass Franz Brünner. https://bruemmer.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/nlbruemmer/autorenregister/transkription.php?id=184%20bzw.%20http://bruemmer.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/nlbruemmer/includes/fenster.php?bild=../pix/handschriften/SBB-IIIA_Nl_Bruemmer_Bettauer_Hugo_Bl1r.jpg

Hugo Bettauer, Der Kampf um Wien. Milena, 2012.

Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Murray G. Hall, “Bettauers erotische Revolution.” https://personal.murrayhall.com/bettauers-erotische-revolution/

Murray Hall, Der Fall Bettauer. Löcker, 1978.

Nancy P. Nenno, “Elective Paternities: White Germans and Black Americans in Hugo Bettauer’s Das blaue Mal (1922).” German Studies Review, 39 (2), 2016.

“New Yorker is Shot by Vienna Dentist,” The New York Times, Mar. 11, 1925. https://www.nytimes.com/1925/03/11/archives/new-yorker-is-shot-by-vienna-dentist-bettauer-once-on-morgen.html

Nicole M. Phelps, “Rights without Ratification: How the US Government Found Its Way to Peace with Austria in the 1920s.” Journal of Austrian-American History, 6 (2), 2022.

Otto Bauer. Rationalisierung–Fehlrationalisierung. Volkbuchshandlung, 1931.

Robert McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner (eds), The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Camden House, 2020.

“Vienna Riots did $700,000 Damage,” The New York Times, Dec. 3, 1921.