Description
Book SynopsisThis study explores the experience of intermarried couples - marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners - and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938. Evan Burr Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions.
Trade Review'Through his history of those tied by family bonds, Bukey lays bare how the Nazi regime challenged core values of western civilization: the family, parents' protection of their children, the mutual love and loyalty of husbands and wives. And he shows how those fathers, mothers, wives, and husbands negotiated that assault. Written with great sensitivity and passion, and grounded in impeccable research, Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria is a superb new work.' Debórah Dwork, Clark University
'We have had only vague knowledge until now about the impact Nazi racist madness had on the private lives of Jews and intermarried couples in National Socialist Austria. Evan Burr Bukey went into Viennese archives, compiled exact statistics, and wrote a precise study about people who were forced to live in a state of enormous stress. He has reconstructed the fates of individuals and revealed thereby the whole gamut of human emotions: greed for money and assets, cowardice and betrayal, as well as loyalty to one's spouse, bravery, and moral courage. The result is an outstanding book, touching and sad, about people in extreme situations.' Ernst Hanisch, University of Salzburg
'Singlehandedly, Professor Bukey has produced the definitive history of persecution of Austrians of Jewish heritage from Anschluss in 1938 to 1945. After all, Vienna was home to the second largest concentration of Jews and 'mixed marriages' in all of Hitler's Gross Deutsches Reich. Bukey's meticulous archival research and probing analyses present in detail how the Nazis imperiled the lives and marriages of hundreds of thousands of citizens while at the same time showing how sometimes individuals within that bureaucracy could blunt the worst of Nazi intentions. What Beate Meyer and Wolf Gruner have achieved in exposing Nazi persecution of intermarriages in Germany, Evan Bukey has matched with his exemplary history of intermarriages in Austria.' James F. Tent, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Table of Contents1. Prologue: Jews and intermarriage in Austria; 2. Contesting racial status: successes and failures; 3. Intermarried divorce, 1938–45; 4. Tightening the noose: arrests, deportations, and forced labor, 1941–5; 5. Epilogue and conclusions.
