Maximilian Hugo Bettauer (18 August 1872 – 26 March 1925) 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.
Life
Maximilian Hugo Bettauer, later known as Hugo Bettauer, was born in Baden bei Wien on 18 August 1872, the son of the stockbroker Arnold (Samuel Aron) Bettauer from Lemberg (Lviv) and his wife Anna (née Wecker). He had two older sisters, Hermine (Michi) and Mathilde. In 1887–88, together with Karl Kraus, he attended the fourth form of the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium in the Stubenbastei, Vienna. Kraus was to be his fiercest critic for the whole of his life.
At the age of 16 Bettauer ran away from home and travelled to Alexandria, from where the Austrian Consul sent him straight back again.
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.
Marriage and emigration
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 Zürich he married the love of his youth, Olga Steiner, with whom, after the death of his mother, he emigrated to the United States. During the crossing, in a disastrous speculation Bettauer lost his entire fortune. He and Olga remained until 1899 in New York City, where she appeared as an actress. Although Bettauer acquired American citizenship, he was unable to find work, so they travelled to Berlin, where their son Heinrich Gustav Hellmuth Bettauer was born. (Their son went by the name Helmut and was transported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he presumably died.)
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.
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").
Second marriage
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 1910 he returned to Vienna and took a job with the Neue Freie Presse. When at the beginning of World War I he wanted to join the army he was turned down, on the grounds of his American citizenship.
In 1918, after an altercation caused by a defective typewriter, he was fired from the Neue Freie Presse.
After the war
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.