In his slim new volume on Viennese Jews and intermarriage under the Nazi regime, Evan Burr Bukey carefully interprets unpublished records from the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv. Reconstructing (as much as possible) the lives and decisions of Jews and gentiles, Bukey guides the reader through the labyrinthine world created by Nazi racial legislation. His work succeeds in disproving “the prevailing notion that Jewish-gentile families suffered minimal abuse at the hands of the Nazis” (194). Rather, as he shows, these people “in between” often had harrowing choices to make as their status, which fluctuated throughout the Nazi regime, brought them social isolation, professional loss, deprivation, and even death.

Why base such a study in Vienna? Bukey points to several particularities. Jews in Vienna were relative newcomers, whose experience of anti-Semitism was in some ways more raw than that of their German brethren. Furthermore, the laws that had evolved since 1933 in Germany were dramatically thrust upon Austria in 1938, accompanied by an orgy of violence during the Anschluss. The Vienna branch of the Reich Kinship Office was presented with more appeals to “racial classifications” than any other agency in the expanded country—possibly as a result of the outpouring of anti-Semitism that accompanied Vienna's incorporation into the Reich.

Bukey finds that 85 to 87 percent of intermarried Jews survived the war (22). To do so, they had to make a series of difficult decisions. Some sought an exemption from Nazi racial laws through petitions to the Ministry of the Interior. Others contested their racial classification. Finally, some “German-blooded” partners filed for divorce, the better to become members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Bukey follows each of these courses in separate chapters, in which he uses individual cases to illustrate the survival strategies of couples caught within the bewildering system of racial legislation in Austria.

Perhaps the most surprising chapter in Bukey's book investigates the process of contesting one's racial status. The often-overlapping circles of power and influence within the Nazi Party hierarchy were in full play here, leaving individuals with a range of options in appealing for a change in racial status. An astonishing percentage of applicants in Vienna were successful in “improving” their racial status to Mischling of first or second degree or even to “Person of German or Kindred Blood.” The majority of these petitions came from “German-blooded” parents, often the mothers, seeking to secure a better future for their children under the Nazi regime. These survival strategies on the part of parents required great resources: Genealogists, lawyers, and a new class of racial specialists were needed to prove a “correct” racial category. Bukey notes that some applicants, especially single mothers, shrewdly exploited the inverted world of Nazi morality by claiming themselves to be promiscuous (and thus opening up the possibility of an Aryan biological father). Their children were safer, and far more socially acceptable, as bastards rather than as Jews.

Divorce in Austria, on the contrary, was not acceptable to the Catholic Church. Although the Nazi regime attempted to entice non-Jewish marriage partners into leaving their Jewish spouses with a streamlined, no-fault divorce, this policy met with disapproval from the church. Bukey proceeds cautiously with the evidence he has of intermarried couples' divorces, asking what reasons, personal and political, might have motivated them. Most of the marriages that ended in “repeal” or “annulment” on racial grounds (an option for intermarried couples) examined by Bukey appear troubled well before the Anschluss, although he does not rule out the possibility of Gentile partners seeking job security or an improved social status through divorce. The author also explores the gendered dynamic of divorce and annulment on racial grounds, finding that Gentile women were more likely to use these methods as a way of leaving their male, Jewish partners. As he puts it bluntly in his conclusion, “it was Jewish men who bore the brunt of Nazi discriminatory measures (195).” Overall, however, he suggests that mixed marriages remained strong in the face of grave opposition from the state.

Much of Bukey's work in this volume is in dialogue with other scholarship, particularly Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York, 1998) and Beate Meyer's study of intermarriage in Hamburg, “Jüdische Mischlinge”: Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrungen, 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1999). Bukey's perspective on Vienna adds a valuable voice to the ongoing exploration of life as it was lived by Jews and Gentiles alike in twentieth-century Central Europe.