When she left, she carried that formation with her. Hollywood did not give her those habits of mind; Vienna did. What Hollywood gave her was an audience and a context in which those habits were, for the most part, invisible.
The Jewish community of Vienna, of which the Kieslers were a part, was about 175,000 people in 1923 — roughly nine percent of the city’s population. It was disproportionately represented in the professions, in the arts, in journalism and publishing, in academia. It was also, by the 1930s, watching the political situation in Germany with a mixture of alarm and, for many, denial. The belief that Austrian civilization, Austrian culture, Austrian enlightenment would protect the Jewish community from what was happening north of the border was widespread and, within a few years, catastrophically wrong.
Fritz Mandl, Lamarr’s first husband, had his own complicated relationship with these political currents. He was himself of partial Jewish ancestry — his grandmother was Jewish, according to some accounts — but he had converted to Catholicism, and his political alignments were with the fascist movements that were reshaping Austria’s right wing in the early 1930s. Austrian fascism under Engelbert Dollfuss and later Kurt Schuschnigg was distinct from German National Socialism in several respects, but both involved the systematic dismantling of Jewish civic standing. Mandl’s position — a man with Jewish ancestry, aligned with fascist politics, selling arms to Mussolini — was the kind of contradiction that the era produced in abundance.
Lamarr’s departure from this world was not only a personal escape. It was a historically timed exit from a civilization that was about to be destroyed. Her mother followed years later, reaching Hollywood in 1942 through Lamarr’s efforts and resources. Most of the Viennese Jewish community did not escape. By the war’s end, two-thirds of Vienna’s Jewish population had been murdered or had fled.