The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden)
Directed by H. K. Breslauer
Austria | 1924 | Fiction | 74 min | Silent w/English intertitles
Film Source: Austrian Film Archive
Sponsor: UVM Hillel
*Screening will be followed by Q&A with Raye Farr, former Director of the Film Archive and Special Exhibits at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum*
This 1924 Austrian film was believed to be lost until a print was found in a Paris flea market in 2015 and was subsequently restored by the Austrian Film Archive. One of the few surviving Expressionist films from Austria, The City Without Jews is based on a dystopian novel by a Jewish writer, Hugo Bettauer, who created an allegorical vision of the near future, satirizing the prevalent anti-Semitism of the time. Austria’s chancellor sees his people as being ruled by Jews and therefore passes a law forcing all Jews to emigrate. Vienna in the film is called Utopia, and initially the city’s Aryan population celebrates the departure of their Jewish neighbors. Very quickly, though, Utopia’s cultural life falls into neglect and the ailing economy does not revive. A love affair, a psychiatric institution presented in the most wonderful Expressionist style, and a deus ex machina denouement move the story along. The film opened in Vienna on July 25, 1924, in Berlin in 1926, and in New York in 1928. In 1933, a version of the film was shown for the last time in Amsterdam, as a protest against Hitler’s Germany.
