The City Without Jews (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Stuart Liebman

Directed by Hans Karl Breslauer; screenplay by Breslauer and Ida Jenbach, based on Hugo Bettauer’s novel, Die Stadt ohne Juden; produced by H-K Breslauer Film; production design and sets by Julius von Borsody; cinematography by Hugo Eywo and Eduard von Borsody; no film editor credited; music by Saunders Kurtz (1928) and Gerhart Gruber (2000), with an original ensemble score composed and performed by Donald Sosin and Alicia Svigals; starring Eugen Neufeld, Johannes Riemann, Hans Moser, Anny Miletti, Hans Effenberger, Gisela Werbisek, Armin Berg. Blu-Ray/DVD dual format edition, B&W, color tinted, German intertitles with English subtitles, 91 min., 1924. Reconstructed and restored by Filmarchiv Austria (Ernst Kleininger, Nikolaus Wostry and Anna Dobringer), 2020. A Flicker Alley release.

In a wide-ranging interview recorded in 2019 and included on the DVD and Blu-Ray editions of The City Without Jews, Dr. Nikolaus Wostry of the Filmarchiv Austria expressed great satisfaction that his institution’s efforts to locate, reconstruct, and restore an obscure 1924 Austrian melodrama had been successfully completed thanks to the help of hundreds of contributions to an unprecedented crowd-funding campaign. What motivated this unusual source and degree of support for returning a forgotten film to the annals of history was not based, it seems, on the work’s intrinsic cinematic merits. Rather, Wostry believed that the film posed important ethical questions relevant to our reflections about some of the major social crises, including immigration and the need for tolerance of cultural differences, that we face today. An outsized claim like this constitutes an imposing pedigree for the film, now considered to be a “landmark of Austrian cinema.” It certainly calls for renewed attention to this long-neglected work.

The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden), is based on a best-selling novella of the same name written in 1922 by a Jewish convert to Evangelical Lutheranism named Hugo Bettauer. Born in a small town outside Vienna, he had lived and worked in the United States (where he actually became a citizen) and Germany, but he became best known after he returned to his Heimatland and assumed the role of a civic-minded agent provocateur. A prolific author of newspaper feuilletons and serialized novels in Vienna, Bettauer championed rights for gays and women’s access to abortion—unpopular causes that challenged the mores of the staid, provincial citizens of Catholic Austria. He was frequently scorned for these positions and even more so for his positive attitude toward more explicit eroticism in film and literature as well as his endorsement of the freedom of sex workers to ply their trade. (G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street [1925] was based on Bettauer’s 1924 novel.) For Austrians who had witnessed the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy and the reduction of a once mighty, multiethnic empire to a small, Central European state, and who, moreover, felt unmoored by the modernizing economic and cultural forces of the postwar era, the way Bettauer cultivated controversy and threatened traditional morals exceeded existing social norms. Yet his books generally sold well; clearly, his brand of sensationalism had an audience.

Bettauer enjoyed the celebrity his initiatives generated and the financial rewards were more than satisfying. So, with his keen sense of how far he could go in rousing the interest and passions of his readers, it is not surprising that Bettauer would have turned to a problem that had a long history in Austrian society—what to do with the Jews?—as the theme for a novella. Since the late nineteenth century, in fact, Austria had spawned a series of radical political movements in response to the economic and social dislocations associated with capitalism’s rise as well as new historical factors such as the greater mobility of peoples, primarily Slavs and Jews, across and within the empire’s borders. As modern industries grew and city dwellers outpaced the population of rural communities, traditional folkways eroded. Economic rationalization and greater competition from Germany and across Europe led to the formation of larger companies at the expense of smaller, homegrown enterprises. These developments came to be associated in the popular mind with malign Jewish influences. The perceived manipulation of the economy by large banking firms (some of which were actually controlled by Jews), the frenzied gyrations of the stock markets, and the increasing internationalization of commerce all led to calls on the part of right-wing, anti-Semitic parties for stricter controls, if not the outright banning, of Jews who were supposedly manipulating the markets to the detriment of ordinary (i.e., Christian) Austrians. Venerable Catholic anti-Judaism and the church’s renewed theological concern for the suffering poor, soon fused with anticapitalist sentiments, appeals to German ethnic nationalism, and virulent anti-Semitism to create a toxic political brew that unfortunately appealed to many. Men like Georg von Ritter Schönerer and Karl Lueger (who became the long-serving mayor of Vienna) called explicitly for the Jews’ expulsion. After World War I, moreover, popular anti-Semitism was further inflamed by an influx of Jewish refugees, many of them Orthodox, non-German-speaking Jews dressed in traditional garb who were fleeing from the former Austrian province of Galicia that had become parts of the new U.S.S.R.

What were ominous warning signs for the Jews were crucial sources of inspiration for Bettauer’s novella. In it, he imagined the worst possible outcome for his former co-religionists. The main storyline, set sometime in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, revolves around the Austrian government’s decision to expel all the Jews from the country and the consequences that result from this decision. The story begins as mass discontent with the Jews’ alleged control of the economy provokes strikes and pogroms. People from all classes demand that the government act against the unwanted minority. Cynical politicians, seeking a return to an imagined, socially tranquil past, act on the impulses that the anti-Semitic nationalists had ginned up. All the Jews are ordered to leave, and they do so on a series of trains imported from other countries to accommodate the exodus. A romantic subplot set in Vienna follows the deportation of a young Jew named Leo Strakosch (Johannes Riemann) and his eventual reunion with his grieving, non-Jewish fiancée, Lotte Linder (Anny Miletti). The two plots come together when Leo returns in disguise to Vienna and then, acting almost alone, he devises an ingenious plan to revive popular support for the return of the Jews to their homeland; the widespread and sometimes violent unrest that he stirs up causes the government to reverse its decision and bring the Jews back.

This synopsis suggests the appeal of The City Without Jews for Wostry and those who funded the restoration project. The story eerily anticipates the actions taken against Austrian Jews about fifteen years after the film’s release in late 1924 when an Austrian named Hitler, who had learned his anti-Semitism from Karl Lueger in Vienna and had subsequently become the Chancellor of the Greater German Reich, ordered the new Nazi government in “Ostmark” to expel the country’s Jews and send any who remained to their eventual death in Eastern Europe. (Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the dirty work.) Bettauer himself, but for his earlier death, would have been on one of those trains. His gift for stirring up emotions in a society on edge had led to his demise. On March 26, 1925, only a few months after the film’s premiere on Austrian (and later German, Parisian, and New York) screens, he was assassinated by a young dental technician who was a member of the recently organized Austrian Nazi Party.

As I noted above, Bettauer’s novella had a happier end. The premise for the comic ending was Leo’s stereotypically devious, Jewish ingenuity. He begins to post messages in public places signed by “A True Christian.” These remind the readers who gather around the walls and kiosks in the city that small shopkeepers have come to miss the myriad small purchases of their free-spending Jewish neighbors. Other scenes reveal how much the prostitutes and mistresses serving the needs of Jewish men long for the luxury purchases from the fashionable shops made by their indulgent boyfriends. He details the distress of the entrepreneurs who had taken over the expensive Jewish-owned boutiques because the Christian clientele who used to buy to keep up with the styles of the Jewish fashion plates have lost interest in Parisian haute couture; much to their embarrassment, their customers revert to classically dull Loden garments. Even the Viennese theater, a vital source of pride for the Austrian bourgeoisie, had become of little interest since it had been drained of the stimulating innovations by talented Jewish playwrights. And as the value of the Austrian currency fell on international markets, his messages reminded Austrians about how the rise in prices seriously compromised their standard of living.

Leo’s plan successfully stirs up widespread discontent. Protests and riots break out to demand the return of their former Jewish fellow citizens, now regarded as a vital economic resource. But Leo does not stop there; he schemes to actively undermine electoral due process. He plies an alcoholic, anti-Semitic legislator with rare wines and liqueurs on the morning of the legislature’s vote to retract its order expelling the Jews. And to ensure the deputy’s inability to vote in what will be a close parliamentary decision, Leo kidnaps the drunk and takes him for a ride out of town. As a result, the measure passes and the Jews are able to return. Leo, as the first brave enough to do so, is greeted by the Viennese mayor who addresses him in as “My dear Jew.” Leo’s marriage to Lotte will soon follow.

What is striking about Bettauer’s novella is the extent to which he incorporated traditional stereotypes of Jews in his efforts to redeem them in the eyes of his fellow citizens. Jewish bankers and stockbrokers do control the economy, but the book presents this fact as somehow a virtuous force facilitating commerce. Jewish clothing stores do pressure the monied classes to consume the latest fashions, but this gratifies the wealthier Viennese matrons and their husbands’ mistresses and helps them to avoid the pitfalls of provincialism; instead, they are induced to become stylish cultural icons. The return of Jewish playwrights (think of a figure like Arthur Schnitzler) enlivens the stage with edgy, sexy dramas even as these make many uncomfortable with the morals on display. Assimilated, Germanized Jewish Austrians like Leo, moreover, even share their fellow citizens’ contempt for the Ostjuden. For both, these religious and strangely clothed “Galicianers” are only unproductive schnorrers (beggars). Bettauer, through his character Leo, astoundingly recommends closer scrutiny and even the barring of such Jews to ensure Austria’s future well-being. And finally, Leo confirms the stereotype of the scheming Jews who are not above taking extralegal measures to manipulate public opinion to gain results.

Hans Karl Breslauer, a minor director who later accommodated himself to the Nazis, softened some of these highly questionable characterizations of the Jews in the script he developed with Ida Jenbach, a Jewish writer whom the Nazis later deported to the Minsk Ghetto where she perished. On the other hand, Breslauer did not omit—indeed he played up—certain details such as Leo’s deceitfulness and his willingness to engage in political dirty tricks. Moreover, Breslauer chose actors who looked distinctively Jewish and asked them to gesticulate in a broad, comically exaggerated manner to conform with Jewish stereotypes. The result is clearly caricatural. Only Leo looks like the “Aryans,” and it is one of the ironies of the production that the actor who played him (Riemann) later joined the Nazi Party and became an established figure in the film industry of the Third Reich.

The Austrian film industry of the 1920s lacked the financial resources routinely available to filmmakers in Germany. Money was tight because inflation was running rampant; the value of the currency in both Austria and Germany was in radical freefall as the film was being made. Breslauer’s team therefore had to shoot the film on a shoestring budget and this caused several production delays. Ultimately, the production company, Mondial, which Breslauer worked for, even had to forego the rights to distribute the finished film because its bankruptcy seemed imminent. The financial pressures probably explain why the completed work is, at least in formal terms, rather humdrum, ordinary fare. Breslauer apparently was, in any case, a mediocre director. Even after joining the NSDAP for opportunistic reasons in 1940, he never achieved results more impressive than his work on Die Stadt ohne Juden.

Any final judgment on the film’s cinematic qualities, however, should be withheld because, as the restorers forthrightly state, this version is only an edition of the original, not its complete reincarnation. While they do double up on some shots of the Viennese mobs, presumably because of a loss of some material, their reconstruction, based on two principal sources of fragments almost miraculously rediscovered (read more about this in the informative brochure accompanying the discs), is highly professional and likely the best that will ever emerge. Their restoration reveals that Breslauer and his cameramen did devise some interesting compositions in depth that portray Jews praying in a synagogue and set them against similarly structured shots of the government legislature debating their expulsion. The extensive and historically accurate toning of the film is quite exquisite as it has been brilliantly recreated by Filmarchiv Austria. Wit also enlivens the final shots of the drunk anti-Semitic deputy ranting at Jewish stars flickering in an asylum room, which knowingly recalls the sets of a similar hospital at the end of the famous The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919). The levity, however, fails to dispel the memory of the few brief shots of trains transporting the Jews out of the country. They remain as chilling reminders of the disastrous genocide to come.

Dr. Wostry and his colleagues are to be commended for their diligent sleuthing and exacting work in rescuing Die Stadt ohne Juden, a film of great thematic interest, and preserving it for posterity. With the help of Flicker Alley, they have made the film once again accessible to a broad general public. Whether the uncomfortable situation for Austrian Jewry, which was very specifically anchored in the political circumstances of a century ago can adequately serve as a conceptual model and ethical lesson for teaching tolerance to their European descendants who face what they consider the destabilizing onslaughts of refugees from the Balkans, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, however, remains an open question.

Stuart Liebman is professor emeritus of film studies at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1