The City Without Jews - 1924

2018 reconstruction

A dystopian silent film from Austria brings a vision of the future (1976!) in a place called "Utopia" (filmed in Vienna) that will purge its Jewish inhabitants as a solution for rampant inflation and financial crisis. The result only accelerates economic decline and leads to international ostracization, except for a few wealthy foreigners who are delighted to send support to help carry out the deed.

Family splits erupt among the film characters, and though handled with a lot of humour and satire, there is an unintended deadly undertone to the story we're watching. We know what events followed just a few years later in Europe with the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany and other similar political groups across Europe. These very real events of Jewish expulsion and annihilation are later events the director (Hans Karl Breslauer) could not know in 1924, but his fictional film is strongly hinting at their possibility by just exploring the causes and ramifications.

The film tries to balance its wide vein of satiric comedy with the narrow grim visuals of persecution and expulsion, with the latter being a much smaller section of the tale. These parts are handled far more realistically with homeless refugees spilled out onto muddy winter-time roadways trudging along with the old and ill trying to keep up. It isn't really much of an invention to show these things since there had already been numerous pogroms in Europe against the Jews and the conditions of those actions were well known, though it is likely that The City Without Jews was the first time it had ever been depicted in a film. The startling realism of these sections as Jews are persecuted are in contrast to the lighter humour of the rest of the movie.

The expulsion law is first heralded in "Utopia" by the Chancellor (Eugen Neufeld) who gives a speech declaring first how he is a "friend of the Jews and an admirer of their brilliant qualities," but finally ends with a kind of logical explanation for the action: if we kick out the Jews, including "baptized Jews," who have been holding so many prestigious and lucrative positions in society and industry, then the native Utopians will take their places, a windfall gift from the political leadership. He also adds a remark that the Jews can take all of their wealth with them, that is, as long as it is listed on their taxes. An episode happens in the seats of onlookers watching the parliament where a Jewish man pleads with the man next to him to immediately take from him 8 million Utopian crowns, and then forward 6 million to a bank in another land, in effect giving away 2 million in order to save the 6. A decade later such a maneuver, with far harsher terms, would be repeated all over Europe.

The main humour of the film, which is presented quite like that of a silent comedy of 1924 vintage, rests upon the double identity of Leo Strakosch (Johannes Riemann). He moves to Paris after the expulsion law goes into effect, but he is in love with the not-Jewish Grete, the daughter of an anti-Semitic man who doesn't much like Leo. While pining away for her in Paris, Leo invents an identity as a Frenchman named Henri, puts on a stylish long mustache that fits with 1924 (and apparently 1976!), and returns to Utopia to visit Grete. In the process of being back "home" he initiates a street-level counter-movement against the expulsion law. Using a small table-top printing kit he makes leaflets with messages critical of the effects of the law and the need for a new law to cancel it, signing it "The Federation of True Christians."

Meanwhile, Utopia is spiraling into worse and worse economic conditions (for example the high fashion shops now display burlap in their windows), and some political figures begin to regret their new law which has failed to live up to its promises. A new law is put forward to cancel the old one, but in order to go into effect a two-thirds majority must be reached. Leo/Henri helps matters by making sure a certain virulent anti-Semitic politician (Hans Moser as Rat Bernart) he has befriended while in his guise of Henri will be occupied elsewhere when the vote comes up. When the old man wakes up from an alcohol-stupor with just minutes left until the vote, he hurries to a nearby hotel to phone in his all-important vote.

The City Without Jews is fairly primitive as 21st century cinema goes but is right in line with what was possible with a film produced in 1924, and is certainly far more expansive in its ideas than a typical silent era movie. Perhaps the only films similar in scope would be the 1927 Metropolis from Fritz Lang, and the 1920 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in particular this latter film because of the presentation of the paranoid psychology of Jew-hating politician Rat Bernart. When he comes out of his alcoholic spree in a fit of rage, hurling and then picking up again a telephone over and over, he ends up committed to an asylum. There he can't stop having visions of Mogen Davids all around him, some that fly in the sky and others that are under his feet and surround him in an expressionistic visual style like that of Cesare moving over the rooftops in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

There is a real humor in The City Without Jews with how Leo/Henri handles his double identity, and also how Grete, his girlfriend, tells her father she is now interested in the Frenchman Henri, appearing fickle to her father for her to have moved from Leo to Henri so easily in her affections. We of course know they're the same person. Her father finally relents and wishes she'd go back to Leo because he doesn't like Henri.

There are plenty of shots of streets, homes and crowds around Vienna, so an on-location reality helps to boost the seriousness of what's underneath the satire and humour. However, Jew-hate isn't particularly explored, but aside from the obvious envy and irrational hatred that is implied in multiple ways, there is also the suggestion of simple greed as a motivating factor. This is another way the film anticipates reality, with the mass confiscation of goods from European Jews not that far away in the future.

Unfortunately, as is explained in the restoration remarks about the film accompanying the Blu Ray edition, The City Without Jews does not have a complete set of intertitles. We see bits of the tale in which brief interactions and conversations take place between characters but there's no dialogue for us to read. This doesn't hamper us from understanding the general progression of the story, but it is a conspicuous absence. However, most sections of the film are equipped with title cards.

The City Without Jews is actually a reconstruction from two main film sources, both incomplete on their own, and as such the two are constructed together with a narrative chronology that is partly conjecture by the reconstruction team. A lack of original materials and intertitles means research into contemporary reviews were used for sorting out the story line chronology.

For a viewer, almost all of this is invisible, and the film comes across as a complete story about a futuristic time that is 1976 but looks like 1924, but horrifically also looks like Europe 1939-1945.

The film The City Without Jews is based upon a book of the same name by Hugo Bettauer (who participated in the writing of the film script) who was assassinated in Austria by a Nazi in 1925. The assassin was acquitted "for reasons of insanity" and released in 1927.

What's Recent

Original Page May 21, 2025