The City without Jews (1924) Review

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by Hans Karl Breslauer

grade: 8.5

1924, the year in which The City without Jews was filmed and for the first time screened to the audience, is a crucial year. Only a few months later, in fact, Adolf Hitler will publish Mein Kampf, giving rise to feelings that had remained, until then, (not too) dormant. The author of the novel – Hugo Bettauer, who, here, also collaborated with Breslauer and Ida Jenbach on the screenplay – had already portrayed two years earlier one of the many possible consequences of this latent resentment. And he had done so in perhaps the most disturbing of all ways: satire.

Utopia or anti-utopia?

A more topical film than ever before – as well as an invaluable historical document – was discovered almost by chance in 1991 at the Amsterdam Film Library and then restored and re-released on the international film (and home video) scene. We are referring to The City without Jews (original title: Die Stadt ohne Juden), directed in 1924 by Hans Karl Breslauer, and a transposition of the novel of the same name written by Hugo Bettauer in 1922.

Already from the title, therefore, one can guess what this feature film is about. Well, we find ourselves in the imaginary republic of Utopia. Following a heavy economic meltdown, people start talking in the town – and, specifically, within the taverns – about the idea that, perhaps, sending away the Jews (who have always been, as we know, important merchants) would lead to greater balance, as well as some sort of economic recovery. Said and done. An ad hoc anti-Semitic law is immediately enacted and every Jew must leave the city, directed towards the Palestinian town of Zion. The consequences, however, will not be at all as hoped: the economy will not improve and, indeed, every foreign buyer will stop making purchases within Utopia. Only brave Leo – of Jewish origin and engaged to Lotte, a Christian girl – will try, in his own way, to concoct a bizarre trick to restore order.

1924, therefore, the year in which The City without Jews was filmed and for the first time screened to the audience, is a crucial year. Only a few months later, in fact, Adolf Hitler will publish Mein Kampf, giving rise to feelings that had remained, until then, (not too) dormant. The author of the novel – Hugo Bettauer, who, in this case, also co-wrote the screenplay with Breslauer and Ida Jenbach – had already portrayed two years earlier one of the many possible consequences of this latent resentment. And he had done this in perhaps the most disturbing way of all: satire. If, in fact, this important work immediately caught the attention of the young Hans Karl Breslauer – then 35 years old – to the point that he wanted to buy the rights for a film transposition, it is also true that this transposition had to undergo a heavy – but for the time necessary – reworking of the text.

If, in fact, in the original novel, the setting was the city of Vienna itself, in Breslauer’s The City without Jews, an imaginary setting (the Republic of Utopia) had to be chosen. Similarly, all references to real parties were avoided, the whole thing was subsequently portrayed as the dream of an anti-Semitic politician (the final sequence explicating the dream, however, is now destroyed and, in its place, all that remains is a single frame and an explanatory caption added later) and, in order to give the whole thing a ‘lighter’ touch and a classic comedy style, even more space was given to the love story between Lotte and Leo.

These important changes, however, failed to “appease the masses” and, on the contrary, provoked strong protests by national socialist groups during some official screenings, which even culminated in tear gas being fired in some cinemas.

An even worse fate, as if all this were not enough, befell Hugo Bettauer himself: the writer was killed by six gunshots, fired on 10 March 1925 (i.e. a year after the release of The City without Jews) by the dentist – a member of the National Socialist party – Otto Rothstock, who was subsequently sentenced to the criminal asylum, but released after only eighteen months.

In addition, therefore, to the historical importance of a feature film like this, we cannot, however, fail to note the undoubted artistic value of this work by Hans Karl Breslauer. And also in this regard, 1924 ranks as a key year. In this period, in fact, we find ourselves – in Austria, as in Germany – in the midst of the Expressionist movement, whose climax came in 1921 with Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and which, also in this work, is alive and pulsating. At the same time, in the United States Western Electric invented for the first time a way of synchronising sound with images. An era, this one, therefore, yes, of transition, but, at the same time, an era in which the solid foundations of the past are reworked and adapted to the historical and political context, a sign of a mature mastery of cinema.

It is, in particular with regard to the interior scenes, the shadows, very marked, which, together with the frequent close-ups of the protagonists, emphasise now the drama, now, in any case, the strong emotional charge. Similarly, the double dimension – typical of Expressionism – is here emphasised by the important presence of the oneiric component, which, in this case, serves above all to soften what was being staged. A solution, this one, often used in dramatic comedies (it is impossible not to think, in this regard, of The Ancestress, another great success of that period by Louise Kolm-Fleck and Jacob Fleck) and which, in our case, proved to be more indispensable than ever.

An important challenge, then, The City without Jews. A film that, precisely because it was so difficult to realise, required the construction of enormous sets for the outdoor scenes (designed by the architect Julius von Borsody), as well as the extraordinary use of a very high (for those years) number of extras, as can be seen in the scene in which we see the crowd – filmed rigorously from above – waiting for news under the government palace.

Was this enough, then, to make people at the time reflect? Did the staging of this (in spite of the location’s name) anti-Utopia (as journalist Bert Rebhandl called it at the time) have any impact on the audience? As one can easily imagine, there was a lot of food for thought in this regard. Fate – or, better still, the course of history – was, however, to take the turn we all know. Just as the Christmas tree decoration which, from Lotte’s hands, irreparably disintegrates to the ground.