• The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden)

2/4/26 (Wed)

I was made aware of this startling 1924 silent film when the irreplaceable Mark Steyn featured the German novel from two years earlier in his column. The film had long been thought lost, but fragments were found in poor condition in Amsterdam in 1991, which were only shown publicly years later. Then, in one of those seemingly impossible coincidences, a full copy in excellent condition emerged at a French flea market in 2015. That was digitally restored and released three years later.

A large city – Vienna in the original, a limp “Utopia” in the film – is roiled by economic troubles and severe public discontent amid a stark divide between the decadent rich and the struggling poor. Looking for a scapegoat, politicians soon target the Jews, blaming them for all the city’s woes. The Jews are compared to a pest that must be exterminated to protect the roses. The government orders that all Jews be expelled from the city, though allowing second-generation Jews to remain if they agree to be baptized. It arranges stock cars to take them away along with all their worldly possessions, ripping them from their roots. The city is soon bereft of all Jewish life. It quickly becomes clear that its business and cultural life has been torn apart as well: the theaters are empty, fashion houses flounder, the currency plunges, businesses die. “When you expelled the Jews,” says one person, “you banished prosperity as well.”

The panicky government decides finally to call the Jews back, and after machinations to ensure a two-thirds majority (including a comic plot involving a Jew returning in disguise to win back his Christian fiancée and plying a key Jew-hating politician with alcohol to derail the vote), succeeds in reversing its decision. We are told that the city thereafter enjoys a miraculous recovery, and the drunk politician ends up in an insane asylum, where he hallucinates Jewish stars all around him in a striking expressionist scene. The film ends as the politician awakens, revealing all to have been a dream.

The film is chilling in anticipating the horrors to come in real life just a few years later. Seeing Jews being shoved into the cattle cars was particularly unnerving, though even this pessimistic scenario never envisioned the mass murder that would accompany this. This is all well before the rise of Hitler, so the danger signs were clearly there.

Nevertheless, as a film, it’s pretty awful. The characters are presented in broad strokes of Good and Evil obvious, and the acting is like a parody of silent-film technique. The director plays some scenes for laughs, in particular the shenanigans surrounding the drunk politician, but his exaggerated approach is laughable for the wrong reasons. The results are embarrassing.

The entire idea of the film, its “let’s love the Jews” message, was eye-rolling and ultimately unconvincing. The claims regarding the Jewish influence on Utopia/Vienna’s cultural life were not necessarily wrong, as history has shown, but the film’s clunky presentation wasn’t likely to convert anyone in 1924. I imagine the decision to substitute the novel’s Viennese setting for an imaginary could-be-anywhere town was political, which speaks volumes on its own, but it removes much of the potential impact (I haven’t read the book). The only truly memorable scene was the asylum sequence with the madman, slanted walls, jagged oversized furniture, and Stars of David popping in and out, an expressionist nightmare that would have been welcomed elsewhere. The remainder of the film was mush. Hans Moser gave the film’s best performance (admittedly a low bar) as the politician in that scene, evidently marking the start of a major career.

The film proved prescient in its vision, and the director was courageous to take it on. (The author of the novel was murdered a year later despite having long converted to Christianity; his son was reportedly killed years later in Auschwitz.) Whatever its flaws as a film, it stands as an eye-opening testament of the times.