Friday, 15 July 2022

The City Without Jews

"The City Without Jews" (1924) is a satire about "a terrible possibility that became horribly real" some years after being published, a film about anti-Semitism foreshadowing nazism and one of the "most prophetic, provocative films of the 20th century". The book was written by Hugo Bettauer (1872-1925), a Jewish Austrian labelled an "Asphaltliterat", a term Joseph Goebbels used during the book burning in 1933 to refer to literature that was considered to be too urban and not patriotic enough. In 1925, the Nazi Otto Rothstock (1904-1990) shot Bettauer five times. Bettauer died sixteen days later as a result of the shooting and Rothstock, who defended the assassination as a patriotic attempt to protect so-called German culture from the menace of "degeneration", spent a few months in prison and less than two years in a psychiatric clinic before being released. In 1977, Rothstock boasted in an interview of being responsible for Bettauer's "extinction". 

Hans Karl Breslauer (1888-1965) directed the film and changed some parts of the book. For instance, Vienna became Utopia aiming to avoid problems with censorship.

The movie is about a city resembling Vienna in which failing economy leads to rising anti-Semitism and the Jewish population being scapegoated. Finally, a law based on fear, prejudice and populist rhetoric is passed expelling all Jews from the city. Only a decade later, the Third Reich turned this fiction into haunting fact and atrociously killed millions of children, men and women (via and via and via).

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photograph of Hans Moser via


  1. Highly interesting, thanks!

    1. I've not yet read the book, it will be one of my next ones. Many thanks, Kenneth!