Close
Monthly Screenings
The City Without Jews
Dir.: Hans Karl Breslauer | 91 minutes

Other Screenings

Silent film screened with live musical accompaniment by Rodika Foigelman. Introductory lecture by Professor Frank Stern, Vienna University.

With thanks to the Austrian Cultural Center.

Austria 1924 | 91 minutes | German | English, Hebrew subtitles

The mythical state of Utopia is afflicted by unemployment and inflation; massive crowds protest in the streets. Seizing the opportunity to blame the Jews for the nation’s misery, a law is passed to expel them all. But before long, the country is worse off than ever…. The City Without Jews, which astonishingly predicted the fate of European Jewry, was released 15 years prior to WW2. The film was presumed lost, yet in 2015, a copy miraculously appeared in a Paris flea market and painstakingly restored by Austria's National Film Archive. Now, previously unknown images depict Jewish life in Vienna with clear anti-Semitic meaning.