Stadt ohne Juden

“Today’s right-wing demagogues show how language and rhetoric can be used to whip up hatred. This film got there before them. Hopefully it can help us think about where we’re going wrong.”
Olga Neuwirth

A unique document with a unique story. The silent film "The City without Jews" provokes a deep reflection about historical time, the blindness of contemporaneity, about our present and future itself. "The City without Jews" is based on the homonymous “Novel of the Day After Tomorrow” by Jewish writer, journalist Hugo Bettauer (1872 – 1925) and was shot in 1924 in Vienna. Irritatingly prophetic, it shows – only 15 years before Kristallnacht – the escalating anti-Semitism of its time and the impoverishment of a city after the expulsion of the Jewish population. The work was preserved only in a fragmentary version, until it was rediscovered in 2015 at a Parisian flea market. On the occasion of the release of the newly restored version, the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (*1968) has written a new film score, performed live by the Viennese Ensemble Phace.