"In the Legendary Republic of Utopia..."

August 13, 2020 9:58 AM

Satirical films that end up predicting a future that they once joked about are becoming more common these days. But such satire doesn't begin with Idiocracy or Network. Let's go back nearly 100 years ago to an Austrian film whose title pretty much says it all: The City Without Jews

Found in a Parisian flea market several years ago, this once thought lost silent film is based on the satirical book of the same name by Austrian writer Hugo Bettauer. The restored Bluray (Trailer) was just released, but if you don't have the coin you can view a more rough around the edges cut available on YouTube.

posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI (17 comments total)

This... could have used a lot more context, at least. From a review linked from the YouTube version:

I am very ambivalent about this film. On the one end, with hindsight, it appears as surprisingly premonitory of what was going to happen in a much worse version 10 to 15 years later and can appear therefore as a strong plea against antisemitism. On the other hand, the film is a comedy relying heavily on classic antisemitic archetypes both in the physical description of some of the characters and even more in their actions: jewish bankers abroad are speculating against the Krone and it is only by deception that Leo manages to have the decree repealed. Its conclusion actually seems to be that the Jews are a necessary evil. I find the film nevertheless fascinating if only by the way it shows the normality of antisemitism in Austria in the 1920's.

I can see the historical value, but I'm not sure a movie about how 'driving out Jews is bad strictly because it would lead to the collapse of the banking system' is really something I'm happy to see here. And the equivalence with films like Network, given the reality of what these racist and xenophobic stereotypes led to, and given the fact that "the city/country/world without Jews" is, in 2020, still a sentiment people express seriously in some increasingly vocal corners, bothers me. "Satirical" doesn't cover the whole of it and I find the framing of this post weird.
posted by trig at 10:18 AM on August 13, 2020 [17 favorites]

I'm glad the first link finally actually gave a plot overview. I have never heard of this film before, but it sound fascinating. I might try giving it a watch at some point soon. Silent film can be quite absorbing, really. And I don't know if this is a good movie, but it sounds like it's worth checking out. Thanks!
posted by hippybear at 10:20 AM on August 13, 2020

trig: to be fair, the main link does include talking about how just changing a few of the inter title cards could entirely reframe the movie, far too easily perhaps for comfort. It's not a fluff piece, it's an honest look at a historical document.
posted by hippybear at 10:23 AM on August 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Trig, my concerns before reading the review in the first link were that the plot would show this city that got rid of Jews would be magically turned into a Utopia in the figurative sense, so it was something of a relief to read that the film's stance was actually the opposite.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:24 AM on August 13, 2020

Yeah, I'm objecting mostly to the fun-sounding framing, which you could easily post with no changes on some racist doppelganger of Metafilter. I haven't watched the movie yet and it sounds like it has historical value, but it would have been really nice to clarify and perhaps discuss that in the presentation, which as is is "Here's a cool satire you can watch!"

Maybe 20 years ago when I thought antisemitism was pretty much a relic I wouldn't have minded, but today I had to go check all the links to make sure the post wasn't actually intended in a racist way. Which sucks.
posted by trig at 10:32 AM on August 13, 2020 [6 favorites]

Literally a click-through to get the context post. Just the opening sentence of the Hugo Bettauer link makes you take a step back and think.
posted by hippybear at 10:40 AM on August 13, 2020

I offer my apologies, folks. To me this was a fascinating piece of film history that I wanted share, but I phrased the post poorly.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:01 AM on August 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

If the mods wish to remove it, I'm okay with that.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:07 AM on August 13, 2020

Even in the 90s Network read like a very accurate prediction rather than a satire.
posted by benzenedream at 11:13 AM on August 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

No, it's good, Alonzo! And I think that the tone of the film is actually in the eye of the beholder.

But that's more because satire of this sort is really hard. The film I was reminded of when I read this article was another more recent film, A Day Without A Mexican. That's got a similar plot, only with a sci-fi mystic booga-boo being the force that removes all the Mexican immigrants from a California town and forces the rich white folks who'd been exploiting them to confront their own helplessness. …It didn't do that well, unfortunately; it apparently swung back and forth between "showing the wacky hijinks that come from rich folks trying to do menial labor" and "preaching at the audience," and that's usually how these kinds of propaganda go.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:15 AM on August 13, 2020 [7 favorites]

antisemitism was absolutely NOT a relic pre-9-11.
posted by brujita at 11:29 AM on August 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Trig was saying that 20 years ago thry were still labouring under the misconception that antisemitism was a relic. Trig isn't saying it WAS a relic.
posted by Omnomnom at 11:41 AM on August 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

I don't like it when the thrust of a movie is too ambivalent. It sounds too close to me.
It's still a very interesting find and post.
posted by Omnomnom at 11:44 AM on August 13, 2020

antisemitism was absolutely NOT a relic pre-9-11.

amen to that

I worked with someone who related a series of incidents that led to people he'd known from high school--young men--who got involved with a group in the US who proceeded to radicalize these fellows *by phone and mail* to engage in a series of.. racist missions? This all culminated in the brutal beating of a retired journalist on his own lawn (Edmonton). The guy that 'flipped' to provide evidence at trial was let off easy for turning, plus he was the driver of the vehicle so less culpable. He had to go into protection.

The hate groups we know about online are the tip of the iceberg, and antisemitism seems to be a glue that binds a lot of this activity.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:52 AM on August 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

The film's co-writer, Ida Jenbach, was Jewish. She was deported to the Minsk ghetto and the rest of her story is unknown.
posted by Mchelly at 12:30 PM on August 13, 2020 [10 favorites]

I offer my apologies, folks.

Thanks, Alonzo.

antisemitism was absolutely NOT a relic pre-9-11.

Yeah, I managed to grow up pretty insulated from it - whatever existed in the places I grew up in was not visible on the surface, you didn't really see it in the local newspapers or the TV shows I watched, and I had no internet access to disabuse me of the notion. (Surely the Holocaust had conclusively settled the issue, right?) But yes, I have been comprehensively disabused. It's still jarring in specific contexts, though. I still remember the time a certain forum then composed 98% of posts on the coolness of functional programming and Paul Graham's thoughts on Lisp very suddenly - and seemingly randomly - started to be full of straight-on misogyny and antisemitism (I'm talking about reddit...) and so seeing a post like this here took me more than a little aback.

Anyway, about the film, the slate article Mchelly linked to has some interesting points:

The message is positive but still worrying. Jews shuttle back and forth, less like people and more like an idea. “The film, looked at now, has a bit of an extreme philo-Semitism that can then lead to anti-Semitism,” Leo Baeck’s Weitzer comments. He’s hit upon something key. The City Without Jews renounces any top-down edict to expel Jews. But not really because it is immoral; mostly because Jews are good with money.

[...] the topics of passing, intermarriage, and who gets dubbed an outsider are central to the story, and enhanced in the film version. [...] Although Bettauer [the author of the original book] was born Jewish and converted at the age of 18, Isenberg warns not to read too much into Bettauer’s change of faith. “It was very much the norm” he says. “There is no contemporary analogy. He was just as Jewish after his conversion; this was just a ticket into European culture.”

The reemergence of the film from the fog of history has extra resonance considering the fate of its key creators. Less than a year after the film’s release, in March 1925, a Nazi named Otto Rothstock shot and killed Hugo Bettauer. It was the first political murder by a Nazi in Austria. [...]

Hans Karl Breslauer left the film industry and began writing light newspaper columns under a pen name, eventually joining the Nazi Party. After the war, he was an unsuccessful fiction writer. Noah Isenberg says there isn’t enough evidence to suggest whether Breslauer, who worked closely with Jews his whole career, was a true believer or, like Bettauer years earlier, this was a conversion merely to “stay afloat.”

Another criticism of the film is about its tidy ending, which apparently is different than the book's less happy one. The wikipedia article has this quote:

In many places the film follows the original book almost word for word, which makes the Utopian ending even more obviously an expression of appeasement. At the end the surprised audience learns that the entire dramatic action only took place in a dream, and thus never really happened. The on-screen happy ending, dictated by compromise, not only negates the meaning of Bettauer's book but also the very real antisemitism that it reflects. Instead it documents a by no means unthinkable and in no way dreamlike reality [...] This surprising turn of the plot, deviating totally from the literary original, which simplifies the action as the content of a dream, cannot merely be regarded as a simple dramatic exigency, but as a prime example of the Austrian soul's ability to repress. This naïve and perhaps crude experiment from 1924 can be taken as a forerunner of what was generally practised after World War II in the country ohne Eigenschaften[a]
— Thomas Ballhausen, Günter Krenn, 2006

I do wonder (without having seen the film) how it intersects with ideas like 'there's no such thing as an anti-war film' or about the complex reality of satire about certain subjects.

Interestingly, Wikipedia also links to a similar book written around the same time: Berlin Without Jews.
posted by trig at 12:57 PM on August 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Watching the youtube. Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra lines up here and there, but it's no Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz.

But it is a good performance of the Concerto for Orchestra, so I am multitasking I guess.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:34 PM on August 13, 2020