Why Austria is restoring a 1924 film that predicted the rise of the Nazis
Few knew it when it first screened, but „The City Without Jews“ offered a glimpse of the future.
Shot in 1924 Vienna, the silent movie imagined a Jew-hating chancellor coming to power in a city named Utopia. He blames his society’s woes on its Jewish population, using smears to foment widespread anti-Semitism. Some of the details of the 70-minute film were eerily prescient: Utopia’s Jews are sent to exile on packed trains, more than a decade before the Nazis sent Europe’s Jews to death camps in a similar fashion. …