Reels of Removal: The City Without Jews

In the chapel on Muristan Road in Jerusalem’s Old City, a screen had been set up at the far end, an altar made of canvas. Peter-Michael Seifried, music director of Jerusalem’s Lutheran churches, sat at the piano, poised to lend music to silence. Before he touched the keys, Seifried mentioned the date: January 30. On this date in 1933, he said, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor.

The silent movie was The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden), first shown in Vienna in the summer of 1924. Its what-if premise is so simple it might have been printed on a ballot: A modern city decides that the source of its troubles is the Jews, and the cure is removal. The city congratulates itself and gives expulsion the diction of justice. Watching the film there, in St. John’s Chapel of the Church of the Redeemer, I felt the double exposure: the antique flicker of a lost Vienna and the bureaucratic choreography of an all-too-real expulsion.

That doubleness—then and now, dream and decree—is the key to the strange afterlife of The City Without Jews. To understand why the film still lands with such force, you have to return to the city that made it.

Vienna, of all cities, understands atmosphere: how culture can be made to waltz above politics. Yet Vienna is also a city that, long before the Anschluss, learned to make resentment wear gloves. By the eve of the First World War, Jews made up roughly a tenth of Vienna’s population; many of them had come there since the 1860s from Bohemia, Galicia, Hungary, and elsewhere in the Habsburg world. (Theodor Herzl, for example, moved from Budapest to Vienna in 1878.) In the years after the war, the empire having dissolved and inflation rising, Vienna, still home to more than two hundred thousand Jews, became a laboratory for moods. One of those moods, native since the turn of the century, was the conviction that “the Jew” explained modern life’s humiliations: money, housing, unemployment, sexual panic, foreignness, the press, the very sensation of being unmoored.

Antisemitism is a cabinet of passions, each with its own label: religious residue, political opportunism, envy disguised as patriotism. It thrives on contradiction: “the Jew” is too powerful and too weak, too visible and too hidden, too assimilated and too alien. Capitalist and Bolshevik. Cosmopolitan corrupter and clannish tribalist. In Vienna, long before 1938, “the Jew” had become a scapegoat elastic enough to fit every grievance.

Hugo Bettauer, a muckraking journalist and best-selling author, was one of the targets of Viennese antisemitism and also one of its most agile mockers. In 1922, Bettauer published what he called “a very amusing little novel,” The City Without Jews. He subtitled it “A novel of the day after tomorrow” (Ein Roman von Übermorgen), which was not so amusing.

“A human wall encircled the beautiful, calm, and noble parliament building,” the book begins. Vienna has gathered “to witness a historical event of unprecedented magnitude,” and from that cross-class crush came the call: “Out with the Jews!”

Inside the building, the fictitious Chancellor Schwertfeger (drawn from Vienna’s real-life antisemitic Mayor Karl Lueger) declares with “clenched hands”:

We are being ruled, suppressed, and raped by a minority. . . . They’ll remain a foreign element that spreads over our entire body and eventually enslave us. . . . Who owns the press and therefore public opinion? The Jew! Who has accumulated billions and billions in wealth since those fatal days of 1914? The Jew! Who is in charge of the circulation of money, holds the executive positions in the big banks, and is the head of all the industries? The Jew! Who owns our theatres? The Jew! Who writes the plays that are staged? The Jew!

In the novel, Vienna does not collapse into barbarism with operatic grandeur; it passes a law. A classification system, eerily foreshadowing the Third Reich’s Nuremberg laws of September 1935, is enacted. “Jews and Jewish descendants who tried to reside secretly in Austria shall be sentenced to death.” The law applies not only to Jews and baptized Jews (Bettauer himself had joined the Lutheran church at age eighteen) but also to “the children of mixed marriages.” The country begins deporting families with the officious calm of bureaucracy doing its job. The immediate consequences are given in a series of vignettes of families divided by the edict.

Bettauer writes against hatred inside a culture saturated with the hatred’s reflexes, and his satire does not always escape the material it handles. His dilemma is the old satirist’s trap: How do you dramatize the lie without rehearsing it? How do you present the stereotype without becoming its ventriloquist?

And then comes the novel’s central perversity. Vienna soon regrets the expulsion not because the city becomes moral but because it becomes dull. The city sinks into drab torpor. “Vienna resembled a parish fair rather than a city.” Theaters, forbidden to stage plays by “Israelites,” degenerate into provincial playhouses. “A few Aryan operettas have been released, but the audience started hissing because they are rubbish.” The confectionery is repurposed into a beer hall. Cafés empty out. “Vienna’s going down the drain without the Jews,” someone says. But something even more valuable has been lost: a scapegoat. “Misery, unemployment, and the cost of living increased, and demagogues were at a loss to find someone to blame.”

This belongs to an old European genre of mercantile remorse: We expelled them, and now our economy suffers, our sparkle dims. The genre is grotesque because it imagines readmission as a favor granted by the expellers. Bettauer uses the grotesquerie as satire but also flirts with the idea that Jews are valuable because of the economic and cultural functions they perform as financiers, doctors, musicians, patrons of culture, and suppliers of urban brilliance.

It’s tempting to read The City Without Jews as a parable of scapegoating. And it is, partly. But antisemitism is not merely “one case among others.” In Europe it was often made into something metaphysical: Jews not simply as minority but as explanatory key, blamed for modernity’s abstractions (capital, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism) and modernity’s terrors (revolution, decay, contamination). “The Jew” becomes at once invisible puppet master and visible pollutant, inside and outside, too integrated and never integrated. A hatred capable of indicting its victim for being simultaneously opposite things is a hatred that can survive any change of regime.

Bettauer’s satire is a field guide to that elasticity and also to the bureaucratic appetite beneath it: the desire to define, classify, and decide who counts as a Jew. Which is another way of counting who belongs. As Walter Riehl, cofounder of the Austrian Nazi Party, put it: The City Without Jews was “the most impudent mockery ever by a foreign-race people of an indigenous population whose hospitality they enjoy.”

Cinema made the satire more visible: Two years later, Bettauer’s talkative nightmare became a silent film. Hans Moser, later Vienna’s most beloved comic grumbler, made one of his earliest screen appearances as the film’s antisemitic councilman; the casting gives the picture an extra sting, as if the city’s own shambling humor had been drafted into uglier service. In the final scene, the councilor descends into delusion and imagines himself surrounded by Stars of David.

But the film’s most intriguing shaping intelligence may be Ida Jenbach, the screenwriter who adapted Bettauer’s novel for the screen. The script moved the action from Vienna to the fictional Utopia, blurred party labels, and invented the ending in which the councilman wakes up cured of his Jew hatred. Born Ida Jakobovits in 1868, she had studied acting at the Vienna Conservatory and worked across Central European stages before moving into film. Jenbach was also an organizer, not only a scenarist. In late 1922, amid crushing inflation and unemployment, she cofounded the Filmbund, the Union of the Austrian Film Industry, to protect film workers’ interests. She was the only woman admitted to the Austrian Directors Club, whose vice president after the war was the film’s director, Hans Karl Breslauer.

In the summer of 1928, The City Without Jews came to a theater in Greenwich Village. Hours before its first and only US showing, the New York State Board of Censors banned it, because “the entire picture is derogatory to Jews.” After a week’s delay, it was permitted to be screened. The New York Times critic called it “one of the most fatuous productions imaginable.”

History, never content to be outdone by art, soon staged the day after tomorrow.

In March 1925, Otto Rothstock, a twenty-year-old Nazi, entered Bettauer’s office in Vienna’s eighth district (Josefstadt) and shot him; Bettauer died of his wounds sixteen days later. The right-wing press all but argued that the victim had it coming. “In his novel The City Without Jews,” the Reichspost opined, “Bettauer openly encouraged the Christian population to be happy to have Jews who pay well for the virginity of Christian girls.” Bettauer’s novel had gone through more than fifty printings and sold an astonishing quarter of a million copies in its first year. But, as its English translator said, the fatal bullets were the author’s only royalty.

“Hugo Bettauer mocked everything that is German,” Rothstock testified at his trial. “I am blameless.” The court declared Rothstock temporarily insane and committed him to the Am Steinhof mental asylum outside Vienna. He was released in 1927 after serving less than two years. His defense lawyer: none other than Walter Riehl.

Thirteen years after the murder and a few months after the Nazi Anschluss, in July 1938, Rothstock published an article under the mocking headline “Vienna, the City Without Jews”:

Anyone who walks through the city today with their eyes open will be able to see that the NSDAP [Nazi Party] has approached the de-Jewification of Vienna with gratifying enthusiasm. We are approaching the time when the seemingly clairvoyant “premonition” of Hugo Bettauer, who once wrote a novel called The City Without Jews, will become truth in the best sense.

The cruelty didn’t stop with the author: Hugo Bettauer’s son, Hellmuth, was murdered in Auschwitz in April 1944.

The men who hated Bettauer wanted to punish a writer. The regime that followed would punish those who had made the film possible. As a Jew, Ida Jenbach could no longer work in German film after 1933. Heinz Hanus, who had cofounded the Filmbund with her, later informed producers which performers and crew were Jews. Collaboration turned into denunciation. Jenbach’s collaborator on The City Without Jews,Hans Karl Breslauer, joined the Nazi Party in 1940. The next year, Jenbach was deported from her Viennese home and forced onto a train destined for Minsk, Belarus. She was murdered either there or in a nearby camp. No known photograph of her, and no record of her death, has survived.

The last screening was in Amsterdam in 1933. When the Nazis came to power, the film about expulsion was itself expelled. The City Without Jews lost more than its audience. For decades after the war, The City Without Jews became, as Ernst Kieninger, director of the Austrian Film Archive, put it, “one of the most sought-after lost films in Austrian film history.”

Its disappearance belongs, in a way, to the same story as Vienna’s own postwar self-invention. After 1945, the city entered its long era of absence-as-atmosphere: a city without Jews, or, at least, with far fewer, yet eager to recover “Viennese culture,” whose theater, music, journalism, and metropolitan nerve had been inseparable from Jewish presence. When the piano humorist Hermann Leopoldi took the stage in Vienna in 1947, a critic exclaimed, “A piece of our old days comes back to us.” The vanished were imagined less as people with histories of persecution than as heritage objects, props restored to the city’s self-image. The “old days” became a set to reassemble: the right song, the right joke, and Vienna would be itself again.

The non-Jewish city wanted back the shimmer of pre-Nazi Vienna—its wit, its café cosmopolitan poise—without reckoning with the people who had made those things possible. In the selective reappearance of Jews in the cultural imagination, they could be displayed, admired, even mourned, and still be kept safely in the past.

The film itself returned from the past like an émigré. In 1991, Paolo Caneppele, an archivist at the Austrian Film Museum, told me that, in 1991, a chemically damaged 35 mm nitrocellulose copy with color tinting and Dutch intertitles—a survivor from the 1933 screening—was found in the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. From that copy, Filmarchiv Austria and Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv Koblenz created a preservation negative, with Vienna workshops rebuilding inserts. But the film remained incomplete. Then, in 2015, a fragile black-and-white nitrate reel of the film, including crucial missing scenes of street pogroms, surfaced at a Paris flea market. Because neither a screenplay nor an original German intertitle set had survived, the restorers worked back through Bettauer’s novel to reconstruct the film’s German titles.

Back in the chapel in Jerusalem, the pianist supplied emotion, irony, grief, and occasionally a sly Viennese lilt, as if the city itself, with all its elegance and evasion, had been summoned into the room. The City Without Jews carries its moral voltage not because it “predicted” the Shoah—too flattering a word for clear-eyed observation—but because it shows how a society can become comfortable with the idea of removal, with the civic fantasy that subtraction can make a society whole. The movie’s own afterlife repeats the lesson in another key: The film vanished, crossed borders, returned in fragments, and had to be made legible again.

What struck me most was not the film’s premonition but its banal familiarity. A crowd gathers, a slogan simplifies, a law is passed. And then the city learns, too late, that when you expel a minority, you don’t expel only the minority.