Die Stadt ohne Juden

Film mit Live-Musik

The City Without Jews (German title: Die Stadt ohne Juden), an Austrian silent film by Hans Karl Breslauer from 1924 based on the 1922 novel of the same title by Hugo Bettauer, is a unique historical document with a jarringly topical relevance. The film – “like an apocalyptical vision of what was later to become reality” (Olga Neuwirth) – follows the original novel’s satirically embellished dystopia (deportation of the Jews), as well as its humanistic closing appeal: A good future is only possible with the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians. The discovery of a lost copy of the film at a flea market in Paris in 2015 enabled the reconstruction and digitisation of the film, which provides insights into Jewish life in Vienna and how anti-Semitic thinking emerges in the societal centre, while it shows open violence and attacks on the Jewish population.
In 2017 Olga Neuwirth, the multiple-award winning Austrian composer and member of the Akademie der Künste, wrote a new score to the film; it premiered in 2018 performed by the ensemble PHACE from Vienna. Neuwirth analysed the film footage frame by frame and, using sophisticated camouflage techniques and a combination of ironic distance and sonorous anger, created a personal, contemporary musical approach to the complexity of the footage and the cruelty of humans. With an introduction by Dr. Nikolaus Wostry, head of Filmarchiv Austria.
“Let us be afraid of humans, for there is much in us to be afraid of!” (Olga Neuwirth, 2017)

PHACE

Nacho de Paz, Dirigent

Stummfilm Die Stadt ohne Juden, Regie: Hans Karl Breslauer (AT 1924, 87 Min.), Neurekonstruktion und digitale Restaurierung: © Filmarchiv Austria 2018 Komposition: Olga Neuwirth (2017)