Thread by @kegill

Freedom of speech also means the freedom to spread the poison of hate.
Nikolaus Wostry, from the Filmarchiv Austria, introducing @stgpresents #silentMovieMovies The City Without Jews (1924)

It was incredible.

Hugo Bettauer wrote the novel which was the basis of the movie. He was murdered in 1925 by a Nazi. Bettauer’s son emigrated to the US in 1938. His daughter lives in Seattle.

Photo: Anti-Semitism in Austria was growing in the 1920s
bbc.com/news/world-eur…

How history repeats: Bettauer’s “private address was published and in the newspapers, it was explicitly said that such a person shouldn't be part of society." (Wostry)

bbc.com/news/world-eur…

Context: The movie “was made nearly 20 years before the Holocaust, at a time when the Nazi party was banned in Austria, and when Adolf Hitler was in jail in Germany, working on his book Mein Kampf.”

Bettauer created a frighteningly prescient vision of the 1930s.

“In 1933, the film was shown commercially for the last time, again causing a stir, when it was screened in the Amsterdam theatre Carré as a protest against Hitler's Germany.”
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_…

The book, written as satire, was a bestseller (>250K copies).

The film was believed to be lost for decades. Two copies, a fragment discovered in the 1990s and copy found in a Paris flea market in 2015, formed the restoration (Wostry).

As with many modern films, the ending deviates from the book.

The new score is from Germany composer Gunter A. Buckwald. Seattle Symphony musicians performed tonight.

In the post-event discussion, Wostry marveled at how quickly everything collapsed. Buckwald reminded the audience that photos from that time look eerily like today.