A silent film from 1924 predicting the rise of Nazism was found in a Paris flea market in 2015 after being lost for decades. Thanks to a huge fundraising campaign, it has now been restored and returned to cinemas, reports the BBC’s Bethany Bell in Vienna.
An Orthodox Jew is set upon by three taunting men.
A woman shopping at a market stall becomes outraged at the high prices. She starts pelting a passing Jewish man with fruit.
Later, huge protesting crowds gather outside the chancellor’s office. Inside, the leader consults with an adviser. “It is awful to expel the Jews,” he says. “But one must satisfy the people.”
The incidents portrayed in the Austrian film The City Without Jews (Die Stadt Ohne Juden) are eerily prophetic.
It 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.
‘Growing anti-Semitism’
The film tells the story of a city that expels all of its Jews. They are made the scapegoats for rising prices and unemployment.
It is based on a dystopian, satirical novel by the Austrian Jewish writer and journalist, Hugo Bettauer.
“At the beginning of the 1920s, just after Austria’s First Republic was founded, political anti-Semitism was growing incredibly, much more than during the monarchy,” says Nikolaus Wostry, director of collections at the Filmarchiv Austria.
Bettauer was trying to combat rising intolerance and racism, at a time when Jews displaced after World War One were arriving in Vienna.
ht/ all too much
And to this day blacks carry on about how bad they have it in this horrible country. Yes in the past there was justification but not these days. Those that don’t show lack of respect and drip with contempt for others get the same back. Many have figured that out but some are too thick.
The left in this country seems to follow that strategy for political control. Who says they never learn from history?
Jews had been scapegoats since the Black Death.
National Socialism simply tapped into the anti-Semitism rife in Europe.
It doesn’t seem to go away – submerges for a while – but never goes.
izlamo delenda est …
back then they scapegoated the jews
today they scapegoat the whites…..
Nazism represented Man’s fundamental hatred of Man. That and creating a “Common Enemy” as a tool to distract the people and whip up public sentiment. While the times are different we see the same thing going on any time a dictator wants to control the people. Some cultures even call it a “religion”!
Replace “Jew” with “conservative,” and you have the modern nazi’s object of scorn.
What’s REALLY amazing, is since my college days (30 years ago), how many people I’ve come across, who DON’T realize, that the nazi’s were SOCIALISTS! RACIST socialists, but SOCIALISTS nonetheless! And that ignorance has remained consistent among “the young (under 25 crowd)” this whole time. I have found myself having to teach this fact, to EVERY group of 17 – 24 year olds, for the past 30 years! 😮
WHAT, precisely, are they ‘teaching’ in publik skrules these days?! I mean, ASIDE from how to put a condom on a banana in the dark… 🙄
“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews.”
— Tom Lehrer, National Brotherhood Week
Saw an excellent German mini-series “Babylon Berlin” on Netflix – it is 16 episodes long, takes place in 1929, and is a murder mystery set in the Berlin Police Department. Takes about 4 episodes for the viewer to figure out who all the characters are, but it is the settings, the casual racism, the despair of the poor people and the onorous terms of the Treaty of Versailles which gives a much better understanding of how HItler was able to come to power in 1933.