A City without Jews

“A City without Jews” directed by Karolina Kirsz.

On March 22, 2024, the Jewish Theater, the Small Stage presented a premiere of the play “A City Without Jews” directed by Karolina Kirsz. The script has been based on Hugo Bettauer’s novel of the same title. Hugo Bettauer wrote Europe’s first anti-fascist novel, “A City Without Jews,” which was published in Austria in 1922. The novel was translated into Polish and published in 1925, the same year in which Bettauer was shot for his beliefs by a young national socialist and NSDAP member who wanted to “save the world from the Jewish plague.”

In “A City Without Jews,” grotesquely and ridiculously, Bettauer presents a story he thinks is a fantasy: the expulsion of all Jews from Austria. When this happens, Vienna turns out to be a dead city, without culture and with a failing economy.

In 1924, the novel was filmed by Hans Karl Breslauer. At first, the silent movie was protested, with smoke candles being thrown into cinemas during screenings, and then banned by the Nazis. And then it was lost. And it wasn't found until 2015, which happened by chance at a flea market in Paris.

Director Karolina Kirsz wrote the original script, adapting Bettauer's prose and drawing from the film plot and the story of the lives of its authors as well as the book's author. In this case, life has caught up with and surpassed the imagination...

The play analyses the mechanisms of exclusion and examines how often our ideological declarations fall short of reality.