In its third appearance, this new department, devoted to informal comment on cultural and social events and trends, presents a report by Nathan Glazer on a mass meeting recently run by one of the lesser-known, though significant, Zionist parties; and a discussion by Alfred Werner of The Trial, a film recently made by the famous director G. W. Pabst in Vienna, and based on a ritual murder trial in Hungary in the 1880’s. Not yet released in this country, the film has already aroused wide comment and controversy in Europe. Nathan Glazer is an assistant editor of COMMENTARY. Mr. Werner’s reports on the cultural and literary scene in Central Europe have appeared recently in the New York Times Book Review.

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The factual background of the new Austrian film—The Trial: In the Name of Humanity—is the story of a sickly and neurotic peasant girl named Eszter Solymosi, fourteen years old, who on April 1, 1882 disappeared from the small village of Tisza Eszlar in Hungary. This happened a few days before Passover, and the girl’s mother, believing that Jews murder Christians to use their blood in the preparation of matzoth, accused Joszef Scharf, the local Jewish sexton, of ritual murder.

The villagers themselves were not hostilely inclined towards their Jewish fellow-townsmen, and the ensuing storm would quickly have subsided if it had not been stirred up from the outside. Unscrupulous Hungarian politicians, led by Baron Geza von Onody, a parliamentary representative of the small but vociferous and vicious Freedom party, exploited the incident in order to “pacify” the economically oppressed Hungarian masses. Onody and his tool, District Attorney Bary, tortured Scharf’s 13 year-old son, Moric, until the exhausted boy said he had looked through the key-hole and seen his father and several other Jews slaughtering Eszter. Even after Eszter’s unmarred body had been found in the Tisza River, the court in Nyiregyhaza continued proceedings against a large number of Tisza Eszlar Jews, who were held in custody and subjected to all kinds of tortures and humiliations. While the trial itself was conducted in an illegal and most brutal manner, Onody and his party instigated bloody anti-Semitic riots in various Hungarian cities.

Hungarian liberals reacted very strongly, and one of their leaders, the lawyer and member of parliament, Karoly Eoetvoes, undertook to defend the Jews. Defying threats and attacks, he succeeded in winning their acquittal. After a fourteen-months’ trial, during which both the defendants and their families suffered horribly from the hands of the mob, the Tisza Eszlar Jews were freed. The end of the trial was a decisive defeat for the Freedom party, and the verdict was hailed by liberals everywhere as a victory of humanity and justice over a combination of medieval superstition and modern demagoguery.

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The trial is the second dramatization of is “Hungarian Dreyfus Case”; three decades ago, when pogroms took place in Southern Russia, Arnold Zweig used the Tisza Eszlar case as the basis for a play, Die Sendung Semaels.

The present film, made at Vienna’s “Little Hollywood,” the suburban Rosenhuegel studio, is postwar Austria’s first and only serious contribution to the combatting of the racial hatred which has reduced Vienna’s Jewish population to one-twentieth of its previous size. It stands as an isolated work of serious film art among the typical Viennese confections, with their seductive countesses, amorous lieutenants, and Strauss waltzes.

The world premiere of The Trial took place last March in Zurich, and the distributors plan to show it to American audiences in the early part of 1949. Wherever the film has been seen so far, it has aroused controversies on two points: first, the advisability of releasing it at this time (“let sleeping dogs lie”); second, the accuracy of its treatment of the historical facts.

The makers of the film, Huebler-Kahla-Produktion, spared neither time nor money in its production. Rudolf Brunngraber, one of the three men who collaborated in writing the screenplay, is a well-known novelist. Emeric Roboz, another of the writers, is a Hungarian Jew who, as an editor of the daily Pesti Elet, in the 20’s, attacked the Horthy regime and the “Awakening Magyars” (heirs of Onody’s Freedom party) and eventually paid for his courage by spending several years in prison. In 1932 he published a two-volume novel on the Tisza Eszlar case, the fruit of intensive study. Brunngraber, too, has written a novel on the case, Prozess auf Tod und Leben, published last spring.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who directed The Trial, is one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers, and was a leading figure in the flowering of the German film that took place under the Weimar Republic. Among his most famous productions are the challengingly pacifist Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft. Pabst left Germany in 1933, and his films were banned in that country as “defeatist” and “bolshevist”; but he returned to Germany at the outbreak of the war and made several films under the Nazi regime.

Two of the stars of the film, Ewald Balser (Dr. Eoetvoes) and Maria Eis (the mother of Eszter), have been the shining lights of Vienna’s famous Burgtheater. Ernst Deutsch (sexton Scharf) worked under Reinhardt in Berlin; then, being a Jew, fled to Austria, to England, and finally to America; recently he played at the Salzburg Festivals in Hofmannsthal’s version of Everyman. The other roles are also played by competent artists, nearly all of them non-Jews with the important exception of Ladislaus Morgenstern, formerly a basso at the Budapest Opera and currently cantor in a Vienna synagogue, who plays the part of the shohet Salomon Schwarz and also served as expert on Jewish rituals in the making of the film.

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The cross-fire of criticism to which The Trial has been subjected since its release comes from many directions. One Austrian province refused to permit its showing, for reasons hardly of a philo-Semitic nature, while certain Hungarian circles have objected to it because it unearths an episode in Hungarian history they would prefer to have forgotten. The elders of the Vienna Israelitische Kultusgemeinde asked that it be banned because of a tinge of unconscious anti-Semitism which they felt could be detected in the film. Even Mr. Roboz, one of the writers of the screen-play, claimed that the film suffered from various misinterpretations of historical facts for which he was not responsible; and surviving members of the Scharf family have objected to the distortion of the character of the boy Moric Scharf.

It can be admitted, certainly, that the film does not entirely adhere to the historical truth. For one thing, the Jews of Tisza Eszlar in 1882 were not strange and fantastical ghetto-dwellers, wearing long beards and caftans, but were what one might call “assimilated” Jews, looking and behaving more or less like their Christian neighbors. Secondly, the villagers themselves were not anti-Semitic rowdies; they did not bum the local synagogue and they were not elated by the trial, which was conducted in another town. And the real Moric Scharf was not the impudent brat depicted in this film, antagonistic to Judaism and loathing his family, but an obedient and well-behaved boy who fell victim to the brutalities of his persecutors. (As an adult, Moric Scharf moved to Amsterdam, where, a pious and respected Jew, he earned a living as a diamond-cutter, and in his old age witnessed the influx of German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.)

It may further be charged that the moviemakers have failed to demonstrate sufficiently and persuasively the close connection between anti-Semitism and social injustice, to show the Jew’s role as a scapegoat in times of economic and political upheavals. Nor is the movie quite satisfactory from the psychological viewpoint. Instead of exposing anti-Semitism’s deeper roots, the film places emphasis exclusively on the conspiratorial aspects of anti-Semitism, on atrocities and physical violence, the burning of synagogues, the forceful arrest and deportation of the village Jews, wild speech-making, riots in the streets and in the court, etc. Finally, one may point out that the Austrian moviemakers displayed less courage and perhaps also less sincerity than the producers of the recent German film Marriage in the Shadows (currently showing in this country): where the German writers and artists have boldly and honestly revived the memory of yesterday’s grim world—of German persecution of “non-Aryans”—their Viennese colleagues have taken a story of the remote 80’s, and the locale is not Vienna, scene of many notorious pogroms, but a faraway region in Hungary. True, the Viennese movie puts fervent pleas for humanity in the mouth of Dr. Eoetvoes, but the setting of The Trial nevertheless offers, to those who want it, an easy escape: “They—not we.” (Or, worse yet: “They too. . . .”)

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Many liberals, on the other hand, have rallied to the support of the movie-makers. If Pabst chose to make the Jews appear more “exotic” than they actually were, then, his supporters argue, he may have done so in order to emphasize the dramatic conflict between Gentile and Jew, and thus to drive home the lesson of his film more sharply. He may have felt, also, that in order to challenge such Nazi films as the fiendish Jud Suess (still haunting the memory of many a Central European), he had to resort to the same “deutliche Sprache,” the same black-and-white technique, but with the tables turned. It has even been suggested that some of the Jewish critics who condemned The Trial did so out of a complex feeling of Jewish insecurity and self-hatred that made them uncomfortable at sight of the bearded, gesticulating, “ugly” Jews on the screen.

In any event, if one may judge a film by the effect it has on audiences, the producers of The Trial seem to have the better of their critics, at this writing. Not once have its audiences reacted in any overt anti-Semitic manner, as had been feared by well-meaning but over-cautious educators and city fathers. I happened to see the movie at a little cinema in the Wohlmut Street, Leopoldstadt, in the heart of what was once the “ghetto” of Vienna. This section is today almost completely non-Jewish, and the men and women who crowded the old-fashioned movie house were, for the most part, typical Viennese, proletarian or petit bourgeois. During the showing they were so silent that one could hear the slightest movement. After the show I saw many of the women wipe tears from their eyes. Voices were subdued, and the people moved into the dark street silently and with expressions of guilt and shame. Did they remember their Jewish neighbors scrubbing streets under SA supervision, the burning of synagogues on the “Black Thursday” of November 10, 1938,, the mass deportations of Austrian Jews after the start of World War II?

It remains to be seen how this Austrian film will be received in the United States, where no such events have occurred, and where anti-Semitism is chiefly confined to the patterns dealt with in Gentleman’s Agreement. For all its faults, The Trial seems to this writer to avoid the grosser errors of so many efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Most important, it shows anti-Semitism to be bad not only for Jews, but for all men. Dr. Eoetvoes—superbly played by Balser in a style reminiscent of Paul Muni’s Zola—sternly explains to his bride-to-be: “I did not accept the defense of these people because they are Jews, but because I am a Christian. For there are keys that can be put into many a key-hole, but the key of falsehood never fits into the key-hole of justice.”

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