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The Golden City (German: Die goldene Stadt), is a 1942 German color film directed by Veit Harlan, starring Kristina Söderbaum, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.

Plot

Anna, a young, innocent country girl (a Sudeten German), whose mother drowned in the swamp, dreams of visiting the golden city of Prague. After she falls in love with a surveyor, she runs away from the countryside near České Budějovice to Prague to find him. She is instead seduced and later abandoned by her cousin (a Czech). She attempts to return home, but her father rejects her, so she drowns herself in the same swamp where her mother died.

Cast

• Kristina Söderbaum as Anna "Anuschka" Jobst
• Eugen Klöpfer as Melchior Jobst, Anna's father, farmer
• Annie Rosar as Donata Opferkuch, Toni's mother
• Dagny Servaes as Mrs. Tandler
• Paul Klinger as Christian Leidwein, engineer
• Emmerich Hanus
• Kurt Meisel as Toni Opferkuch, Anna's cousin
• Rudolf Prack as Thomas, Anna's fiance
• Liselotte Schreiner [de] as Maruschka, housekeeper
• Hans Hermann Schaufuß as Nemerek, engineer
• Frida Richard as Mrs. Amend
• Ernst Legal as Pelikan, farmer
• Valy Arnheim as Alois Wengraf, notary

Sources

The movie is based on drama Der Gigant by Austrian writer Richard Billinger [de]. In the novel, however, it is the heart-broken father who commits suicide; the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, in particular Joseph Goebbels, insisted that it be the daughter rather than the father who dies.

Motifs

Anna's fate and drowning are clearly represented as the natural consequence of her failure to appreciate the countryside and her longings for the city. This harmonizes with the preference for the countryside of the Blood and Soil doctrine.

Citations

1. Noack, p. 203.
2. Hal Erickson (2012). "Die Goldene Stadt (1942)". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 November 2012.
3. ^ Rhodes, p. 20.
4. Grunberger, p. 382.
5. Romani, p. 86.

References

• Grunberger, Richard (1971). The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 978-0-03-076435-6.
• Noack, Frank (2016) . Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-6700-8.
• Rhodes, Anthony (1976). Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion: World War II. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 978-0-87754-029-8.
• Romani, Cinzia (1992) . Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich. Translated by Connolly, Robert. New York: Sarpedon. ISBN 978-0-9627613-1-7.

External links

• The Golden City at IMDb

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• German black-and-white films
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