Jud Süß

Background

Joseph Süß Oppenheimer

Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was an 18th-century court Jew in the employ of Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. As a financial advisor for Duke Karl Alexander, he also gained a prominent position at the court and held the reins of the finances in his duchy. He established a duchy monopoly on the trade of salt, leather, tobacco, and liquor and founded a bank and porcelain factory. In the process, he made multiple enemies who claimed, among other things, that he was involved with local gambling houses.

When Karl Alexander died suddenly, Oppenheimer was arrested and accused of fraud, embezzlement, treason, lecherous relations with the court ladies, accepting bribes, and trying to reestablish Catholicism. The Jewish community tried unsuccessfully to ransom him. After a heavily publicized trial during which no proofs of his guilt were produced, he was sentenced to death. When his jailers demanded that he convert to Christianity, he refused. He was taken to the gallows on 4 February 1738, and given a final chance to convert to Christianity, which he refused to do.

Feuchtwanger's novel

Although the story of Duke Karl Alexander and Joseph Süß Oppenheimer constituted a relatively obscure episode in German history, it became the subject of a number of literary and dramatic treatments over the course of more than a century, the earliest of these having been Wilhelm Hauff's 1827 novella. The most successful literary adaptation was Lion Feuchtwanger's novel titled Jud Süß (1925) based on a play that he had written in 1916 but subsequently withdrawn. As a Jew, Feuchtwanger did not intend his portrayal of Süß to be antisemitic but rather as a study of the tragedy caused by the human weaknesses of greed, pride, and ambition. With an interest in exploring the challenges confronting Jews in the diaspora, Feuchtwanger was particularly concerned with the issues of conversion and antisemitism. He was particularly struck by the fact that Süß could have saved himself by converting to Christianity but had steadfastly refused to do so, opting instead to return to formal Jewish observance and piety.

Ashley Dukes and Paul Kornfeld wrote dramatic adaptations of the Feuchtwanger novel. A German-born American director, Lothar Mendes, directed a British film adaptation of the novel in 1934. This film (entitled Power in the U.S.) starred Conrad Veidt, and was an early effort to expose Nazi antisemitism. It prompted the Nazi propaganda ministry to make their own version of the film, which starred the distinguished German star Werner Krauss, who had played the title role in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Plot

Charles Alexander, Duke of Württemberg (Heinrich George), a man much beloved by his Swabian subjects, is crowned Duke and swears an oath to obey the laws of the duchy "according to the traditional Württemberg loyalty and honesty." However, the Duke soon becomes frustrated because the Württemberg Diet refuses him the funds needed to maintain a lifestyle comparable to his neighboring sovereigns; in particular, he wants a personal bodyguard and an opera and ballet company. Lacking funds even to purchase coronation gifts for the Duchess (Hilde von Stolz), the Duke sends a courtier to Frankfurt to borrow money from Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (Ferdinand Marian). Süß shows the emissary jewels and jewelry that are obviously beyond the Duke's means and then says that it would be his honor to provide the Duke with jewelry at a substantial discount. However, Süß insists on presenting the items to the Duke personally despite the Judensperre – a ban against Jews entering the city – which has been in force for over a century. Armed with a pass from the Duke, Süß cuts his hair, shaves his beard and dons "Christian" clothes so that he can enter Württemberg disguised as a Christian. As his carriage is involved in an accident, Süß gains a lift from Dorothea Sturm (Kristina Söderbaum) to the city.

The Duke is delighted with the jewelry, and Süß willingly defers payment. Süß offers to provide financing for the Duke's bodyguard, opera, and ballet as well. Eventually, the Duke discovers that he owes Süß 350,000 thalers, but Süß demurs, saying that all he wants in "payment" is the authority to maintain the roads and bridges of the duchy for 10 years – and the right to levy tolls for their use and upkeep. The Duke will receive a percentage of the proceeds, thereby freeing him from the financial limits imposed by the council.

The new tolls cause the price of food and other essentials to rise, enriching both Süß and the Duke. Süß gains the authority to levy taxes on salt, beer, wine, and wheat as well. He also assists in procuring local women for the Duke, thus engaging in the corruption of their morals. The increase in the price of basic necessities causes the people of Württemberg to suffer great privation. The oppressive taxes and brutal collection methods incite sporadic rebellions that are suppressed harshly. Süß goes so far as to destroy half of a blacksmith's house to prove his power to punish those who refuse to pay their taxes. When the blacksmith attacks Süß's coach with a sledgehammer, Süß has the blacksmith hanged, on the grounds that an attack on the Duke's minister is tantamount to an attack on the Duke himself.

Production

Development

Adolf Hitler and the Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels believed that film was a very potent tool for molding public opinion. The Nazi Party first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world. He asked them to "produce films with ... sharp racial contours" that portrayed men and society "as they are in reality."

According to Richard Levy, "Of the 1,100 feature films produced under the Nazis, only a handful demonstrated explicit antisemitic content and even there, the antisemitism was often secondary to the film's plot. ... Two films, however, both produced in 1940, were designed to translate National Socialism's antisemitic ideology to a popular audience: Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940) and Jud Süß (Jew Süß, 1940)."

In November 1938, Goebbels made a series of attacks against the Jews in the German media that, after the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jew, resulted in the anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was considered by Hitler to have been a political disaster both within Germany and internationally, and he became furious with Goebbels. Not only did the brutality instigated by Goebbels evoke harsh criticism internationally, the mixed reaction in the German media evidenced a lack of broad-based support among Germans for antisemitic violence. Hitler expressed his frustration and anger at the mixed response from the German media and insisted that, instead of openly calling for violence against the Jews as Goebbels had in instigating the pogrom, Nazi propaganda should "elucidate events of foreign policy" in such a way that the German people themselves would call for violence against the Jews.

In response to Hitler's reprimand, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the antisemitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an antisemitic film. Hitler preferred films such as Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi antisemitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching antisemitic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.

Pre-production

Feeling that a project of this significance required top-caliber actors and frustrated at the delay in casting the film, Goebbels personally participated in the recruitment of the lead actors. For example, he insisted that Ferdinand Marian and Werner Krauss take on key roles in the film. However, Goebbels had to employ a combination of accommodation, generous compensation, pressure, intimidation and even threats of reprisal in order to fill the lead roles in the film with the top German cinema stars of the day. Harlan claimed that "virtually every actor was performing under duress."

Daniel Azuelos ascribes the cast's reluctance to an unwillingness to be typecast as Jews. David Welch identifies Werner Krauss as having asked Goebbels to make a public pronouncement stating that Krauss was not Jewish but merely "playing a part as an actor in the service of the State." In order to address their concerns, Goebbels issued a disclaimer stating that those actors playing the parts of Jews were in fact of pure 'Aryan' blood.

Similarly, Josef Škvorecký also notes that all the major cast members as well as Harlan himself tried in various ways to avoid participation in the project; however Škvorecký ascribes a rather different motivation to the cast than the one that Azuelos propounds. Škvorecký attributes the reluctance of actors to participate in what he characterizes as a "politically-most-correct film" as an indication of "how aware most German artists were of the fact that antisemitism under Hitler changed from prejudice to murder." While cast members could have declined the roles that were offered to them, Škvorecký asserts that such action would have required "extraordinary courage: the dire consequences of such an act of defiance were only too easy to imagine." According to Škvorecký, "Goebbels either outwitted [the actors he desired for the cast], or knew about compromising circumstances in their lives and used this knowledge for bludgeoning them into acceptance." Elaborating on the "compromising circumstances", Škvorecký writes, "One of the paradoxes of this sinister film is how many participants in the violently racist project had either Jewish spouses or relatives, were disciples of Jewish artists and known friends of Jews, or had been—before the Nazi takeover—left-leaning intellectuals, even communists." For example, Škvorecký points out that Veit Harlan's first wife was Dora Gerson, a German-Jewish actress and cabaret singer (who was later murdered in Auschwitz). Harlan himself had flirted with socialism. Although Werner Krauss was openly antisemitic and an ardent Nazi, his daughter-in-law was Jewish. Ferdinand Marian had a half-Jewish daughter from his first marriage and the former husband of his second wife was a Jew.

Filming

Shooting began in March 1940 and, with the exception of some scenes which were shot on location in Prague, most of the filming took place at the UFA studios in Berlin Babelsberg. The scenes showing the entry of the Jews into Württemberg and worshipping in a synagogue were filmed in Prague where Jewish extras were coerced into performing. 120 Jews were taken from Lublin Ghetto by Harlan for use in the film.

The total cost was 2.081 million ℛℳ (equivalent to $9,210,804 in 2021), a rather high figure for German feature films of that era. It earned 6.2 million ℛℳ (equivalent to $27,442,087 in 2021) at the box office for a profit of 3.172 million ℛℳ (equivalent to $14,039,726 in 2021) thus making it a blockbuster in contrast to the commercial failure of Der Ewige Jude.

David Culbert attributes the film's box-office success in large part to "its lavish sets, its effective crowd scenes, its skillful script, and the splendid acting by most of the principals."

Post-production

According to Harlan's postwar testimony, Goebbels was infuriated when he saw Harlan's first version of the film because it was not antisemitic enough for his purposes. Harlan reported that Goebbels accused him of being "incapable of thinking in political terms". Goebbels told him that he "should produce political films and not [the kind of] films that he would make in peacetime." Goebbels' dissatisfaction was centered on the relationship between Dorothea, the leading female character and Süß. He complained that Harlan had "transformed Süß, a monster, into a Romeo."

Harlan testified that Goebbels removed him from the editing process and insisted on many changes, mostly with the intent of making Süß more unambiguously evil. The film was extensively re-edited to remove ambiguities that portrayed Süß in too sympathetic a light to suit Goebbels' antisemitic agenda. For example, Goebbels insisted on dropping a scene in which Dorothea responds to Süß's wooing with a smile. Scenes in which Süß was depicted as "too pleasant" were simply dropped. In some scenes, new lines were scripted for Marian to read in order to make his character less sympathetic. Other scenes were added including a new ending to replace the original one written by Harlan. Harlan claimed that he had wanted to make the hanging of Süß appear to have been a "great injustice." For the final execution scene, Harlan had written a defiant speech in which Süß condemned the German authorities. When Goebbels was shown a rough-cut copy, he was infuriated, insisting that Süß must not be portrayed in any way as a martyr. Demanding that Süß must be humbled and humiliated at the end, he had Harlan's speech replaced with one in which Süß cravenly begged for his life.

While Harlan's account of Goebbels' involvement in the film has been treated by a number of sources as factual, Haggith and Newman assert that "it is difficult to find any evidence of significant interference (by Goebbels) aside from casting and the appointment of Harlan." They point out that it was in Harlan's interest to shift the blame to Goebbels after the war.

Release and reception

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 8 September 1940 and received rave reviews, earning the top award.

It was a great box-office success in Germany and abroad unlike most of the other major antisemitic films produced in Nazi Germany. 60,000 people saw the film in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo by 7 October, and over 100,000 people saw the film in Königsberg. Otto Froböse, the financial auditor of Terra, estimated that 21 million people saw the film in commercial theaters. It ranked sixth out of the thirty most popular German films of the war years and was the number one film of the 1939–1940 season. In France, the film was released in February 1941, was viewed by an estimated one million people before showings ended in 1944.

Heinrich Himmler ordered that the film be shown to SS units about to be sent against Jews, to non-Jewish populations of areas where Jews were about to be deported, and to concentration camp guards. Children under the age of fourteen were prohibited from seeing the film. There were reports of anti-Jewish violence after audiences viewed the film; in particular, teenagers seemed particularly prone to be instigated to violence by the film. Stefan Baretzki, a guard at Auschwitz concentration camp, later said that after they were shown Jud Süß and similar films, guards would beat up Jewish prisoners the next day.

In early 1941, the company Nordisk Tonefilm sought permission to distribute the film in Sweden but it was banned by the Censor. During the war the movie was never screened in public in Sweden, although the German embassy arranged screenings for special invitees.

Feuchtwanger was horrified and incensed at the way in which his work had been manipulated and distorted, calling Harlan's film a Schandwerk ("a shameful work"). In 1941, he wrote an open letter to seven actors. Based on the sentiments expressed in the letter, it appears that Feuchtwanger was shocked that these men, whom he considered colleagues and who he knew were familiar with his work, would agree to participate in Goebbels's antisemitic propaganda film.

Postwar legacy

In 1945, exhibition of the film in Germany was banned by decree of the Allied Military Occupation. In fact, the film was banned throughout the western world and most of the extant copies were destroyed.

Harlan, who had later directed the propaganda movie Kolberg (1945), was the only film director of the Third Reich to be charged with crimes against humanity. Harlan defended himself asserting that he had been neither Nazi nor antisemitic. He claimed that Goebbels had controlled his work and that he should not be held personally responsible for its content. He recounted the ways in which he had been forced to endure Goebbels' constant haranguing and meddling in the production of the film. In the end, the court condemned the film but exonerated the director. While Harlan had not acted nobly, the court recognized that he had operated under duress and should not be held responsible for the content of the film.

After the war, all the cast members also disclaimed responsibility, pleading that they had been coerced into participating in the film. According to his biographer Friedrich Knilli, Marian never came to terms with his having accepted the role of Süß and became an alcoholic, dying shortly after the war in a 1946 car accident. Some have attributed the accident to suicide.

Both Heinrich George and Werner Krauss were placed under arrest because of their past affiliation with the Nazi party. Although Heinrich George had been a member of the German Communist Party before the Nazi takeover, he was nonetheless interned as a Nazi collaborator at the Soviet special camp in Sachsenhausen where he died in 1946.

Werner Krauss was banned from performing on stage and in films in Germany. He was required to undergo a de-Nazification process from 1947 to 1948. Ultimately, he was rehabilitated to the extent of being invited to German film festivals. In 1954, he was awarded the Order of the Federal Republic of Germany; in 1955, he received the High Decoration of the Republic of Austria.

In the first few years after the war, Kristina Söderbaum was often heckled off the stage and even suffered the indignity of having rotten vegetables thrown at her.

Distribution

Harlan was required by court order to destroy what was then believed to be the only remaining negative of Jud Süß and he reportedly did this in April 1954. A few years later, however, copies of the film began to turn up to the embarrassment of the West German government. After a lengthy investigation, it was determined that another negative existed in East Germany and it was used to make prints that were dubbed in Arabic and distributed in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt and Lebanon. Though that negative has never been located, it has been widely suspected that this version was produced and distributed by the Stasi or the KGB in order to arouse antisemitism among Egyptians and Palestinians against the US-backed Israel (and henceforth, support for the Soviet-backed Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser).

In 1983, the Los Angeles-based neo-Nazi National Socialist League under Russell Veh stirred controversy in the United States when it attempted mass distribution of Jud Süß. The NSL was actively involved in the distribution of Nazi propaganda films in America, including Triumph of the Will.

The film is currently held by the F. W. Murnau Foundation. The foundation only permits screenings of the film when accompanied by an introduction explaining the historical context and the intended impact.

In July 2008, the film was publicly screened in Budapest by Sándor and Tibor Gede, Hungarian right-wing extremists. without the permission and consent of the Murnau Foundation. The Murnau Foundation protested to the Hungarian government through diplomatic channels.

The film is available for sale on VHS from Facets.

Analysis

Historical accuracy

Although the film claimed to be "historically accurate", the plot presents only a few historically accurate details and significantly departs from the historical record on a number of key points. Some of these departures were based on the Feuchtwanger novel and the Mendes' film adaptation of it; others were introduced by Goebbels and Harlan. According to Wallace, it is generally recognized that the narratives of both films are only loosely related by being rooted in the same "chapter of Wurttemberg history".

Joseph Süß Oppenheimer did serve Duke Karl Alexander as a court Jew. When the duke died suddenly, Süß was, in fact, brought to trial and subsequently executed in an iron cage more or less as depicted in the film. Haggith and Newman assert that much of the rest of Harlan's film is "pure invention." For example, the film presents the grounds for Süß's execution as being abuse of power and sexual relations with a Christian woman. According to Shay Hazkani, these accusations are not mentioned in any of the historical essays about the real Süß.

Relationship to previous works

Although Lion Feuchtwanger believed that Harlan's film relied heavily on his novel, Bergfelder and Cargnelli characterize the film as "based primarily on Wilhelm Hauff's novella" and assert that it only uses a few characters from Feuchtwanger's novel. Even these characters and their actions are distorted to support the film's antisemitic message.

Because Goebbels envisioned a film that would be a response to Mendes' film adaptation of Feuchtwanger's novel, Harlan's plot shares a similar structure to the plot of the Mendes film with a few crucial changes which Feuchtwanger characterized as shameful distortions. Feuchtwanger himself referred to Harlan's film as a "Schandwerk" ("a shameful work") and wrote an open letter to seven Berlin actors, two of them having played lead roles in the film. He asserted that Harlan's film had distorted his novel so much that it was a perversion of it. He further called into question their motives for making the film in light of their familiarity with him and his novel.

Haines and Parker characterize Feuchtwanger's works and the Mendes film adaptation as "diametrically opposed to Nazi anti-Semitism."

For Feuchtwanger, Süß was a forerunner that symbolized the evolution in European philosophy and cultural mentality, representing a shift towards Eastern philosophy, from Nietzsche to Buddha, from "the old to the new covenant."

In his novel, Feuchtwanger portrayed greed, pride and ambition as human weaknesses found in both Jews and Gentiles and which could be overcome by the denial of desire. In contrast to Feuchtwanger's philosophical meditation on the tension between Eastern and Western philosophy, Harlan's film casts these as uniquely Jewish traits and presents Jews as a "dangerous and recklessly underestimated threat."

Stereotypes of Jews

The film employs a number of negative stereotypes of Jews as being materialistic, immoral, cunning, untrustworthy and physically unattractive. At one extreme, Jews are portrayed as cut-throat capitalists; at the other, they are depicted as poor, filthy immigrants. Mike Davis writes that "A thousand years of European anti-semitism were condensed into the cowering rapist, Süß, with his dirty beard, hook nose and whining voice."

The character of Süß is based on the stereotype of the grasping Jewish moneylender. There is an early scene in which Süß is shown to possess a fortune in jewels and jewelry. In another, he tells an innocent German girl that his home is "the world" (reflecting the Nazi stereotype of Jews as rootless wanderers in contrast to the Germans' love of their German homeland). Several conversations between Jewish characters perpetuate the Nazi line that Jews are inherently hostile to non-Jews. According to David Welch, the Nazis issued a guide to the press explaining how to interpret the film. The guide emphasized that a key point of the film was that once Jews like Süß got into positions of responsibility and power, "they exploited power, not for the good of the community, but for their own racial ends."

Racial pollution

In both Feuchtwanger's novel and Harlan's film, the dramatic climax is rape. However, Feuchtwanger posits that Süß has a hidden daughter whom the duke discovers, rapes and who then dies by drowning. The novel then focuses on Süß's grappling with the desire for revenge and the tragedy resulting from his decision to exact vengeance for the loss of his daughter. Harlan replaced the rape of Süß's daughter by the duke with Süß's rape of an Aryan woman, thus completely inverting Feuchtwanger's plot device from a father's tragic quest for vengeance to the punishment of a Jew for having sexual relations with a Christian.

Christiane Schönfeld writes that, "[t]he Jew as sexual beast and vampire, sucking the life spirit from individual and community alike is an all too common motif in anti-Semitic propaganda and is put to effective use in Harlan's film." Michael Töteberg writes: "[Jud Süß] openly mobilized fears and sexual aggression and exploited them for anti-Semitic incitement." According to Michael Kater, the film was shown to "a large number of (German) girls" in order to warn them of the "sexual devastation that Jews had wrought in the past" and to remind them of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. In an interview with Der Film given before the release of the film, Harlan pointed out that Süß was ultimately sentenced to death not for his financial machinations which were technically legal but for violating an ancient law which prohibited Jews from having sexual relations with Christian women. He then cites this as being "an interesting parallel to the Nuremberg Laws.

There is also Süß's role as a purveyor of women for the Duke, and his relentless pursuit of an "Aryan" woman for sexual purposes, even after she rebuffs his first attempt to seduce her. From the Nazi perspective, this was Rassenschande, a racial pollution, a crime against the German blood. The heroine's suicide is a proper response of a German to such a tragedy.

"Jew in disguise"

One antisemitic theme that is introduced at the beginning of the film is the portrayal of Süß as the typical "Jew in disguise", a concept which Welch describes as "the inherent rootlessness of the Jew and his ability to assimilate himself into whichever society he chooses." Süß is presented to the audience first in traditional ghetto attire and then a quick cutaway to a shot of him in elegant clothes riding in a carriage on his way to Stuttgart. Thus, Süß is shown to be hiding his true identity as a marginalized Jew and posing as a respected member of German society. However, despite Süß's attempts to fit into Württemberg high society, Harlan will not let the audience forget that he is ultimately depicted as a "dirty Jew" and underlines this point by juxtaposing him with the elderly Rabbi Löw. In an interview with Der Film, a German film magazine, Harlan explained:

It is meant to show how all these different temperaments and characters – the pious Patriarch, the wily swindler, the penny-pinching merchant and so on – are ultimately derived from the same roots.

Around the middle of the film we show the Purim festival, a victory festival which the Jews celebrate as a festival of revenge on the Goyim, the Christians. Here I am depicting authentic Jewry as it was then and as it now continues unchecked in Poland. In contrast to this original Jewry, we are presented with Süss, the elegant financial adviser to the Court, the clever politician, in short, the Jew in disguise.

Effectiveness of the film

Stephen Lee writes that Hitler's vision of the kind of film that was likely to engage the German public proved to be less effective than the more subtle approach advocated by Goebbels. For example, the "documentary film" Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) that Hitler commissioned was so crude and strident that many audiences were repelled by the grotesque imagery and the film was a box-office flop. The failure of Der Ewige Jude convinced Goebbels that the most effective approach for disseminating propaganda was subtle and indirect. Lee writes that Goebbels had learned to "introduce propaganda as a subliminal message within the context of a story with which the audience could identify." The Nazi antisemitic message was more subtly and artfully presented in the feature film format that Goebbels preferred.

Richard Levy attributes the effectiveness of the film in part to an "arguably engaging story" and the casting of some of the leading German stars of that period including Ferdinand Marian, Heinrich George, Kristina Söderbaum, and Werner Krauss. He characterizes the film's antisemitic message as being "integrated into the film's story and strategy rather than overwhelming it or seeming to stand apart from it." Edgar Feuchtwanger attributes the success of the film to it being "a combination of virulent anti-Semitism with a compelling love story, full of sex and violence."

However, Stephen Brockman cautions against making "all-too-sweeping assumptions" about how effective Jud Süß was as a propaganda tool. To support his argument, he points to anecdotal evidence that, rather than being perceived as a despicable Jew, Marian's portrayal of Süß was considered to be quite sympathetic; so much so that he received fan mail from women who had become infatuated with his character.

David Culbert notes that "[t]hose who have condemned Jew Süss as a lifeless production are presuming—understandably—a morally abhorrent film cannot possibly have redeeming artistic merit." However, Culbert argues that, while one can understand such reasoning, it is actually a fallacy. He argues that those who dismiss Harlan as a "loud-mouthed opportunist who could direct crowd scenes" have failed to understand the structure of the script whose brilliance is due to Harlan rather than to his predecessors, Metzger and Möller. Culbert attributes much of the film's success to Marian's performance. He describes Marian as making use of "techniques and gestures perfected in his stage portrayal of Iago (in Shakespeare's Othello)". According to Culbert, "the construction of [Harlan's] plot owes much to Shakespeare."

Recent documentary and feature films

From the early 21st century the film became the subject of a number of documentary films. In 2001 Horst Königstein made a film titled Jud Süß—Ein Film als Verbrechen? (Jud Süß—A Film as a Crime?). The 2008 documentary Harlan – In the Shadow of Jew Süss by Felix Moeller explores Harlan's motivations and the post-war reaction of his large family to his notoriety. In 2010, Oskar Roehler directed a film titled Jew Suss: Rise and Fall (German: Jud Süss: Film ohne Gewissen, Jud Süss—film without conscience) that premiered at the 2010 Berlinale, receiving mixed reviews. It dramatizes the involvement of Austrian actor Ferdinand Marian who initially turns down the role, but then gives in to Goebbels' pressure and the promise of fame.