Last year we presented a series on German musical comedies, 1930-32. Now we follow up on the fate and the continuing creativity of the talents involved during their exile years, by screening five German-language musical comedies produced in Austria and Hungary.

The Nazi takeover in January 1933 resulted in the end of the Jewish influence on popular German filmmaking. It also marked, for a great many Jewish filmmakers (including directors, actors, screenwriters and producers), the beginning of life and work in exile. In the film studios of Vienna and Budapest, they kept the vision of another kind of German-language cinema alive, a cinema less polished yet much more free-spirited, irreverent and adventurous than the one dominating Nazi screens. Like the musical comedies of the late Weimar Republic, these films are filled with catchy tunes, light-hearted romances, bumbling hucksters and at times a sense of melancholia that speaks of displacement and an uncertain future.

Read the selection of films curated by Lukas Foerster.