Vienne avant la nuit

The French author and documentary filmmaker Robert Bober never met his great-grandfather. Wolf Leib Fränkel, born in 1853, a Jewish lamp-maker and lighter, left his Polish home village in 1904 and, after being prevented from emigrating to the USA, settled in Vienna's Leopoldstadt as a tinsmith. More than a century later, Bober set out there to search for traces: for memories of his great-grandfather that are not his own, and for the child at the hand of the old man that he could have been. His exploration becomes a journey into the time before the long night of the Holocaust, when Vienna was a cultural metropolis at the end of the Habsburg monarchy and home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. Bober roams the Prater and through the famous coffee houses, he visits the Heldenplatz, where Hitler announced Austria's "Anschluss" to the "Third Reich" in March 1938, and the Stadttempel, the only Viennese synagogue that escaped destruction during the night of pogroms in November of the same year. He reconstructs the life of his great-grandfather from the biographies of the many Jewish authors for whom Vienna had become a adopted home before the war. For him, the life experiences of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Peter Altenberg and Arthur Schnitzler and their literary material of uprootedness, exile and quiet hope are inseparably fused with the life of his own great-grandfather. Vienna Before the Night is a touching family story, a yearning approach to a lost place and a deeply personal reflection on Jewish identity and history.