The Mortal Storm

A feature film. This movie was one of the earliest to examine how a society can be swept off their feet by a fascist regime. Freya Roth is the daughter of a preeminent Jewish science professor and an aristocratic German mother. She has one younger brother and two elder, full-blooded German half-brothers. An outwardly anti-Nazi film released a year before the United States entered World War II, The film was a damning indictment. MGM, the production company, worried that the movie would negatively affect their German audiences, avoided mentioning “Germany” as much as possible, and outright refused to identify Freya or her father as Jewish, instead using the vague descriptor “non-Aryan.” This attempt to have their cake and eat it didn’t work, of course: it led to all the of MGM’s films being banned in Germany altogether. The movie was rereleased by Warner Archive on Blu-ray. The film is based on the 1937 novel The Mortal Storm by the British writer Phyllis Bottome.