Die goldene Stadt is a 1941 German film directed by Veit Harlan

Veit Harlan

Veit Harlan was a German film director and actor.-Life and career:Harlan was born in Berlin. After studying under Max Reinhardt, he first appeared on the stage in 1915 and, after World War I, worked in the Berlin stage. In 1922 he married Jewish actress and cabaret singer Dora Gerson; the couple...

, starring Kristina Söderbaum

Kristina Söderbaum

Kristina Söderbaum was a Swedish-born German film actress, producer and photographer.Her father, Professor Henrik Gustaf Söderbaum , was the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences....

, who won the Volpi Cup

Volpi Cup

The Volpi Cups are the principal awards given to actors at the Venice Film Festival. Formal acting awards were introduced in the second festival . Initially they were called Great Gold Medals of the National Fascist Association for Entertainment. The name Volpi Cup was introduced the following year...

 for Best Actress, and in Agfacolor

Agfacolor

thumb|An Agfacolor slide dating from the early 1940s. While the colors themselves hold up well after 60 years, damages visible include dust and [[Newton's rings]].Agfacolor is a series of color photographic products produced by Agfa of Germany...

.

Plot

Anna, a young, innocent country girl (a Sudeten German), whose mother drowned in the swamp, dreams of the golden city of Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

. After she falls in love with a surveyor, she runs away to Prague to find him. She is instead seduced and abandoned by her cousin (a Czech). She attempts to return home, but her father rejects her, and she drowns herself in the swamp where her mother died.

Source

The movie is based on Billinger's Gigante. In the novel, however, it is the heart-broken father who commits suicide; the Propaganda Ministry insisted that it be the daughter not the father who died.

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

Blood and soil

Blood and Soil refers to an ideology that focuses on ethnicity based on two factors, descent and homeland/Heimat...

 doctrine.

Because her seducer is a Czech, this death is also a punishment for racial pollution

Rassenschande

Rassenschande or Blutschande was the Nazi term for sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans, which was punishable by law...

.