His family moved to Vienna in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, the first of many disruptions in Wilder's life caused by Europe's political agonies. The last of these, the beginning of the anti-Jewish campaign, sent Wilder to America in 1933. His grandmother, mother, and stepfather died at Auschwitz.
Wilder became a journalist early in his life, reporting on sports for Die Stunde in Vienna, where he also specialized in personality interviews (Richard Strauss and Arthur Schnitzler were two of his subjects). Moving to Berlin and the Nachtausgabe, he became a crime reporter and frequented the Romanisches Cafe, though not the tables where Grosz, Brecht, and Weill presided. For a while he was a professional tea dancer.
By the middle of the 1920s, he was writing silent scenarios. About this phase of his career, as well as others, he has given interviewers different information at different times: the number of these scripts, typically twenty-five-minute vignettes, is reported as one hundred at one time, seventy-five another time. Scholars have identified only fifteen so far, the earliest in 1929.
People on Sunday (1929) was his first solo screenwriting credit, though Robert Siodmak, the director, Curt Siodmak, and Fred Zinnemann also worked on the film, and the nature of Wilder's contribution has been disputed.
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