Bergner and Czinner's first film was Nju, made in Germany in 1924, co-starring Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt. Nju (Bergner) is a delicate, moody woman married to the childishly well-meaning but unimaginative Jannings; she seeks a match for her passions in Veidt, whose rejection pushes her to suicide. In his book, Film Till Now, Paul Rotha writes, “Nju was the essence of story simplification, of contrasted human emotions without irrelevant matter.... There was something extraordinary about this film; an indescribable atmosphere of emptiness, of fatality. Elisabeth Bergner, Jannings and Veidt simply stood about; Czinner caught the interplay of their thoughts. There was little attempt to tell a story; one felt that it just happened, and was recorded as it happened.... Nju left a feeling, rare in the usual completeness of a German film, that things would still go on. It was an incident that would be left behind by the lover and the husband in the continuation of their lives.”