Jonas Sternberg was born in Vienna in 1894, the son of an ex-soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army and the first of five children in a family of Orthodox Jews. When his father married his mother, they were disinherited and moved to New York when Jonas was only three. After growing up in poverty between the two locations, Jonas took the name Josef von Sternberg and became one of the best-known directors in early twentieth-century film.

Every three to four years, “Jo” was moved from New York to Vienna or Vienna to New York, until he wound up homeless on the streets of New York at age 17. This was when he changed his name to Josef. Eventually he chanced upon some work repairing sprocket holes that took him back and forth to Europe in cattle boats. Luck was on his side. One day, a chance meeting in Brooklyn led to work cleaning and repairing movie prints. Josef took film jobs, when and where he could get them for thirteen years, even making training videos for the U.S. Army during the First World War.

In the 1920s silent film era, Hollywood did not spend very much money on its films, which forced the best directors to be creative. After working as an apprentice for so many years, Josef grew critical of the director he worked under and always felt that he could improve upon their techniques. Josef lacked formal education, but learned quite successfully on his own. At age 26, he translated and published a version of Karl Adolf’s Töchter (1922) and added the “von” to his name after seeing it beside “Sternberg” in the film credits of one of the films that he had worked on. After a few haphazard attempts at producing his own films, Josef released The Salvation Hunters (1925), which won the positive appreciation on the American silent film icon Charlie Chaplin, even though the film eventually began to lose money.

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