Like the 1911 film The Bells, The Burgomeister is an adaptation of the nineteenth-century stage melodrama by French writers Erckmann-Chatrian. An inn-keeper murders a Jewish guest for his money but, years later, his guilt forces him into hallucinations of his victim's sleighbells and a dream state in which he is tried for and convicted of the crime.
Like The Bells, The Burgomeister is a 'lost film': in the case of the latter film, the National Film and Sound Archive knows of a single extant sequence.
