Emil Jannings won "Best Actor" Oscar for this film, which is the only lost Academy Award-winning performance.
A poor-quality two-second clip of this lost film is in the documentary Cavalcade of the Academy Awards (1940), which highlights past achievements of the Academy Awards and the 1939 ceremony. It is sporadically shown on Turner Classic Movies.
Northern Illinois University owns a 17-minute filmstrip entitled "Movie Milestones No. (1936)" in which this lost film is featured as one of four clips. The others are The Ten Commandments (1923), Old Ironsides (1926) and Behind the Front (1926).
According to a document from the US Department of Commerce dated February 16 1930 (from Liaison Officer Robert J. Phillips to the attention of Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur J. Carr), a pirated copy of this movie was being shown in the Dikoff Moderne Theatre in Sofia, Bulgaria. The document calls for an investigation to be carried "with the view of stopping the showing of this [illegal copy] if it can be done".
In her autobiography, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim A Writer in Early Hollywood", Frederica Sagor Maas claims that the original screenplay for this film was written by her husband, Ernest Maas. The story--of a man who abandons his family--was loosely based on Ernest's own father, who had an affair with his sister-in-law and destroyed two families in the process. As a fellow German-American, and working in the nascent film industry, Ernest knew Emil Jannings personally and gave him a copy of the original screenplay. Later, he learned that Jannings had taken it to another director (and studio) and they'd stolen it; this was common in the early film industry.