Anders als die Andern 9780228018698

Table of contents :
Cover
Anders als die Andern
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Synopsis
Credits
Introduction: The Pleasures and Pains of Watching Anders als die Andern
1 Producing Anders als die Andern: Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse
2 The Form of Melodrama: Gesture, Anguish, and Queer Life in Anders als die Andern
3 Feeling Backward with Anders als die Andern
Conclusion: The Queer Cinema of Mourning
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Anders als die Andern

Queer Film Classics Edited by Matthew Hays and Thomas Waugh

The enduring commercial success of lgbtq2i films over recent generations offers proof of widespread interest in queer film within both pop culture and academia. Not only are recent works riding the wave of the new maturity of queer film culture, but a century of queer and proto-queer classics are in busy circulation thanks to a burgeoning online queer cinephile culture and have been brought back to life by omnipresent festivals and revivals. Meditations on individual films from queer perspectives are particularly urgent, unlocking new understandings of political as well as aesthetic and personal concerns. Queer Film Classics at McGill-Queen’s University Press emphasizes good writing, rigorous but accessible scholarship, and personal, reflective thinking about the significance of each film – writing that is true to the film, original, and enlightening and enjoyable for film buffs, scholars, and students alike. Books in the series are short – roughly 40,000 words – but well illustrated and allow for considerable depth. Exploring historical, authorial, and production contexts and drawing on filmic analysis, these open-ended essays also develop the author’s personal interests or a subjective reading of the work’s sexual identity discourses or reception. The series aims to meet the diversity, quality, and originality of classics in the queer film canon, broadly conceived, with equally compelling writing and critical insight. Books in the series have much to teach us, not only about the art of film but about the queer ways in which films can transmit our meanings, our stories, and our dreams. L’Homme blessé Robert Payne

Midnight Cowboy Jon Towlson

Boys Don’t Cry Chase Joynt and Morgan M Page

À tout prendre et Il était une fois dans l’Est Julie Vaillancourt

Orlando Russell Sheaffer Appropriate Behavior Maria San Filippo

Anders als die Andern Ervin Malakaj

Anders als die Andern Ervin Malakaj

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

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London

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Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 isbn 978-0-2280-1867-4 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1868-1 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-1869-8 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-1870-4 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the ubc Scholarly Publication Fund.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Anders als die Andern / Ervin Malakaj. Other titles: Different from the others Names: Malakaj, Ervin, author. Description: Series statement: Queer film classics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230160077 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230160085 | isbn 9780228018674 (cloth) | isbn 9780228018681 (paper) | isbn 9780228018698 (epdf) | isbn 9780228018704 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Anders als die Andern (Motion picture) | lcsh: Motion pictures—Germany—History. | lcsh: Male homosexuality in motion pictures. Classification: lcc pn1997.a348 m35 2023 | ddc 791.43/72—dc23

For Gary and Darlene

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix Synopsis | xiii Credits | xix Introduction: The Pleasures and Pains of Watching Anders als die Andern | 3 1 Producing Anders als die Andern: Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse | 34 2 The Form of Melodrama: Gesture, Anguish, and Queer Life in Anders als die Andern | 60 3 Feeling Backward with Anders als die Andern | 100 Conclusion: The Queer Cinema of Mourning | 126 Notes | 133 References | 137 Index | 149

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have people in my life who support my academic pursuits. It has not always been so. People with my lived experience face many obstacles in the academy. The institution’s infrastructures are not able to hold us gently. Friends and collaborators had to help stretch and twist the academy’s boundaries to accommodate me and my research. For many years these efforts were futile. Only recently has this begun to change. The very same people who helped me find a sense of community in the academy are the ones for whom I am eternally grateful for their ongoing support while writing this book. Kyle Frackman has been a friend, collaborator, and mentor of a variety that one rarely encounters in academia. He indeed initially called my attention to the Queer Film Classic series and encouraged me to submit a proposal. Each idea in the book in some fashion or another goes back to a conversation I had with Kyle. He listened patiently, offered insights at critical moments of the project, and read drafts when I needed help. May all emerging queer scholars find a comrade like Kyle, who will help guide them when they need support in the academy. At McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup) I have had the distinct pleasure to work with the kindest and best professionals in the field. Matthew Hays and Thomas Waugh have supported the project from the first email I sent to them inquiring if they would be interested in including the project in their series. They provided vital early feedback on the project, which ultimately

x Acknowledgments

improved it. Jonathan Crago has been an amazing supporter of the project. Their dedication helped me realize early on that I had found a home for my book with mqup. The two anonymous reader reports were extremely helpful during the revision stage of the book. My writing support group through the scholarly collective Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (ddgc) has been vital for this project. I wrote the book during the global pandemic, which made focusing nearly impossible on most days. Our weekly check-ins helped structure my writing time and break up writing into manageable smaller tasks. Many colleagues and friends at the University of British Columbia (ubc) provided much-needed support over the course of the pandemic. In my home department, the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, Katherine Bowers, Tim Frandy, David Gramling, and Ilinca Iuraşcu have been the best supporters throughout. I turn to them for advice so much that they are part of my permanent personal advisory board. Uma Kumar, Jason Lieblang, Biz Nijdam, Gaby Pailer, Rosemarie Peña, Caroline Rieger, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young have supported my work in the department in important ways. My staff colleagues Hillary Hurst, Elizabeth Nolan, and Diane Smyth are indispensable collaborators on many fronts. My graduate student colleagues Braden Russell and Shoshana Schwebel have been variously involved during the research process as assistants and I am grateful for their support. Colleagues working in other units at ubc continue to support my work. William Brown, J.P. Catungal, Mary Chapman, Igor Drljaca, Ayasha Guerin, Stephen Guy-Bray, Tom Kemple, Gregory Mackie, Vin Nardizzi, Christopher Patterson, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Janice Stewart, and Mila Zuo continue to be fierce interlocutors. My comrades in the ddgc, including Andrea Bryant, Paul Dobryden, Regine Criser, Suzuko Knott, Kiley Kost, Priscila Layne, Nichole Neuman, Adrienne Merritt, Jeannette Oholi, Maggie Rosenau, Didem Uca, Daphne Warren, Beverly Weber, continue to inspire me. The ongoing efforts of the collective to transform German studies help motivate many scholars such

Acknowledgments xi

as myself to contribute to the discipline’s scholarship and teaching. Beyond the ddgc, Eleoma Bodammer, Vance Byrd, Sara Friedman, Venkat Mani, Laurie Marhoefer, and Katie Sutton have variously helped me at critical moments during the writing of the book. Anna Hájková has been a true comrade and helped me during the revision process. Jennifer Evans is one of those mentors we all aspire to become one day. My best friend and comrade Siham Bouamer has been a great supporter of my work at every juncture of this project and many others. She deserves the world for it. My family – the Malakajs and the Kujawinskis – have been so good to me. I am grateful for their ongoing support. The Filmmuseum München has been extremely helpful with inquiries about image rights. I am grateful for their ongoing efforts to support early film studies, in particular their investment in the restoration of Anders als die Andern. Images from the film are taken from their expanded fourth edition 2022 dvd reissue. Here, I would like to extend special gratitude to Stefan Drößler, one of the leads on the restoration projects. The ubc Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies supported this project with a faculty research grant. The ubc Faculty of Arts likewise supported the research for this book with a ssrhc Explore Grant. The ubc Provost’s office supported the project with a Scholarly Publication Fund grant, which helped offset the cost of publication. Gary, my husband, has been there for me through it all. His ongoing love and support means the world to me. Darlene continues to be the world’s best research and emotional support assistant. I dedicate this book to them. Vancouver November 2022

Synopsis

Anders als die Andern is preserved as a fragment of the original film. The most authoritative version in circulation today is available in dvd format distributed by the Filmmuseum München, Germany (2011). I will rely on this version for the synopsis and have based my discussion of the film throughout this book on it as well. The fifty-one minutes of running time are comprised of scenes, archival footage, and intertitle summary based on an official synopsis of the film published by Magnus Hirschfeld in the 1919 issue of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types). In other words, we know the contents of the film even if we only have about one third of its original footage preserved today. In the summary below, I will present the full synopsis of the film by adopting a similar format Richard Dyer deployed in his own account of the film. Dyer drew on the official summary supplied by Hirschfeld, which I will do as well. However, whereas Dyer used brackets to denote what elements of the film are missing, I will italicize the missing scenes from the film (Dyer 1990, 27). In some instances, promotional stills from select missing scenes were preserved. And so, even while the actual scenes are missing, these promotional stills were deployed to serve as a substitute by the archivists (I go into more details about this aspect in the introduction to the book). I will use Körner, Sivers, and Bollek – the last names of the characters – in the synopsis of the

xiv Synopsis

film and throughout. This is in keeping with both the way that these characters are discussed in the film itself as well as the scholarship on it.

The accomplished violinist Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt) makes a stunning realization about a series of suicides by respectable men reported in newspapers: they are tied to Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which criminalized male homosexuality. The legal code and a broader system of hostility against homosexuals drove the men he read about to suicide. As a homosexual himself, Körner fears what the future would hold for him in light of these deaths. He imagines a procession of famous men who have succumbed to the pressures of a world hostile to homosexuals. Körner makes the acquaintance of a young man interested in a career in music: Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz). Sivers attends Körner’s concerts with great interest. One day he seeks out the accomplished musician at his home. Over the course of their conversation, Körner agrees to take Sivers on as a student. Soon thereafter, Körner begins to develop a romantic attachment to his pupil. As a result of Sivers spending a lot of time with Körner, Sivers’s parents begin to worry about their son’s extreme dedication to a career that might not secure him a good living in the future. In the meantime, Körner’s family pressures their son to marry. Inspired by his father (Leo Connrad), the family insists Körner attend a party hosted by a rich widow, Frau Hellborn (Helga Molander). The protagonist resists initially, but eventually agrees. At the party, Körner rejects the widow’s advances and leaves, a gesture that both offends the hostess and frustrates his parents. After the party, an equally frustrated Körner decides to send his parents to a sexologist (Magnus Hirschfeld), who informs the parents that Körner is a homosexual. The sexologist assures Körner’s parents that homosexuality is an innate condition that in no way hinders Körner from contributing to society. In the meantime, Körner’s relationship with Sivers slowly becomes more intimate. However, during a walk in the park the couple faces an unnerving

Synopsis xv

situation: Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) runs into them by chance. After Bollek approaches them in the park, he comments on Sivers’s attractive features. Körner rejects his interjection, grabs the arm of a confused Sivers, and rushes away from the scene. Soon thereafter Sivers faces his disapproving parents yet again. They are concerned that their son is dedicating too much time to his music lessons with Körner and forbid him from pursuing these further. Devastated by the decision, Sivers enlists the help of his sister, Else (Anita Berber), who visits Körner at his house in order to secure his help in the matter. After Körner promises to speak to the parents, Else leaves the house. As she exits, Else runs into Bollek at the front door. The crook blackmails Körner: he demands money in exchange for keeping quiet about Körner’s homosexuality, a request Körner feels forced to fulfil. Körner visits Sivers’s parents to assure them of their son’s talents. They hesitantly agree to support their son’s musical career, which pleases Sivers. Soon thereafter, Bollek writes a letter to Körner in which he demands a larger sum of hush money. Körner, angered by the letter, proclaims that he will no longer give into the demands. In a queer bar, Bollek broods over Körner’s rejection of the demands. With an unnamed accomplice he schemes the next steps. In the meantime, Körner and Sivers have a successful concert during which the latter celebrates his debut. While they are performing, Bollek breaks into Körner’s house to rob the musician. However, Sivers catches the culprit in the act of robbery. He confronts Bollek. A physical altercation between the two ensues. Körner, who also shows up on the scene, intervenes and throws Bollek out of the house. The encounter shocks Sivers. In the scene, he finds out (presumably for the first time) that Körner had relations with the intruder. Sivers also likely realizes the severity of the consequences of his own homosexuality becoming public knowledge in this scene. Sivers runs away from home. His sister worries and inquires with Körner. Körner is devastated by the news. As Else seeks to comfort him and becomes a bit too intimate, Körner rejects her advances. Else is offended and leaves. In the

xvi Synopsis

meantime, Sivers tries to earn money in taverns on the outskirts of town. In one such tavern he rejects the advances of a barmaid, who accuses him of harassing her and ultimately costs Sivers his job. Sivers misses Körner. Wallowing in despair, Körner thinks back on his life in a flashback sequence. At a boarding school, he (young Körner, played by Karl Giese) made an intimate acquaintance with his roommate. However, after a teacher discovered the two kissing Körner faced a tribunal of teachers who ultimately expelled him. As a student, Körner was studious and worked in isolation. However, his fellow students pressured him to attend a party. There, women made advances on him, which he rejected. This behaviour inspired negative rumours among people, who sought to explain the protagonist’s puzzling behaviour. Körner sought out a hypnotist, hoping conversion therapy would help set him straight. After this failed, he sought out a sexologist (Magnus Hirschfeld), who assured him that there was nothing wrong with being a homosexual. Körner started participating in queer nightlife, where he met Bollek. After a night out the two made their way to Körner’s house. Once inside, Bollek immediately blackmailed Körner, forcing him to pay him money in exchange for the culprit staying quiet about Körner’s homosexuality. The flashback sequence is interrupted by another blackmail letter from Bollek, which Körner destroys. Körner takes Else to a presentation by the sexologist, in which the expert expounds his theories of sexual indeterminacy and homosexuality. Afterward, Else is “enlightened” about Körner’s homosexuality and pledges her support and friendship to the protagonist. In the meantime, Körner reports Bollek to the police, who in turn accuses Körner of breaching Paragraph 175. Soon thereafter, Körner’s homosexuality becomes public knowledge. When the police show up at Körner’s house to arrest him, Else tries to intervene. She seeks out the help of the sexologist, who assures her that he will support Körner as best he can. On trial, the judge shows sympathy for Körner after the sexologist’s testimony. The judge even sees Körner as model citizen. However, the judge is forced to observe the law (here, Paragraph 175) and sentences Körner to one week in prison. Bollek, in turn, receives a sentence of three years.

Synopsis xvii

Permitted to leave the court until he is ready to face his sentence, Körner returns home. On his way, he is shunned by the people who knew him. The newspaper reports make his homosexuality into a public scandal, which leads to Körner’s mistreatment in public. At home, he receives a note that his agency dropped his contract. His father urges Körner to “do what is right,” implying that Körner should take his life amidst his homosexuality becoming a public spectacle. Körner again sees the procession of famous men in his mind. This time he imagines himself to be part of it. Soon thereafter, Körner takes a pill and dies in his home. Sivers, devastated by the announcement he read in the newspaper about Körner’s death, arrives at his wake. Körner’s parents are upset that Sivers showed up. Else yells at them, noting that they had a role to play in the death of their son. Sivers displays suicidal tendencies, which the sexologist, who attended the wake, interrupts. The sexologist remarks that Sivers should stay alive and dedicate his life to changing the context – in particular the legal code – which led to the death of his beloved. An image of a hand striking lines through Paragraph 175 closes the film.

Credits

Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) © 2022, released 1919, German/English intertitles, 51 minutes, black/white, silent, 1.37:1 Improvised score by Joachim Bärenz Distributed by the Filmmuseum München, Germany, in corporation with film&kunst GmbH Produced by Richard Oswald Film-Produktion, Berlin, in cooperation with the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Kommittee Director Richard Oswald Script Richard Oswald and Magnus Hirschfeld Cinematography Max Faßbender Cast Conrad Veidt Reinhold Schünzel Fritz Schulz

Paul Körner Franz Bollek Kurt Sivers

xx Credits

Anita Berber Ernst Pittschau Alexandra Wiellegh Ilse von Tasso-Lind Wilhelm Diegelmann Clementine Plessner Helga Molander Magnus Hirschfeld Karl Giese

Else Sivers Husband of Körner’s Sister Körner’s Mother Körner’s Sister Sivers’s Father Sivers’s Mother Frau Hellborn The Physician Young Körner

Version history The most authoritative version of Anders als die Andern in circulation in 2023 is the fourth edition of a dvd released in 2022. This dvd features a restoration of the film (in German original or with English subtitles) distributed by the Filmmuseum München. In addition to the various archival documents related to the making and the history of the film, the dvd also contains the episode “Schuldlos geächtet!” (“Innocently Ostracized”) from the 1927 film Gesetze der Liebe: Aus der Mappe eines Sexualforschers (Laws of Love: From the Dossier of a Sexologist) as well as the documentary about Anders als die Andern titled Gefährliche Neigungen: Die Skandalgeschichte von ‘Anders als die Andern’ (Dangerous Urges: The Scandalous Story of “Different from the Others,” dir. Gerald Koll, 2000). Much of the restoration of the film depends on archival material stemming from this episode. I will go into details about the history of the film in the introduction of the book. Here, I would like to acknowledge that I, along with others like me writing about Anders als die Andern, am grateful for the work of Stefan Drößler, who was the project lead for the Filmmuseum München restoration project of the film. Prior to the 2022 edition, the Filmmuseum München issued the third edition of the dvd in 2011, the second edition in 2007, and the first edition in 2006. The most recent edition from

Credits xxi

2022 features a sharper resolution of the image based on a new restoration of the original film material. An early version of the Filmmuseum München restauration, which is copyrighted for the year 2003, was made commercially available across North America through Kino Lorber. In 2004, it appeared as one part of Kino Lorber’s series, “Gay-Themed Films of the German Silent Era.” The other films in the series included Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1924 film Michael and Wilhelm Dieterle’s 1928 film Geschlecht in Fesseln (Sex in Chains) (see Grundmann 2005, 63–6). Salzgeber Media circulated a vhs version of the film starting in 2002, as did other small-scale distribution companies in Europe and in North America. Some of the vhs copies of Anders als die Andern available in private and university libraries throughout North America are unofficial copies acquired through personal connections among film studies scholars and cinephiles of various persuasions. Unofficial film reel prints of the film’s footage based on “Schuldlos geächtet!” circulated through scholarly and cinephile circles and were used as basis for film screenings across North America.

Anders als die Andern

Introduction

The Pleasures and Pains of Watching Anders als die Andern I was a student in a graduate seminar on the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Era (1918–33) when I first stumbled across a mention of Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919). In preparation for a discussion of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920), which still sits positioned among the most iconic films of the period, I consulted the Weimar chapter in Sabine Hake’s book on the history of German film (Hake 2002, 27–63). As I was reading about the reinstitution of film censorship in 1920 following a brief period of relaxation of state intervention in cinema production, I was stunned by the reference to a “controversial” film relating to “alternative sexualities,” a sexologist, “male-male desire,” and a political mission to right historic wrongs (33). (In chapter 1, I will explore in detail the important role the film played in the reinstitution of film censorship in Germany.) I instantly reread the sentences describing Anders als die Andern, and quickly began scanning the rest of the chapter (and then the book itself) for other mentions of it. Slightly disappointed that this film received but a brief passage in an authoritative text on the history of German cinema, I turned to the Internet. A search led me to a clip of the film. I watched a scene in which the protagonist Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt) plays a piano at his home as Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz) walks into his study to introduce himself. This encounter ushers in their relationship. Körner’s flirtatious smiles in this

4 Anders als die Andern

scene underscore his happiness in the moment. Over the course of the film, the anti-queer structures of his world will suppress this happiness. I likely smiled along with the protagonist while watching, feeling grateful for the moment he and his love interest secured for one another. More on this emotional alignment shortly. I then located additional resources on the film in my university library. Each one of the articles and chapters I consulted sustained my initial astonishment about the existence of an (at that time) almost one-hundred-year-old German feature film dedicated to the topic of same-sex love! As a queer emerging scholar in the field of German film studies, I instantly felt drawn to Anders als die Andern. Each analysis of the film I read facilitated for me a type of heightened emotional attachment to its material that I could not quite explain back then, but that I recall vividly as I am writing this book. This attachment pertains to a complex set of feelings or states of mind that range from excitement about the material to hurt about the protagonist’s fate; from hope for a better world for homosexuals evoked in the film to despair in the face of persistent hostilities against queer people today. My (queer) students regularly cite a similar set of conflicting emotions when they first encounter the film in the Weimar cinema seminar I teach. How could this old film – and, as I will discuss below, a fragmented one at that – have such a powerful grip on viewers long after its time? How can just a mention of it, often with just a brief recourse to descriptors about the early German homosexual rights movement within which it is positioned, elicit very powerful supportive emotional responses for the film in 2023? In my assessment, such heightened emotionality relates to the history of queer rights advocacy. My amazement about the film stems in part from the fact that it was positioned in a vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement in Germany. Before watching Anders als die Andern, I did not know about the part of queer history to which it belonged. My students likewise learn about early homosexual rights advocacy for the first time in my Weimar cinema seminars. And when I give public talks about the film, or when I men-

Introduction 5

tion it in private settings, queer audiences tend to express a similar astonishment. Stonewall, it seems, persists as the central point of orientation for North American queer people with regard to the history of queer rights advocacy. And rightfully so! The critical energies of the 1960s Gay Liberation movement were transformative for the private and public life of queer people. Consequently, these energies continue to preoccupy popular culture. For instance, David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) concerns one of the most important figures in the movement. And although the film highlights Johnson’s collaborations with other trans women of colour who collectively resisted the exclusion of the most vulnerable from queer rights discourses advanced by the movement, it still centres Stonewall (figure 0.1). The documentary was distributed widely via the streaming platform Netflix, and is only one example of many that foregrounds the various public, private, and contested histories around the movement. Each year, often in anticipation of pride festivities throughout the summer, similar stories, literature, film, and new media products emerge commemorating (or otherwise engaging with) Stonewall. In this (popular) media environment, Stonewall is enshrined as the central historic moment for homosexual and trans rights advocacy. I believe that the movement’s centrality in the popular queer imagination likely informed my own initial astonishment about Anders als die Andern. It likely also shaped (and continues to shape) my students’ reactions to the film. The long history of homosexual rights struggles indeed takes a secondary status to advances in queer rights historically closer to our time, advances that have also secured a stronger presence in popular media cultures. For some, Stonewall even becomes the first organizational effort toward queer rights worth mentioning. And what would position queer people to know or claim otherwise? The broader histories of queer rights struggles are rarely (if ever) taught in school. Even at universities they tend to be allocated to footnotes in textbooks dedicated to other topics or are centred in specialized courses. Thus there is all the more cause to be astonished when these histories come into view.

6 Anders als die Andern

Figure 0.1 Documentary footage from a Marsha P. Johnson interview reproduced in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, 2017.

In my assessment as a queer film studies scholar whose work tends to focus on early cinema history, other cinematic mediation of queer life in the silent era solicits similar astonishment from viewers. One only need to do a quick online search for William A. Wellman’s 1927 film Wings to find clips with commentary from fans, various screengrabs, blog posts, and numerous popular writeups about “the first gay kiss in cinema history.” Film studies scholars will warn you about “firsts discourse” – that is, the practice of proclaiming something is the first of its kind. In film studies, these types of claims usually do not go well. For instance, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1922 film Manslaughter features a queer kiss, as does Ernst Lubitsch’s 1918 film, Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man). Next to these examples, there are dozens of comedies, melodramas, and other genres of filmmaking in the silent era that in some way address queer life. Firsts-discourse tends to simplify the historical

Introduction 7

record. In this regard, I am not keen on the firsts-discourse that accompanies Anders als die Andern. It is, indeed, not the first film about queer love, an idea that quite many articles in popular venues advance. For instance, Mauritz Stiller’s Vingarne (The Wings) was released in 1916 in Sweden and in various European countries.1 Nonetheless, I can appreciate the enthusiasm of people astonished to discover for themselves these wonderful texts. And it is in this regard that the kiss in Wings meets such astonishment among viewers. Two pilots kiss in the film. Initially rivals, Jack Powell (Charles Rogers) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) are shown in an intimate moment toward the end of the film. Following a series of misrecognitions and misunderstandings, Jack shoots a plane David operates. In his dying moments, David reaches out for Jack, and the two kiss (figure 0.2). If you are a queer person watching this film for the first time, you will likely be astonished in the same way I was when I first discovered Anders als die Andern for myself. The heightened emotionality about Anders als die Andern I cite above also relates to the history of hostility against queer people. I was devastated by the fate of the protagonist. This extreme emotional response stems from acknowledging the severe structural violence to which this fictional homosexual character was exposed. In my mind – and, as I will outline shortly, as intended by the creators of the film – Körner’s struggles navigating a world hostile to homosexuals by extension also speaks to the experiences of real-life homosexuals living in early-twentieth-century Germany. By being given access to past struggles through this film, I could recognize the long history of hostility against queer people. This engagement with historic injustices activated for me a particular type of pain conditioned by my own history of facing antiqueer resentment. Here, I wish to tread carefully, because I do not want to give the impression that I am interested in collapsing historical time. Living life as a homosexual in Weimar Germany is not the same as living life as a homosexual in 2023 in Canada. But the queer struggles that Anders als die Andern cites – for example, facing challenges to navigate familial, professional, and personal life as a homosexual – resonate on a personal level with those

8 Anders als die Andern

Figure 0.2 Jack (Charles Rogers) and David (Richard Arlen) kiss in Wings, 1924.

of us who have had to struggle in similar ways when our queer selves stumble into hostile interactional situations. Even those of us long out of the closet, positioned in a vibrant queer community, might find some comfort in knowing we are and have really never been alone in some of our struggles. And so, Anders als die Andern often elicits complicated, at times conflicting emotional alignments with its subject matter to which I will turn in various ways throughout this book. I would like to begin illustrating what is at stake here based on a famous scene from the film. Anders als die Andern was cowritten by Richard Oswald (who also directed the film) and the sexologist and homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld. The first time I watched the film, I marvelled at the scene featuring a lecture in which a sexologist

Introduction 9

played by Hirschfeld outlines his theses about “sexual indeterminacy” – a nomenclature Hirschfeld developed to account for varied gendered embodiment and sexual practices (Kuzniar 2000, 25). In this much-referenced scene from the film, the sexologist authoritatively proclaims that queer ways of being in the world are innate and thus not pathological (figure 0.3). An excited audience heightens the affirmative tone of this moment of the film. Among the audience members is Sivers’s sister, Else (Anita Berber), for whom the lecture becomes transformative. She even proclaims that she understands homosexuality better as a result of attending the lecture and can consequently support her brother and his lover in ways she was not able to do before. Notwithstanding this uplifting message and its transformative effect for the audience, the scene also contains traces of pain. The protagonist’s presence in the audience for the lecture offers a sombre reminder of the challenges Körner faces in the world outside. He stands positioned in the background of the large lecture hall. As the sexologist presents his findings in the foreground of the shot, Körner’s lit up forehead draws our attention to the protagonist in the background. We are reminded of the previous sequence, which presented a flashback that chronicled Körner’s history of experiencing hostility growing up and living life as a homosexual. In the lecture hall, the dark makeup around his eyes underscores his brooding frame of mind. Here, the hopeful tenor affiliated with the lecture and its impact on Else collides with Körner’s worries, generating a tension that persists throughout the film between affirmative politics and the pain of living life as a homosexual in a hostile world. To me, this tension is a vital component of the film. After I watched Anders als die Andern for the first time, I struggled to reconcile the film’s occasional affirmative tone, which culminates in the sexologist’s call to action at the end of the film, with the deep pain registered primarily on Körner’s body. The fact that Hirschfeld’s hopeful message and support ultimately could not protect Körner against the structures of oppression the protagonist faced is a constitutive feature of the film. In my interpretation, Körner’s pain indeed

10 Anders als die Andern

Figure 0.3 The sexologist (Magnus Hirschfeld) gives a lecture on the innateness of homosexuality as Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt) stands against the wall in the back of the lecture.

resists simple conscription into Hirschfeld’s call for reform at the end of the film. This means that the suffering and death in the film are more than a rhetorical resource for Hirschfeld’s advocacy work. Körner’s fate is not just a means to substantiate an affective punchline at the end of the film aligned with a reform initiative. The sorrow, instead, becomes a mechanism for (especially queer) viewers across time to engage with the film. Here I evoke again the strange comfort I cited above, or similar supportive or generative engage-

Introduction 11

ments with the film’s sorrowful representational strategies for queer life. Queer viewers like me familiar with the pain accompanying anti-queer hostility might respond with a supportive nod coupled with a concerned frown when recognizing what informs Körner’s brooding presence in this uplifting venue. After all, some of us have been in similar situations. In this vein, my focus on pain does not mean that I interpret Körner’s death at the end of the film to be an “obligatory suicide,” as Vito Russo did in his 1981 landmark study, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (21). For Russo, the film becomes an early example of how cinema nurtured its relationship to gay representation on the premise that gays on screen “would suffer for their sexuality” (21). In such a reading, mediated queer suffering relates to a type of negativity that limits audience engagement. This mediation procedure, for Russo, proliferates a sense of futility about living life queerly that is inevitably harmful for queer viewers. There is too much suffering in queer cinema history, which renders screen cultures inadequate resources to account for the richness and capacity of queer life. I, as other queer film studies scholars – for example, B. Ruby Rich in New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013, 256) – remain inspired by Russo’s insistence in his study that queer viewers are deeply affected by cinema while pushing back against Russo’s totalizing claims. To this end, Rich remarks that we, as queer viewers, “fight back and resist [movies] or use them for our own goals” (256). Here, mournful imagery can be more than limiting. It can, indeed, be generative for viewers on several fronts. A comradely sigh, a supportive tear, a sorrowful nod as responses to negative mediation of queer life indeed pertain to living queerly in our present. At times such moments might inspire political action, as envisioned by the ending of Anders als die Andern. Or – and I think this is much more likely the case – they might just propel us to feel along with the emotive structures of a given film, as is the case with Körner’s brooding in the background of an uplifting lecture. Feeling bad with others is part of life. Cinema – in particular melodrama – affords us an opportunity to do so.

12 Anders als die Andern

Hundredth Anniversary and Emotionally Complex Engagements with Past Queer Struggles The reception history of Anders als die Andern offers many examples of complex audience engagement processes with the film that draw as much energy from the film’s sombre warning about the challenges of living life queerly as they do from the film’s affirmative moments. Take, for instance, the uk-based playwright Claudio Macor’s stage adaptation of Anders als die Andern. Inspired by the hundredth anniversary of the initial release of the film in 2019, Macor wrote a stage play titled Different from the Others. The play premiered 29 October 2019 at the White Bear Theatre in London. In an interview anticipating the premiere, Macor describes his writing process as one conditioned by a personal investment in “stories of discrimination” that serve as the basis for him to better understand “what we went through” (My Theatre Mates 2019). The collective “we” here refers to queer people. The concern with the history of discrimination becomes for Macor a vital operation to substantiate his aesthetic practice: knowing about queer struggles from the past is for Macor an invaluable resource for living as a queer person today. The play concerns the making of the film and recounts Hirschfeld’s efforts to turn to the medium of film as a means by which to advocate for homosexual rights. In the interview, Macor notes his astonishment about the “modern” qualities of the storyline in the film. In this regard, he celebrates its affirmative message, which seemingly transcends time. However, what underpins the entire adaptation process for Macor is the painful history of queer life during the Weimar era. The film, in providing viewers access to this history, establishes a resource for its audiences to remember how long the struggle for queer rights has been, as well as the ways in which it is still underway even in places like the uk, where queer rights may appear to have been secured. Berlin’s multi-part commemoration initiative for the hundredth anniversary of the screening of the film likewise calls attention to the long history of queer rights advocacy in which Anders als die Andern is positioned. It pertains to var-

Introduction 13

ious strains of optimism and negativity affiliated with watching the film. The event took place on 26 May 2019, and was organized by the Lesben- und Schwulenverband Berlin Brandenburg (Lesbian and Gay Organization of Berlin Brandenburg, abbreviated by the organization as lsvd). Anders als die Andern actually premiered 28 May 1919, casting the anniversary event two days short of one hundred years. However, the minor misalignment was intentional. 26 May was a Sunday. As such, it made for an opportune day to cater to the two parts of the commemoration: an afternoon walk through the historical queer neighbourhood, followed by a screening of the film at the lsvd headquarters (see Lesben- und Schwulenverband Berlin Brandenburg 2019). The attendees met at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (hkw). The institution is located in Berlin’s famous Tierpark in close proximity to the German chancellery. It is dedicated to international cultural exchange and hosts, among other events, exhibitions, cultural studies conferences, and public talks. The hkw is also located on the former site of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), which was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919 (see Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2020). The institute – the first of its kind – was a centre for homosexual rights advocacy and scholarship throughout the 1920s and early 1930s (figure 0.4). In 1933, it was raided by the Nazis and its contents dismantled or publicly burned (Beachy 2014, 241–2). The building itself was eventually confiscated by the Nazi regime and later destroyed in the war. Meeting at the former site of the institute meant activating for the attendees of the commemoration feelings affiliated with queer potential and queer injury. First, it means acknowledging the extensive efforts undertaken by Hirschfeld and his collaborators in nurturing an exceptional venue dedicated to sexological research, homosexual and trans community service, and homosexual and trans rights advocacy from 1919–33. During this time, the institute expanded to a research site with over fifty rooms, drew international visitors and scholars, and influenced public health initiatives in the city of Berlin (for instance, it housed heterosexual couple counselling clinics)

14 Anders als die Andern

Figure 0.4 A postcard featuring the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Photograph by Willy Römer, 1928, bpk / Art Resource, ny.

(Beachy 2014, 161–3; 182–5). Second, it means grappling with the historical violence that effected the institute’s downfall. Attendees of the commemoration walk, which was guided by Dirk Naguschewski, would have heard a short history of the institute. This history begins with a brief biography of its famous founder and ends with the institute’s destruction. The institute’s public visibility – in no small part resulting from the active homosexual rights advocacy and public outreach by Hirschfeld himself – drew criticism from conservative voices from its founding days to its last. As such, the history of the institute is an emblem for the affirmative potential of homosexual and gender-variant communal life. It is also a reminder about how dangerous the world is and can be for queer and trans people.

Introduction 15

The next stop on the walk is the Magnus Hirschfeld Monument, located almost directly opposite the hkw on the other side of the Spree River (Berlin Pride Guide). Six tall calla lilies each in a different color of the rainbow were installed alongside the river walk to commemorate the first homosexual and gender-variant rights movement. On 15 May 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) with the motto, “Per scientiam ad justitiam” (“through science to justice”) (Beachy 2014, 85–6). Under the auspices of this committee, he aimed to establish media, scientific, and advocacy initiatives to improve living conditions for homosexual and gender-variant people. As a permanent dedication to Hirschfeld’s life work, the monument – which was the product of an lsvd advocacy campaign – signals the endurance of the movement from the latenineteenth century to today. The attendees of the commemoration then took a short bus ride from the monument to the lsvd headquarters in Schöneberg (one of Berlin’s queer and trans neighbourhoods), where the screening of Anders als die Andern was held. The commemoration event focused on the long history of queer and trans advocacy. It did not keep this history confined to the past, but told the story of Anders als die Andern as a chapter in a long struggle that stretches into our current moment. Standing on the former grounds of the Institute für Sexualwissenschaft and then proceeding to the Hirschfeld monument links the past to the present without collapsing them into one another. The monument, which is explicitly invested in recognizing the long history of queer and trans rights that continues to the present moment, invited attendees of the commemoration event to feel part of this history. A visit to this monument prompted participants to recognize a struggle that began over one hundred years prior to their moment. The organizers likely sought to use the visit as a means to empower visitors to support queer and trans rights today. The walk, then, echoes some of the intellectual premise behind Macor’s adaptation of Anders als die Andern. Both projects are interested in queer history, both its good and the bad parts – or, rather, both projects cite the inspirational material

16 Anders als die Andern

while also facilitating more painful attachments that the engagement with queer history might bring about. A still earlier commemorative initiative has secured the first wide distribution of Anders als die Andern in North America. It is characterized by an astonishment about the material given the hostility to which the film was subjected over time. As the work of the most prominent historian of the film, James Steakley, has demonstrated, Anders als die Andern had been shown on New York City’s public access television channel 28 June 1986, as part of pride week activities commemorating the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 (Steakley 1999, 181). A day later, it was also shown as part of “Gay Pride Week” programming on Los Angeles’s public access television channel kcet (Taylor 1986). The Los Angeles Times review of the program dramatized the occasion with an article titled “Once Feared Lost to Nazis: Restored German Film with Gay Theme on kcet.” The review quotes Vito Russo, who proclaims that the “film fragment survives as an accident of history” (Taylor 1986). At that point a twentythree-minute fragment (the latest restoration by the Film Museum München has a running time of fifty-one minutes, and the original film was approximately ninety minutes long), Anders als die Andern arrives to US TV audiences for pride week through a near impossible set of circumstances. The article foregrounds the film’s importance for pride week via recourse to its status as an artifact of queer rights advocacy that – against all reason – endured not only various attempts to erase it from cultural memory during the Weimar era; the article also notes how the film survived the forceful anti-queer structures that proliferated during the Nazi era. In this framing, Anders als die Andern not only embodies a particular kind of persistence despite the historic violence of homophobia that sought to stop it from conveying the queer history from the past. The film’s message, which vehemently criticized the legal and social systems that oppressed queer people, also afforded it a sort of timeless relevance. Combined with its content, the film’s persistence as fragment offered a message of empowerment for the queer rights struggle underway in 1986 in the usa.

Introduction 17

As was the case with the adaptation and the commemoration walk, the screening of the film in 1986 activated the film’s affirmative and mournful energies alike. All three examples from the film’s long reception history deploy these energies in the service of sustaining queer rights discourse and activism, while also not letting go of the devastating realities attending queer life in cultural settings at different stations of history.

Anders als die Andern as Fragment The 1986 Los Angeles Times article cited above has already established a link between the film’s fragmentation conditioned by its history of survival against all odds and audience astonishment. The article posited that even in fragmented form the film has been productive in eliciting supportive audience interest in it. In this regard, Lauren Elizabeth Pilcher has demonstrated how two restoration projects of Anders als die Andern – one by the Filmmuseum München and the other by Outfest ucla Legacy Project – actively foreground the film’s fragmentation in their attempt to activate the film for contemporary audiences. Both restorations work with an extant twenty-four-minute fragment and supplement it with subtitles and photographs based on archival material, which in both cases yields a fifty-one-minute film. Pilcher’s study outlines how these restorations “rely on imagined collections of extra-filmic materials that contextualize the fragment for contemporary audiences and allow spectators to visualize it as ephemera of lgbtq history” (Pilcher 2015, 37). However, neither project is interested in “recreating an accurate experience of the 1919 feature-length film” (58). This would not be possible given the parameters of what is left of it. Pilcher notes how the restoration projects instead aim to “contextualize the absence of the fragment by imagining and reimagining its homosexual content as part of an expanding contemporary archive experience on-screen or in digital media spaces” (Pilcher 2015, 58). This activation of the fragment

18 Anders als die Andern

for contemporary audiences follows a two-step process that Pilcher calls “archival failure.” First, the film as fragment resists (and thus queers) received film archival procedures. By surviving in pieces with little to no evidence that longer material would ever be available, and despite being pursued by two international restoration projects, the film persists as fragment. Two, the film – as a fragment reconstructed with archival material such as photographs and intertitle sequences that call attention to its fragmented quality – enacts a type of intentional failure devised by archivists. Pilcher admirably argues that the restoration projects thereby not only position viewers to ponder the gaps between authentic footage and restoration material, but also stimulate viewers’ imagination of past queer life. The gaps in the film become invitations. As such, its patchiness, far from being a distraction to viewers, is a constitutive part of how contemporary viewers can engage with the film. More recently, in 2019, Sara Friedman has similarly discussed Anders als die Andern in terms of its status as a “chimera, cobbled together from stills” and “footage that survived the Nazi takeover” (Friedman 2019). In her assessment, the film’s recovery facilitates a “second tale” – that is, a new history of reception for the film among post-Paragraph 175 audiences.2 These viewers often experience this patchiness digitally through the film’s rather wide availability via various online platforms. For Friedman, such convenient accessibility provides contemporary audiences a unique glimpse into early twentieth-century homosexual rights discourse. In fact, the accessibility of the film, coupled with a certain notoriety it garnered in cinephile circles, circumvents many official outlets such as university curricula through which the history of the film and the early homosexual rights movement in Germany would have been channelled to people. In this regard, consider that the social media platform Letterboxd, which provides a forum for users to post personal responses to films, contains over 400 personal reviews of the film. Furthermore, nearly 3,000 members noted they watched the film and it is featured on over 2,000 lists, which permit members to “collect, curate, and share,” as their website notes

Introduction 19

(www.letterboxd.com/lists). These numbers continue to rise no doubt as a direct consequence of the (sometimes illicit) copies of Anders als die Andern circulating on various digital platforms.

Transmutation, Migration, and the Persistence of Anders als die Andern The most authoritative version of Anders als die Andern in circulation in 2023 is distributed on dvd by the Filmmuseum München. This dvd will be the basis for my own work in this book. The fragment used for the restoration has a famous history to which the Los Angeles Times review of the tv screening of the fragment already pointed. Steakley has traced this history meticulously, and so many of us working on the film (scholars and students alike) remain indebted to his work. Following the reinstitution of film censorship in 1920 – which I will discuss in detail in chapter 1 – Anders als die Andern was banned for public screenings. In 1927, Hirschfeld sought to repurpose the film and make it available for the public again by reshuffling the scenes and including it as chapter 5 of a multi-episode film on modern sex practices, Gesetze der Liebe: Aus der Mappe eines Sexualforschers (Laws of Love: From the Dossier of a Sexologist) (see Hirschfeld and Beck 1927). Through the film, Hirschfeld hoped he could introduce some of the banned material from Anders als die Andern in drastically shortened form for public consumption. The transmutation of the original material yielded a twenty-four-minute episode titled, “Schuldlos geächtet! Tragödie eines Homosexuellen” (“Innocently Ostracized: The Tragedy of a Homosexual”). I turn to the descriptor “transmutation” to signal the severity of the project. Even though the episode is comprised of scenes from the original Anders als die Andern, the transmediation process is more than a minor modification. The episode not only uses about 20 per cent of the roughly ninety-minute original filmstrip, but

20 Anders als die Andern

the reordering of scenes yielded a different storyline even if with familiar scenes from the original. Notwithstanding the transmutation that yielded a different film, Gesetze der Liebe was banned only a few weeks after it was initially approved by the censorship board (Steakley 1999, 194). Shortly thereafter, the film received the green light again after a rigorous debate internally among the panels of censors, but was only allowed to be screened for adults with all the homosexual material cut from the original (194) – meaning, the episode containing footage from Anders als die Andern. Steakley notes that during each of the discussions, censors evoked the same ruling against the material in the film that was deployed against Anders als die Andern in previous years: “any filmic portrayal of homosexuality whatsoever could in effect seduce impressionable audience members,” which substantiated calls to censor it (194). And so, the transmutation of the original film was also interrupted. However, the source material comprising “Schuldlos geächtet!” takes on the form of a vehicle through which portions of the original Anders als die Andern were channelled to our time today. Steakley believes that German copies of Gesetze der Liebe may have succumbed to Nazi efforts to destroy such materials. Despite the structural hostility against the material, a 1928 copy of it had made it to the Soviet Union, before finally traveling to Vienna “for a 1971 Richard Oswald retrospective” (195). Steakley’s research has furthermore shown how a Soviet copy was made available for a 1974 screening of the film in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). It is important to note that the Soviet version was subjected to Soviet censorship. In Steakley’s assessment, the censors “altered Hirschfeld’s words to describe homosexuality as a pathology criminalised because of the threat it posed to youth” (194). Through the help of gay activists, the East German copy of the film eventually reached the Filmmuseum München. This copy serves as basis for the film we have in circulation today (195; see also Steakley 2007, 13–14). The restoration work on the film in part

Introduction 21

included revising the material modified by censors. In Munich, professionals restored the film’s affirmative gay messaging.

The Emotional Reception of Anders als die Andern For Richard Dyer, the constitutive elements of Anders als die Andern are “a love story and a lecture” (Dyer 1990, 27). Here, Dyer foregrounds the structural hostility that burdens the budding same-sex relationship between Körner and Sivers and the lecture by the physician in which the expert calls for tolerance for homosexuals. The interrelationship between the melodramatic storyline and the call for reform as articulated by the physician in the lecture and at the end of the film contributes in no small part to the emotional energies that resonated with audiences across the film’s reception history (Malakaj 2017, 216–30). Scholars working on the film have access to supportive responses by both contemporary and subsequent audiences of Anders als die Andern, which have all variously remarked on the film’s powerful emotive force. This emotionality pertains not only to the message advocating for the abolishment of Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Penal Code, which criminalized male homosexuality. Although this call for reform of the legal code, which I will discuss in chapter 1, is certainly a prominent structural feature of the film, nevertheless what leads up to it is a potent recounting of same-sex love under impossible circumstances, as well as the protagonist’s mental and physical anguish about living in a world hostile to homosexuals. The film’s melodramatic narrative and visual style, which I discuss in chapter 2, then pattern an intense sentimentality informing the film’s long reception history. I would like to turn to other examples from the film’s long reception history to illustrate some of these points. The October 1919 edition of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types) – the main advocacy and scholarly periodical of the Scientific-Humanitarian

22 Anders als die Andern

Committee and which was edited by Hirschfeld – printed a full dossier on the film. In addition to a summary of the plot, the compilation featured excerpts of the film’s reviews published in periodicals throughout Germany. It also contained letter excerpts addressed to Hirschfeld from various individuals who watched the film. An anonymous writer remarks how much he was moved by the film’s storyline: “I watched your film. I’m shaken to the core. Oh, these poor people were robbed of luck! Why are they persecuted? Why is there not more effort to study their true core” (Hirschfeld 1919, 42)?3 This contemporary reviewer’s response is grounded in the melodramatic storyline. The questions posed convey a sense of astonishment about the state of things for homosexual men at the time. The fictional couple’s misfortunes, which are conditioned by violent social and legal circumstances, index a painful storyline featuring personal suffering that is ultimately devastating for the viewer. I want to acknowledge here that Hirschfeld carefully curated the contents of the journal he edited. This strategy served to support his broader undertakings with the Institute for Sexual Science, which pursued precisely the type of work for which the anonymous admirer of Anders als die Andern calls in the letter. However, this strategic compiling of reactions to the film – which ultimately is part of Hirschfeld’s broader media praxis intended to improve queer life – does not invalidate the emotional flair at the core of the writer’s response.4 The film was, as I will discuss in the next chapter, specifically devised to elicit emotional responses from viewers. More recent viewers likewise comment on the effective emotional force of the film’s melodramatic storyline. In this regard, the social media platform Letterboxd offers dozens of responses to Anders als die Andern similar to the one I discussed above. For instance, the user friedgreengibbs’s 1 March 2020 review isolates the film’s preoccupation with “the feeling of shame and of yearning” (friedgreengibbs 2020). Writing about the interplay of the title character’s struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with the burden of anticipating the effects of going public about it, the reviewer articulates the pain of watching the opening scene: “Just the opening hit me, with Veidt’s character reading

Introduction 23

in the newspaper of suicides committed by gay men and imagining a long line of historical figures who were persecuted for their gayness … it really hurts” (friedgreengibbs 2020). The structural oppression of homosexuals in 1919 weighs heavy on this reviewer’s disposition. However, the pain is not solely affiliated with (and thus confined to) an object from the past. The film’s foundation – that is, a story about structural hurdles for same-sex love and life – feels painfully current. To illuminate this point, friedgreengibbs turns to an example. As an alumna of Brigham Young University, the reviewer describes how she felt relieved when in 2020 the conservative institution lifted sanctions against same-sex relationships among students in its honour code. However, the institution reversed the amendment only weeks later (Carlisle 2020). The reviewer watched the film and posted the review during a brief time period when the sanction had been lifted. “Veidt’s character is blackmailed. I know students at my alma mater were blackmailed and abused because their tormentors knew they were trapped by the bounds of the Honor Code – that if they told anyone what was going on, they could be expelled. You don’t sit down to watch a movie like this from 1919 and expect it to touch on such specific things that you can recognize from your own lifetime. At least, I didn’t expect that” (friedgreengibbs 2020). For friedgreengibbs, the pain affiliated with the impossibility of living queerly depicted in the film radiates from 1919 and reaches into our present. The reviewer did not anticipate a historically distant cultural object to carry such an emotional force that speaks to her experience in the present. But Anders als die Andern indeed accomplished precisely that. A host of reviews on Letterboxd align with the points friedgreengibbs’s review raises. Olivia Gallup’s 17 May 2020 review of Anders als die Andern is particularly interesting in this regard. Gallup echoes friedgreengibbs’s evocation of a transgenerational culture facilitated by the film: “It’s comforting but also heartbreaking to understand how long the queer community has been fighting” (Gallup 2020). For Gallup, the momentary pain of apprehending the struggle the characters face on film fuses with a recognition that the

24 Anders als die Andern

film had been part of broader queer rights struggles in Weimar Germany. Moreover, this structural pain resonates with contemporary audiences, culminating in their acknowledgment that the struggles living life queerly in a post-queer-rights world still take a familiar form. For many reviewers, the film’s survival story as a cultural text that persevered against all odds and that bears the violence of this perseverance in the very form of its fragmented body is also an extension of the emotionality affiliated with the storyline of the original text. A Letterboxd review by Alice from 20 February 2020 attests to this. Alice notes, “it’s a real shame and tragedy that so much of [the film] got destroyed by the nazis” (Alice 2020). It is important to remark that the film’s survival history is a bit more complicated than that. Historians of the film can but speculate what happened to its early prints. Moreover, as Christian Rogowski has noted, in 1919, the year in which Anders als die Andern appeared – Germany “produced no fewer than 470 films; the next year, the number increased to a staggering 510” (Rogowski 2010, 3–4). The majority of these films are considered “lost” due to the fragile nature of the filmstrips on which they were encoded, as well as inadequate preservation culture at the time that they were made. Anders als die Andern, in this regard, would be subjected to the same fate as other films from the era. Nonetheless, Alice’s point is well taken. By targeting the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a cultural institution which would have housed complete copies of the 1919 original and preserved them for posterity, the Nazis most certainly posed a threat to the film and nearly eradicated it from history.

Bad Feelings Based on the reviews above, as well as my personal experience watching the film, I would like to propose the following thesis: viewing Anders als die Andern in (and beyond) 2023 is an exercise in activating a host of complicated feelings about its own history and its subject matter for the present. More

Introduction 25

precisely, it is an operation that captures what Heather Love has called “feeling backward” (Love 2007). Love is interested in “the unexpected continuities between the queer past and the queer present” (17). Writing from the vantage point of queer optimism as articulated in the progress scripts of queer rights discourse (for example, the valorization of the legalization of gay marriage), Love notes that affirmative historical moments tend to obfuscate the “painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality” (4). Contemporary discourse about the progress in queer rights advocacy embraces optimism and pride as guiding paradigms for a future unburdened by structural violence against queers. It pursues what I will call “affirmative” feelings that variously align queers with progress narratives invariably celebrating an already existing present liberated from most burdens suppressing queer life or casting such a state as immanent. So-called “bad feelings” like shame, depression, grief, or loneliness feel incompatible, even antagonistic to queer affirmation post-Stonewall. Consequently, Love views feeling backward as a means to resist the optimism of the present. Feeling backward does describe an engagement with cultural texts that embrace negativity in an attempt to recognize what Love calls “the gap between aspiration and the actual” (4). In its overt emphasis on prideful optimism, public queer rights discourse nurtures a romance with progress sometimes distortive of the state of things. As Love notes, “queers are hated; we wish we were not; but wishing does not make it so” (27). Here, feeling bad can become a means by which to recognize this – or to be reacquainted with this fact. Feeling backward is indeed a sensation of feeling out of sync with the promises of queer progress. However, it is important to point out that its investment is not to reject queer optimism. Rather, feeling backward calls attention to the negativity that characterizes queer life in the present that persists despite the achievements of the modern queer rights movement(s). Love notes that cultural texts from the past that embrace queer negativity are particularly interesting for the operation of feeling backward because they help inspire complicated feelings in us today that diverge from queer optimistic tendencies

26 Anders als die Andern

(Love 2007, 3). Such capacity to inspire negative feelings is precisely what makes historical queer texts preoccupied with bad feelings a worthwhile endeavour. In positioning us to feel backward, such texts help us immerse ourselves in “ruined or failed sociality” (22). However, this backward gesture is not intended as a foil by which we should come to appreciate the current state of things (that is, turning to objects about the past to help us glean how things were horrible back then, and how much better they are now). As Love notes, “paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present” (29). Giving ourselves over to the painful stories in queer history means confronting the heavy burden of historical injury committed against queer people. Dwelling at the site of convergence of the negative as construed by fictional, social justice, and historical accounts of queer injustice could inspire a more realistic, if sombre outlook on queer life in the present. Love participates in a line of thought about negative affect that, as Ann Cvetkovich’s work on depression seeks to do, aims to “depathologize negative feelings” (Cvetkovich 2012, 2). In so doing, work on bad feelings articulates their generative capacities for social life. For thinkers working in this arena, contemporary life is burdened by the impasse of neoliberal forms of striving that slowly undo us through their pressures on our body-minds. Lauren Berlant (2011) succinctly articulates the condition’s affective register in the phrase “cruel optimism,” which describes how the very thing we are aiming to achieve wears us down. In my view, Berlant helps cast into sharp focus the high cost of queer optimism. Turning to progressive scripts announcing a better world through hard work and commitment – scripts thriving under the affective register of good feelings like optimism and pride – leaves many people behind and casts much of the anti-queer hostility of our current world illegible. Negative feelings, however painful, can then diffuse faulty optimism by tethering us to the sombre reality about the world in which we live.

Introduction 27

Cvetkovich has discussed the generative premise of negativity on the basis of the impasse that attends depression. An impasse suppresses progression in that it tethers us to the moment and grounds us in a state of arrested development. By definition, an impasse is thus anti-progressive. Experiencing impasse, which slows down experience, “might not be a sign of failure and might instead be worth exploring” (Cvetkovich 2012, 21). In fact, an impasse might prompt us to pursue creative ways to be in a world otherwise conditioned by a progress that does not offer adequate resources for survival for some. For Cvetkovich, impasse and the anti-progressivist stuckness that it inspires can be a powerful means by which to sense our way into collective struggles for a better world. To me, and to a number of viewers over the course of the film’s long reception history, Anders als die Andern is deeply entwined with bad feelings. The film’s impossible love story, its painful ending with the protagonist’s suicide, and the burdened history of censorship, transmutation, and migration collectively facilitate backward feelings. Viewed from this vantage point, the film resists any simplistic message of empowerment about queer progress – and, as I will show below, thereby even challenges its very own call for legal reform at the end of the film. Anders als die Andern will certainly continue to solicit astonishment of the variety I cited at the opening of this introduction, because it absolutely is an extraordinary cultural artefact. Viewers will continue to be astonished by scenes in which they gain insight into the subcultural life of sexual minorities during the Weimar era. For instance, a famous scene in which Körner meets Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) for the first time takes place at a queer masquerade ball (figure 0.4). These are to some, as they were to me, jaw-dropping moments mediating joyous excitement among queer figures from the past. However, these moments do not negate the pain that proliferates throughout the film. On the contrary, the repose they provide for viewers in a lot of ways intensifies viewers’ devastation about the moments of hostility against the protagonist. In true melodramatic form,

28 Anders als die Andern

Figure 0.5 Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) approaches Körner at a queer masquerade ball giving insight into Weimar queer subcultural life.

the “good” scenes are the foundation for the “bad” to thrive. And so, this book will not turn to optimism; I do not aim to make my readers happy. I also do not want to foreground the happiness of the film (certainly evoked in some scenes). Instead, I provide an analysis that attends to the negative feelings invariably attached to and facilitated by the film. The mournful storyline at the heart of Anders als die Andern is conveyed through different filmic procedures that help articulate its bad feelings. In my account, I will turn to the study of embodiment practices and perfor-

Introduction 29

mance style in order to assess how the pain characters feel takes form in the film. Early film theory, in particular the work of Béla Balázs, will be important for my analysis. Balázs saw in the body of the performer an important site at which film appeals to its audiences. Following this premise, which I will discuss in detail in chapter 2, performers channel into the roles a vitality informed by their lived experience and an intimate understanding of humanity as it pertains to the role they play. Watching film is then a deeply intimate matter, in that audiences are prompted to study gestures and expressions in order to apprehend in them the very humanity that performers bring to their roles. In the case of Anders als die Andern, the mournfulness of the storyline intensifies the already intimate process of watching film. The queer impossibility of living the life the film conveys produces a sadness that arrests development, quells political capacities, and indeed leaves viewers with little more than to mourn the characters’ stifled lives on screen. I connect the discourse on bad feelings with cinema’s capacity for intimate engagement with bodies to generate a theory of watching queer films of the past as a means to recognize the existing threats to queer life today.

Why Queer? Some purists reading or working on queer cultural history tend to want to reserve “queer” as descriptor for specific moments in history. For example, one critique is that using terms or categories common in the twenty-first century in order to make legible experiences of the past constitutes anachronism.5 In the scholarship on the history of sexuality, in particular that pertaining to Hirschfeld’s work and the broader discursive practices of the WhK, a common practice is instead to turn to terminology of that time period. To me, such an approach does not work for the type of intervention I hope to make in the scholarship on Anders als die Andern.

30 Anders als die Andern

Hirschfeld’s discursive practice to describe same-sex relations, trans embodiment, and gender-sexuality practices included words such as “homosexual,” “third sex,” and “transvestite,” among others. Already in the 1904 pamphlet, Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex, 2017), he outlines varieties of lived experience and embodiment that can be captured under some of these terms as well as others. It is not my intention to rehearse here insights by scholars who have engaged extensively with the history of nomenclature attached to Hirschfeld as well as other early sexologists. Scholars like Heike Bauer (2017) and Robert Beachy (2014) have already done so in admirable fashion. I encourage you to turn to their scholarship if you are interested to learn more. I do want to point out, however, that Hirschfeld frequently subjects his linguistic markers to variations, outlines their overlaps, points to blurred lines between terms in ways that, I believe, establish their flexibility. Even though the term “queer” is not part of this repertoire, I do believe that the flexibility of “queer” as a descriptor for various kinds of lived experience and embodiment is productive in that it echoes Hirschfeld’s own flexibility. I do use the terms “homosexual” or “homosexuality” when quoting specific moments in Hirschfeld’s work. I follow the same practice for discussing some portions of Anders als die Andern in which such descriptors are immediately helpful or when interacting with the scholarship on the film that turns to such language. One component of the film’s subject matter, after all, relates to same-sex desire, which certainly aligns character development in Anders als die Andern with the semantic field of homosexuality. The film is pretty straightforward about the cis male lead characters and their romantic and sexual commitment to one another. But what audiences make of this commitment is the stuff of queerness, which in this regard pertains to the media relations audiences enter when in the company of cultural texts pertaining to nonnormative sexuality. These queer media relations can accommodate many different types of interpretations on the basis of viewers’ individual histories and how those interact with

Introduction 31

the fate of the characters depicted on film. Because I trace the film’s reception history, which includes extensive reflection about my own engagement with the film as well as that of people across its over one-hundred-year history, adhering to language of the past does not always help to account for complicated transhistorical media interaction with contemporary queers. Describing historical engagement with the film as a type of queer media practice thus feels more appropriate. I also read the film as more than just a film about homosexuality. Anders als die Andern attunes viewers to the many irritations that nonnormative sexual subjects impose upon or suffer as a result of the cisheterocapitalist world order. Sara Ahmed has described such irritation via recourse to the concept of “lines that direct us” (2006, 16). These lines “depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition” (16). Subjects unable or unwilling to take such paths on are cast as queer. Queer subjects are not only anomalies in that their non-adherence to the path casts them as incompatible with the very nature of the path; they also call into question that a particular path itself is cast as matter of course for them. For Ahmed, familial lineage is one such line. It is built on the premise of what Adrienne Rich has termed “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 1993). Here, heterosexuality secures a child’s investment in familial lineage (Ahmed 2006, 21). The child, according to Ahmed, accrues a personal debt to the system of heterosexuality as a result of being born and is expected to “return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along the course” (21). Failure to reach “certain points” constitutes queerness. Subjects cast as queer because of their failure to follow paths become a problem because of their inability to reach predetermined points and are tasked to find ways to overcome this challenge. It is precisely along these lines that the characters in Anders als die Andern also live queer lives: their very nature constitutes a threat to the family unit in that neither will be

32 Anders als die Andern

able to make good on their familial debt. By extension, they are both cast as asocial threats to the community in which the family belongs. Sexual difference then bears the power to shatter relations, transform lineages, and thus becomes a radical form of threat to the established world order. Queer theory and the descriptor “queer” are particularly well equipped to attend to the irritations to assemblages of the status quo articulated in the film.

Outline for the Book I will outline Anders als die Andern’s negativity over the course of three chapters. In the first chapter, I will relay the film’s production history. The chapter will focus on the film’s position in the broader history of melodrama as well as sexology. Although the film was co-written by Hirschfeld, its formal investment and audience appeal were patterned according to genre conventions that, in my reading, intimately align it with the popular culture industry of its time. Here, one of the points I hope to make is that tethering the film too closely to the history of sexology and early homosexual rights discourse (as has been done before) might sideline the central feature of the film: it was made for popular consumption. The second chapter concerns an analysis of gesture and expression as well as other cinematographic features of melodrama in Anders als die Andern. This approach will help me isolate key narrative and formal components that afford viewers intimate access to characters’ bad feelings. The third chapter will then expound how the film’s investment in negativity becomes a key means by which to decode its commentary on modern queer life. Here, the film’s negativity in the form of bad feelings that are difficult (if not impossible) to conscript into a progressivist rhetoric about the improving conditions for queer life today will be central. This negativity will help me account for the film’s sustained appeal for contemporary viewers and future audiences. I end with a conclusion that concerns negativity as an analytic category for

Introduction 33

queer cinema. I engage with more recent reactions to Anders als die Andern that remark on the film’s structures of sadness. I do so to establish how such negativity facilitates an intergenerational queer feeling culture. Feeling bad sometimes happens in isolation; but at times we do it together through media events such as the viewing of a film.

Chapter 1

Producing Anders als die Andern Melodrama Between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse In his work on melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg has described the genre in terms of its investment in the “impasses of the ordinary” (Goldberg 2016, 35). By recourse to everyday situations and the obstacles that render these impossible, melodrama has the capacity to resonate on some level with the daily lives of viewers. In other words, melodrama grips us by rehearsing struggles that might in some fashion reflect our own. However, the social issues at the center of melodramatic storylines maintain a tenuous relationship to social reform. Generically speaking, melodrama is less committed to solving the social issues it raises than to calling attention to them. By prompting viewers to apprehend the severity of insurmountable problems, Goldberg suggests that melodrama cannot accomplish more than offer viewers the opportunity to imagine a better world from their vantage point at a given moment in time and place. Elsewhere I have turned to Goldberg’s discussion of melodrama’s capacity to help viewers experience these “possibilities of impossibility” in order to account for the social reform message in Anders als die Andern (Malakaj 2017, 216–30). Magnus Hirschfeld was indeed interested in film as one component in a broader structure of orchestrated public, scientific, and legal reform ventures he undertook to improve life for queer people during his time. To this end, Anders als die Andern ends on a clear social reform message: Paragraph

Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse 35

175 of the Prussian Imperial Penal Code, which criminalized male homosexuality and encouraged a blackmail culture that financially ruined or drove many men to suicide, must be abolished. However, this call for reform is packaged in a melodramatic storyline, directed by a leading genre filmmaker of his time, and introduced to audiences using established patterns for genre film distribution. In this light, I propose we interpret the film as a product of the mass media culture of its time, one through which Hirschfeld hoped to raise awareness about the struggles of homosexual men. In this regard, the transformative effect of Anders als die Andern is located within the structures of feeling it evokes for viewers through its visual and narrative material. It facilitates for viewers an intimate engagement with the fates of characters facing insurmountable obstacles to live queer lives freely. In so doing, the film ultimately hopes that such engagement might compel viewers to imagine more affirmative queer futures. But it also prompts an unconditional sentimentality that points to the transhistoric hostilities that queer people face in a world harmful to them. In this chapter, I will focus on these considerations about melodrama by way of studying the production history of Anders als die Andern. The chapter is divided into two parts. On the one hand, I will situate the film in the broader trajectory of popular filmmaking by Richard Oswald, who directed the film. Here, I will examine the financial models underpinning the director’s operations that shaped what material was taken up into his film production program and why. Melodrama, as both affectively resonant and consequently financially lucrative venture – tears sell! – will be of special import in my considerations. On the other hand, I will explore how melodrama’s capacity to appeal to audiences fits in Hirschfeld’s broader homosexual rights discourse in Germany of the 1910s. Here, melodramatic imagination came to be seen as a potent tool by which to position audiences to engage with vital insights emerging out of the German homosexual rights reform efforts of its time. The context leading up to the film’s ultimate ban from public screenings is

36 Anders als die Andern

then entwined with public panics grounded in anxieties not only about the capacities of cinema broadly, but also about the prowess of melodramatic form in particular. Some felt melodrama was dangerous because it permitted audiences too much space to align with the fate of the protagonist.

Melodramatic Possibilities: The Genre Cinema of Richard Oswald and Audience Appeal Anders als die Andern premiered during a special screening arranged for the press and notable public figures on 24 May 1919 at the Apollo Theater in Berlin (Hirschfeld 1919, 3). The venue itself is an important place in German cinema history. Designed as a musical performance hall and later famous for its variaté numbers, the theatre was the setting in which the early cinema entrepreneur Oskar Messter presented among the first moving images to German audiences, around 1900 (Segeberg 2008, 304–5). One week after its official premiere, Anders als die Andern was screened for the first time to the public at the Prinzeß Theater in Berlin. The film would be on the theatre’s program for several weeks with multiple screenings per day (Steakley 2007, 68; Hirschfeld 1919, 3). Moreover, Oswald would soon be inspired by the audience success of his Aufklärungsfilme (enlightenment or social hygiene films) like Anders als die Andern to purchase the theatre for its convenient location in one of Berlin’s much-trafficked entertainment quarters. The Richard Oswald-Lichstspiele opened its doors on 19 September 1919. The theatre had the capacity to seat 500 audience members at once. It would serve as site for the premiere of the majority of the films he directed until 1925 (Kasten 2005b, 436–7). I would like to turn to Jürgen Kasten’s scholarship on the economic dimension of Oswald’s work as important contributor to the German cinema industry in the 1910s and 20s, because it helps situate Anders als die Andern in a broader trajectory that concerns media and economic practices of a key

Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse 37

cultural figure of his era. Less than a month after opening the first Richard Oswald-Lichstspiele, Oswald purchases and opens a second film theater in Berlin. Moreover, at this time Oswald not only ran his own film production company, the Richard Oswald Film GmbH, but also operated his own film distribution company with national and international partners. In short, he enacted on a much smaller scale what would become the practices of the largest German cinema conglomerates like Decla-Bioscop and Ufa, which dominated production, distribution, and exhibition sectors of the German film industry throughout the 1920s (Kasten 2005b, 436). Oswald was born 5 November 1880 into a Jewish family in Vienna. His birth name was Richard W. Ornstein. According to Hans-Michel Bock’s biography of the filmmaker, which draws on unpublished biographical manuscripts held at the Film Institute in Düsseldorf, Oswald cites the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (1881) as inspiration for his name change (Bock 1990a, 119). In the play, a syphilis-stricken character named Oswald implores his mother to aid his death. The character also discovers that his romantic interest is the illegitimate daughter of his father and thus Oswald’s sister. The devastation affiliated with both events serves as key catalyst for the melodramatic plot of the play. Oswald, the film director, recalls how stunned he was by watching the actors perform through gestures and facial expressions the deep-rooted anguish of the characters on stage: “Their effect was so strong on me that I was simply gutted in the aftermath” (119).1 Feeling transformed by the potential of theatre to affect audiences, as well as a result of his family ties to and strong interest in the theatre world, Oswald took up private acting lessons (Kasten and Loacker 2005, 503). Until 1910, Oswald worked as an actor in Vienna and left the AustroHungarian capital for Germany in the same year because of the antisemitic climate of the Viennese theater world (Kasten and Loacker 2005, 506–7). According to Bock, he quickly made a name for himself as an actor in Düsseldorf before moving on. Shortly following his arrival in Berlin in 1913, Oswald is involved in writing his first film script for Der Hund von Baskerville (The

38 Anders als die Andern

Hound of the Baskervilles, dir. Rudolf Meinert, 1914). The adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 novel is not the first time he worked with the material. For the development of the screenplay, Oswald drew on his experience undertaking what would become a popular adaptation of the novel for stage in Vienna in 1906 (510). This early film work in Berlin helped him make a name for himself among the Berlin culture industry as a cultural practitioner with a keen sense for what material speaks to broader audiences, a skill he would leverage into half a dozen theater-to-film adaptations in his first years in the German film industry (511–14; Bock 1990a, 120). Over the course of his career, Oswald would refine this early sense for popular film material. A 1921 article he published in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, a daily newspaper with a wide reach, details his investment in audienceoriented filmmaking. In the article, he complains about a variety of film criticism lodged against him which is uninterested in the business side of film production. In his assessment, film critics are unfamiliar with the broader operations of filmmaking, which necessitate financial success if a given filmmaker is to have the resources required to make another film. The critics unable to support the film enterprise on the basis of what it is – a mass market artform – have, according to Oswald, no right to offer criticism. In this regard he notes, “A film is the product of artistic handicraft. In film, success and business go hand in hand. If a good film does not make money then it is not a good film, if a bad film makes money then it is a good film” (Oswald 1990, 68). It is important to foreground that – despite his use of evaluative language in the article (for example, his mentions of “good film” and “not a good film”) – Oswald is not dismissive of aesthetic and intellectual rigour as admirable markers of quality cinema. He merely embraces cinema as a medium of the masses and, as such, observes that it is a filmmaker’s responsibility to appeal to as many viewers as possible. In 1922 Oswald wrote another article on the matter of film success for the popular German film periodical Film-Kurier in which he reiterated this point. For him, the film industry cannot afford to chase critical success at the expense of ticket sales. “Film is a public affair,” he

Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse 39

proclaims (69). “A film, which does not draw the audience into the cinema, is not seen” (70). For Oswald, risking ticket sales jeopardizes the very financial and operational structures that made the film, a risk that could endanger the possibilities of future filmmaking. Neglecting the dynamics not of taste but of audience appeal then undermines cinema itself. Such investment in popular appeal is reflected in the operations of Oswald’s production company. He began his filmmaking career at the start of the First World War. Together with other German-based filmmakers, Oswald benefited from the restrictions on foreign film imports developed and enforced during the war. These political measures exponentially boosted domestic filmmaking. Of particular interest here are French-made films, which had dominated German markets prior to the outbreak of the war. During the war, French films were not allowed to be screened. This created an opening for domestic filmmakers such as Oswald to address a growing demand for entertainment (Ritzheimer 2016, 124–5). Kasten’s research has shown how Oswald pursued a prolific filmmaking practice during this time of high demand by constantly reinvesting money earned from one project into another venture (Kasten 2005b, 436). Navigating a complex set of investors not only based in Berlin but also throughout Germany coupled with the immediate reinvestment strategies of money made from sales, Oswald was able to secure enough resources to maintain film production of sometimes up to a dozen films at the same time (436). Kasten here notes that this process helped him mitigate the risk of one film flopping with audiences by having others lined up to introduce on the market. As a result of this financial model, Oswald directed forty-two feature films between the beginning of the war and his work on Anders als die Andern at the tail end of it, a number that does not include half a dozen films for which he wrote the script or which he produced (for a complete list of Oswald’s work in the film industry, see Bock 1990b, 137–80). Over the course of this period, Oswald became an experienced filmmaker in a variety of popular film genres. Kasten uses the term “Instinktdramaturgie” to describe the director’s proclivity to identify new or to repurpose

40 Anders als die Andern

old material for the screen in ways that appeals to audiences (Kasten 2005a, 15). The bases for Oswald’s films ranged from adaptations of popular writings (for example, works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Eugenie Marlitt, and Margarete Böhme) to newly developed screenplays, sometimes in collaboration with other writers (for example, his collaborations with Magnus Hirschfeld). With regard to genre, Oswald came to be well-versed in crime, detective, and horror fiction during the era of the First World War. Most important for the purpose of this chapter, however, is his recurring investment in various subgenres of melodrama. Here, Oswald’s reflections from his 1922 Film-Kurier contribution are instructive again. In the article, he valourizes filmmaking that appeals to broad audiences by drawing on material of universal value. “Love and hate, joy and pain” represent for Oswald those “purely human qualities that have always remained the same at all times and will remain the same” (Oswald 1990, 70). In essence, melodrama would be the form through which he could give expression to these universal markers, thereby appeal to audiences, and thus satisfy his economic interest as cultural producer invested in making enough money to keep his filmmaking enterprise running. Over the course of the 1910s and 20s, melodrama came to be established as a popular film genre in the German context. Its propensity to draw on what Oswald would call a universal set of experiences spoke to audiences across class lines. The work of Heide Schlüpmann illustrates the two-pronged development of the genre in Germany. On the one hand, filmmakers turned to “serious” material as a means to stake out their claims as legitimate contributors to the culture industry (Schlüpmann 2010, 10). On the other, melodramas (as well as early cinema cultures broadly) were a gendered matter. Women constituted the majority of cinema audiences in cinema’s first decades and their experiences came to be a prime subject for melodramatic emplotment (12–13). Early cinema reformers pursued censorship measures in no small part because of anxieties affiliated with a possibly harmful effect

Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse 41

that such cinema culture could have on the institution of the German family. Representational strategies and fan cultures that challenge the politics of respectability dictating middle class life were a special concern for conservatives. Such criticism will indeed also be echoed in the eventual screening ban on Anders als die Andern. Over the course of the 1920s, popular cinematic forms like melodrama were not only criticized by conservatives. Take, for instance, the work the German film and culture critic Siegfried Kracauer. He famously dismissed melodrama as a dubious form of distraction for female viewers. His 1927 essay “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” pertains to gendered viewing pleasures. Kracauer’s condescending remarks about women viewers afford the essay a disturbing flair of misogyny (Hake 1987, 159). In it, he laments that melodrama’s penchant for sentimentality cultivates an audience culture interested in questionable spectacle of public feeling in the movie theater: “Many tears are shed which flow only because crying is sometimes easier than contemplation” (Kracauer 1995, 302–3). Instead of motivating viewers to resist the patterns of oppression attendant to modern life under capitalism – indeed, those very social issues captured in its storylines – melodrama’s engagement with conflict as a means to effect a thrill in viewers invariably does little more than to “preserve the status quo” (303). Kracauer most certainly recognized the emotional effect of melodrama, but would have disagreed with Goldberg’s considerations about its effect. For Kracauer, melodrama’s penchant to generate emotional responses in audiences is suppressed by the end of the cinematic spectacle: “Furtively, the little shopgirls wipe their eyes and quickly powder their noses before the lights go up” (303). The compulsion to move on from the cinematic experience interrupts contemplation and coerces viewers to go about their day. Notwithstanding the harsh criticism by various cultural commentators over the course of his career – or the critical stances against audience-oriented filmmaking broadly – Oswald over and again turned to the popular form of

42 Anders als die Andern

melodrama. Throughout the war years, he indeed experiments, refines, and shapes new articulations of melodrama from one project to the next. Most prominent in this regard is his work on the melodramatic subgenre of the Aufklärungsfilme (enlightenment or social hygiene films) to which Anders als die Andern belongs. It is indeed Oswald’s successful work on these films that brings him in contact with Magnus Hirschfeld in the first place. On the whole, Oswald enhanced melodrama’s existing investment in social issues by integrating into his films social reform messages. That is, he sought to harness melodrama’s capacities to relate to viewers via a set of recognizable struggles and link viewers’ emotional investment in the material to contemporary social issues. Even so, Oswald’s desire to popularize social reform messages should be viewed in the context of the economic and media practices for filmmaking to which he as audience-oriented filmmaker subscribed. This is not to say that Oswald had no stakes in the political messages embedded at the core in the social hygiene films like Anders als die Andern that he produced.2 Rather, it means that his investment in the affective prowess of melodrama as a popular culture form has some political capacities and some limits. The scandal-prone enlightenment or social hygiene films certainly drew audiences. A filmmaker with an astute sense for lucrative ventures like Oswald would have no difficulties deciding between the making of an enlightenment film with good chances that it would appeal to audiences and another type of film. As we will see below, even Hirschfeld saw film as one among other media strategies to advance his homosexual rights undertakings. In light of a collaboration among cultural practitioners who sought to reach audiences, their interest in melodrama’s capacities is bound up with the affect-laden moments of viewing and any potential affective resonances that linger with viewers and accompany them as they move on from the cinematic spectacle. Neither Oswald nor Hirschfeld would be deterred by Kracauer’s tear-wipe at the end of the cinematic spectacle, which allegedly suppresses emotionality or even can-

Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse 43

cels it. Rather, their investment in melodrama might be better understood through Goldberg: melodrama prompts viewers to consider better worlds. This is an emotion-conditioned phenomenon that not always but sometimes lingers beyond the viewing. Either way, the social hygiene film proved to be a worthy venture for the two practiced media practitioners.

Magnus Hirschfeld, Genre Cinema, and the Popularization of Early Queer Rights Collaboratively, Oswald and Hirschfeld come to harness a number of discourses and channel their scandalous, sentimental, and thus titillating potential into a very popular film. One such discourse revolves around the melodramatic subgenre of the Aufklärungsfilm (enlightenment or social hygiene film) that I mentioned above. Jill Suzanne Smith’s important work on the genre connects its emergence to “a media shift within the public health” discourse during the First World War (Smith 2010, 14; Killen 2017, 137–63). The spread of disease during the war years ushered in the establishment of various institutions tasked to improve public health through education. The Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten (German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases) as well as the Deutsches HygieneMuseum (German Hygiene Museum) drew on a number of methods to do so. Smith notes that these institutions “sought to harness the power of the visual image by organizing traveling hygiene exhibits, staging theatrical productions, and making documentary films” (Smith 2010, 14). The topics of such films had a focus on sexually transmitted diseases (for example, syphilis and gonorrhea), which were of particular interest to public officials who sought to curb their spread among the population (Schmidt 2000, 23). Through detailed visualization of the cause and effect of such diseases, as well as expert guidance of a public health official or physician narrating better

44 Anders als die Andern

hygiene practices (sometimes as live accompaniment to a film screening), these films were supposed to raise public awareness about the origin and spread of such diseases (Killen 2015, 110). However, these were not the only topics for such films. They ranged from films about smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, and cancer prevention, to those about physical exercise, hygiene in the workplace, and care work at home, as well as films about relationships, pregnancy, and sex work (Schmidt 2000, 23–4). The producers of social hygiene films quickly realized a purely documentary focus on the cause and effect of public health matters such as venereal diseases would not sustain audience interest. A 1923 government report even notes that in the long term a focus on such films as main mode to improve public health failed. The report cited esoteric scientific language, which was inaccessible to lay audiences, and the overall boring presentation of the subject matter as key reason for failure with audiences (Schmidt 2000, 36). However, some of the approaches to the hygiene film ventured into the realm of narrative fiction. Entertainment supplanted didacticism with the aim to use narrative accounts to introduce audiences to public health messages they otherwise might not receive (25). Oswald soon came to be known as one of the most successful social hygiene filmmakers to efficiently integrate reform messages into melodramatic storylines with wide audience appeal. Smith calls his 1917 blockbuster social hygiene film melodrama Es werde Licht! (Let There Be Light!) a “prototype for a new symbiosis of science and film, of public health advocacy and entertainment” (Smith 2010, 14). Supported by the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, the film dramatizes the life of two brothers, one of whom devastates the life of the other as a result of negligence with regard to his venereal disease: he seduces his brother’s fiancée, who dies during childbirth as a consequence of infection (Kasten 2005a, 86). Despite the politically turbulent time toward the end of the First World War, Oswald’s film becomes an audience success, grossing the filmmaker three times more than what he invested in the film (87). From here, he even creates three sequels to the film.

Melodrama between Genre Cinema and Public Health Discourse 45

The German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases endorsed the first part of the series and likely financially supported Oswald’s production of the film. However, it soon abandoned the support of the director, which inspired Oswald to turn to two sexologists for endorsement. For a collaboration on the first two sequels of Es werde Licht!, Oswald enlisted the help of the venereal disease expert Iwan Bloch; and for the third one, Oswald turned to Magnus Hirschfeld (87). Important to note here is that Oswald’s association with Hirschfeld begins before their collaboration on Anders als die Andern. By the time their collaboration begins, Oswald had secured experience in aligning his work with an “official” association or figurehead as consultant by way of lending credence to his films’ social reform message. However, whether this was done out of genuine interest to lend scientific credulity to his storylines is not clear. What is clear, however, is Oswald’s investment in audience-oriented filmmaking. In the years 1917, 1918, and 1919 – the latter one being the year in which Anders als die Andern premiered – Oswald made a name for himself as successful filmmaker of social hygiene films at the same time as he continued releasing films in various genres. The ten films directed by Oswald released in 1917 counted melodramas, crime stories, and a comedy. In 1918, eleven of the films he directed were melodramas as well as various popular literary adaptations that included travel accounts. His eclectic approach to filmmaking firmly aligns with the economic model he developed for it. As such, his social hygiene films must be situated in this model, notwithstanding the negative attention that these would garner him in the form of conservative pushback about their subject matter, a culture of criticism so extensive that it might actually distort the place these films actually held in his overall production program. Oswald collaborated with a host of on-screen talents over the course of his social hygiene film productions. These creatives would leave an important mark on the German film industry throughout the 1920s, and in some cases beyond that, working on some of the most iconic films from the era. For instance, Oswald is widely regarded as a catalyst for the career of Conrad Veidt.

46 Anders als die Andern

Veidt, who played the leading role in Anders als die Andern, was also featured in the fourth part of Es werde Licht! (1918), as well as the two-part social hygiene film Die Prostitution (Prostitution, 1918/1919). These hygiene films likewise featured Anita Berber and Reinhold Schünzel, both of whom play figures in Anders als die Andern (Berber plays Else and Schünzel plays Bollek). This string of screen personalities came to be affiliated with Oswald’s brand. Once produced, the films were often marketed in bundled form to movie theatre owners. In the case of Anders als die Andern, one advertisement for the film in the authoritative trade press periodical Der Kinematograph features the film alongside the two-part Die Prostitution film series (figure 1.1). The advertisement even links the titles, which are framed in boxes, to one another by means of lines. The gesture makes explicit that these films are linked in some fashion, no doubt with the interest of suggesting that audiences, who enjoyed one of these films, would likely find the others engaging in similar ways. The advertisements exclusively dedicated to Anders als die Andern in Der Kinematograph featured the entire cast by name along with comparable information. Here, I would like to note that Oswald likewise collaborated with the cinematographer Max Fassbender for this string of social hygiene films. Collectively, the insistence on collaborating with specific on-screen talent and tech staff points to Oswald’s carefully orchestrated production cycle for these films. It also suggests that he stuck to a team of creatives strongly affiliated not only with quality work, but with work that yields popular success. In any case, the popular appeal of Oswald’s broader filmmaking, coupled with particular interest in his successful social hygiene film productions, ultimately paves the path for Oswald’s collaboration with Hirschfeld on the material for Anders als die Andern. Before discussing this collaboration and its effects, I would like to turn to Hirschfeld and his broader contribution to the early German homosexual rights movement. Hirschfeld was born 14 May 1868 into a well-respected Jewish family in Kolberg, a Baltic town in what is today Kołobrzeg, Poland (Mancini 2010, 1). Following his studies in medicine, he opened a private

Figure 1.1 Advertisement for Richard Oswald’s Die Prostitution alongside Anders als die Andern in Germany’s leading film trade periodical Der Kinematograph 660, 27 August 1919.

Figure 1.2 Advertisement for Anders als die Andern featuring the full cast of the film, the filmmaker, and Hirschfeld’s endorsement, among other information. From Der Kinematograph 644, 7 May 1919.

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practice in Berlin. Shortly after his move to the capital, he published a number of writings about homosexuality with the support of his friend and publisher Max Spohr. The first was the 1896 pamphlet Sappho und Sokrates, oder wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des Eigenen Geschlechts? (Sappho and Socrates, or How Does One Explain Love among Men and Women for People of Their Own Sex?). With this pamphlet, Hirschfeld sought to foreground the innateness of homosexuality by way of dispelling a widespread understanding of it as natural anomaly or character flaw. In his biographical writings, Hirschfeld cites a suicide by one of his patients as the motivation for writing this pamphlet. The event marks one of the major points of departure for his lifelong commitment to combat scientific, legal, and public misconceptions about homosexuality that drove many homosexuals to desperate acts (Hirschfeld 1986, 48).3 In fact, Hirschfeld describes Sappho und Sokrates as a publication that was published at a time of a steadily “swelling avalanche” of advocacy work in community organizing, public writing, and scientific research on queer life (48). On 15 May 1897, he forms the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (WhK, Scientific-Humanitarian Committee). The institution steadily grows in its membership as a homosexual rights organization building an advocacy platform based on “research findings and the personal experience of thousands of people” (47). Under its auspices, Hirschfeld founds and edits the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types) in the same year. The yearbook is published until 1933. The yearbook was an important publication organ for the WhK. Through it, the institution sought to disseminate new scholarship, legal, cultural, and other writing about queer topics. In fact, by the time of Hirschfeld and Oswald’s first collaboration on the final installment of the Es werde Licht! series, the sexologist was already widely known for his advocacy work, in particular for calling for the abolishment of Paragraph 175. The WhK had since 1897 pursued several failed attempts to abolish the legal code by petitioning the German parliament (In het Panhuis 2006, 14). This work waned over the course

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of and especially toward the end of the First World War. The conditions of wartime life made advocacy challenging. In December 1918, however, less than a month after the official end of the war, enthusiasm about revolutionary potential of change was palpable for the committee. As Glenn Ramsey has shown, the members of the WhK proclaimed “the new political order as favorable to the abolition of Paragraph 175” (Ramsey 2008, 90).4 A climate of restrained progressivism in the aftermath of the war would dismantle the influence of Imperial Germany’s conservative institutions, which maintained a firm grip on various sectors of public life. Emerging rights-based frameworks announced a cultural shift that would garner Weimar Germany a certain fame with regard to gender and sexual politics not only in its urban centers, but also in rural areas as a result of the expansion and popularization of various media (Marhoefer 2015, 16–17). The WhK sought to harness this progressivist enthusiasm affiliated with the immediate afterwar period for its political mission. While strategizing another round of public and legal appeals to repeal Paragraph 175, its executive board also pursued initiatives that sought to reach the broader public. It is at this time that Oswald approached the WhK with an idea for a social hygiene film that would aid their initiative to abolish the legal clause. There is no doubt that this proposal to the WhK was somehow arranged in consultation with Hirschfeld; however, what the communication between Oswald and Hirschfeld was beforehand is unclear. The proposal for the film and a discussion about it are recorded in the minutes from a 1918 WhK meeting published in the fourth issue of the Vierteljahrsberichte des Wissenschaftlichhumanitären Komitees (Quarterly Reports of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), the official publication that replaced the Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen during the war years. Oswald is said to have presented the WhK in absentia with two different script ideas for the film (Hirschfeld 1918, 171–2). A number of members of the committee were principally against enlisting film as a means through which to spread information about their cause. They likely feared a trivialization of what they viewed as a serious sub-

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ject matter. Ultimately, however, the committee decided in favour of the film. The report goes on to describe film as “one of the most effective means to enlighten the masses” as long as it possesses the “necessary scientific basis” for its undertaking and is steered in the right direction (171). The committee’s guidance and the collaboration on the script with Hirschfeld would secure this premise. Moreover, they would assure that the film is “subtle and agreeable,” as well as developed in such a way to position viewers to apprehend that “the biological and psychological development of homosexuals” is “innate and irrevocable” (172). Such matter of translating the specialized scientific and legal insights developed under the auspices of the WhK into lay language for the public was long part of Hirschfeld’s broader public-engagement strategies. Ina Linge’s work has shown how Hirschfeld, in addition to pursuing expert publications to shift scientific and legal language during his time in venues such as the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, also wrote texts specifically for the public. To this end, Linge names as one example Hirschfeld’s 1904 short book Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex). The book deploys accessible language detailing queer life in the capital in an attempt to reach a general audience with information that might change public opinion about queers (Linge 2018, 597–8). Film, in particular the popular variety for which Oswald was known, would be an extension of the popular media engagement strategies already in the repertoire of the WhK. And so, when a filmmaker known not only for his appeal to audiences, but also for his successful production history of social hygiene films, approached the WhK for a collaboration, it would not have been the first time the committee would have been prompted to consider a popular media form for its political work. The rise of film as a medium of the masses presented many opportunities, even if some members of the WhK resisted its temptation. Consider that by 1924, Vienna boasted 171 movie theaters, some of which had the capacity for hundreds of viewers with multiple showings per day (Resch 2008, 116). In comparison, film enthusiasts in Berlin could pick from 342 theaters by 1925

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(Kreimeier 1999, 112). Some were small neighbourhood venues. Others were much larger. For instance, the Capitol-Filmpalast – one of the largest film “palaces” in Berlin of the mid-1920s – had a capacity for 1,500 viewers (Weitz 2007, 227). This thriving moving image culture was augmented by dozens of film periodicals, film columns, and other film discussions in newspapers, as well as a burgeoning film book culture that collectively shaped what Sabine Hake has described the discursive “consciousness industry” of film in this era (Hake 1993, xii). If the WhK aimed to promulgate information about its cause, the thriving cinema cultures of its time would be a rather strategic means by which to accomplish this. With regard to the production of Anders als die Andern, one other sociopolitical matter of its time facilitated the production of a film of its kind: a brief period during which film censorship was abolished. Hirschfeld’s 1918 report in the Vierteljahrsberichte des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees explicitly remarks that “the abolition of censorship and the greater freedom of speech and press are important for our cause, because they afford us greater capacity to enlighten others” (Hirschfeld 1918, 171). Laurie Marhoefer’s work has demonstrated how the “well-established movement against ‘filth’ and ‘trash’ publications had thrived in imperial Germany” (Marhoefer 2015, 31–2). Moreover, this movement was emboldened under military rule during the war years that not only “suppressed all kinds of media,” but also abruptly came to an end with the end of the war (31–2). Cultural producers interested in topics of gender and sexuality, which were vehemently controlled by the military censors previously (and Imperial Germany’s municipal offices before that), now felt a sense of freedom to pursue their subject matter with fewer restrictions. In this post-censorship climate, and with a burgeoning confidence that the new republic would strengthen progressive aims, the idea for Anders als die Andern found additional traction, means for production, and distribution (Steakley 2007, 32–3).5 Hirschfeld compiled a dossier on the film in the first postwar issue of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. In it, he lists the film’s premiere as one

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of three vital events for “our movement” in 1919. The other two are the founding of the Institute for Sexual Science, as well as the formation of the Dr Magnus Hirschfeld-Stiftung (Dr Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation) (Hirschfeld 1918, 3). Manfred Herzer’s work has detailed how the establishment of the foundation was an integral infrastructure to harness Hirschfeld’s private fortune (Herzer 2017, 287–9). Likely proceeds and donations by WhK members on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in 1918, as well as other funding sources, were used in order to gather enough capital to purchase the real estate that would ultimately house the institute (ibid.). And so, the WhK confirmed the film’s importance for its work; however, it always saw it only as one (albeit important) feature of a broader advocacy structure. The speech that Hirschfeld gave during the press premiere for the film in the Apollo Theater is reproduced in the dossier along with various film reviews and private letters sent to Hirschfeld from people who watched the film. Hirschfeld’s speech details what he saw as the key contribution of Anders als die Andern to his overall advocacy efforts. The cornerstone of the film is its capacity for “enlightenment” of the masses. In his assessment, “ignorance” is a key factor shaping hostility toward homosexuals, which can be fought with the help of “truth seekers” and “heralds of truth” (Hirschfeld 1918, 4). The life story of Paul Körner – crafted with the guidance of Hirschfeld himself – would facilitate this process. Hirschfeld describes the film material as “unusually difficult and important” (4). With regard to its multiple aims, he notes that these will not only “liberate man from undeserved humiliation” but will also “deliver humanity from a judiciary mistake” (5). In the speech, Hirschfeld furthermore speaks directly about the mode in which this work will be conducted in the film. To this end, he notes that the WhK considered a “purely scientific lecture” or to “show on the basis of an individual fate what is necessary to know” (5). Ultimately, the decision was made for a film that accomplishes both. For Hirschfeld, the lecture (which he delivers) is central for the film. However, “around it there is a simple life story, free of all exaggeration, which the expert will recognize as an all-too-common example” of the struggles of homosexual

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men (5). Hirschfeld describes these struggles as characterized by competing tensions between “unwanted aversion” on behalf of family members and “involuntary affection” (5). Moreover, the film’s storyline gives insight into the impulses, desires, and behaviours of homosexuals that lead to “the usual persecutions by the blackmailer, by society, including the family, and by the law” (5). For Hirschfeld, this common fate for homosexuals must urgently be stopped. He sees the viewing as an occasion for audiences to imagine what this work would look like for them. The film’s material, which the screening “sets in front of your eyes and your soul,” could help assure “that the procession of these victims of insufficient enlightenment does not further gain in numbers” (4, 5). The emotionally charged language in the lecture, which is grounded in Hirschfeld’s advocacy work to improve life for homosexuals during his age, primes the melodramatic storyline of the film. The emotionality indeed takes an important place in the lecture, working in tandem with its content. It seeks to define queer life as governed by a set of hurdles which, in aggregate, make it impossible. Here, impossibility is described as a daily recurrence patterned by a violent collision between ignorance and innocent, instinctive love among men. When Hirschfeld notes that he not only views the film as a visual phenomenon for the audience in front of him, but also one that reaches deep into their soul, he means that film’s subject matter will grip audiences. The blatant injustice that shapes impossible living situations for homosexual men presented in the film cannot but resonate with reasonable people presented with the right type of scientific facts about the innateness of homosexuality. This affective resonance is captured elsewhere in the dossier on the film published in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. For one, it is reflected in the reader letters reprinted there. These not only regularly cite the film’s capacity to present scientific language explaining the innateness of homosexuality to viewers who could then use it where necessary on other occasions, but also comment on the deeply moving storyline. An unnamed artist, for

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instance, appreciates the extensive care with which the film extended “human kindness” to the subject matter in such a way that “no spectator could evade” its transformative emotional force (Hirschfeld 1918, 38).6 Secondly, the dossier archived some of the press responses to the film. The Hannover-based Deutsche Volkszeitung, for instance, discusses what it describes as a remarkable feat of fusing a lecture by a scientist with “a shocking depiction of an individual life” (16). However, even in Hirschfeld’s dossier there is not a straightforward story that explains how audiences responded to the film. As James Steakley has noted, the responses were too varied (Steakley 2007, 69). The film became the talk of town, as it were, particularly among queer audiences (73). It also drew the ire from conservatives. Hirschfeld refers to some of the critics as “morality fanatics” (Sittlichkeitsfanatiker), who have objected to the film on various grounds (Hirschfeld 1918, 20). Some criticized the film’s inaccuracies about homosexuality (they rejected Hirschfeld’s assessment that homosexuality is innate), while others objected to the film’s gentle portrayal of queer love. There were concerns that it might corrupt the youth – as though homosexuality were a flu you could catch in just the right type of conditions (20). A Kiel-based Pastor, Martin Cornils, for example, condemned the cinematicemotional process whereby the protagonists of the film are made into “martyrs” in such a way that this depiction would interfere with what he views as decency in public life (35; Malakaj 2017, 4–5). Similar complaints pressured Hirschfeld and Oswald to hold another press screening for the film 17 July 1919, after which the Berliner Tageblatt pronounced the film “discreet and tactful” (Hirschfeld 1918, 20). Enthusiasm for and resentment toward the film continued over the course of the first months after its premiere (Wolff 1986, 191–2). Advertisements for it can be found across Germany and, by November 1919, in various Austrian cities. A discussion of the film in the Austrian newspaper Linzer Tages-Post from 4 August 1919, laments the film’s daily showings in Frankfurt as “nauseating”

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abuse of the cinematic medium. The reviewer notes, “Paragraph 175 belongs in front of the forum of doctors, legislators, and political representatives who can inform themselves; it is not up to the general public to make decisions about it on the basis of a tragic film novel [Filmroman]” (“Anders als die Andern” 1919, 3; Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt 1920, 18). Indeed, the reviewer hopes the film does not find distribution in Linz. The review is interesting with regard to its premise: it rejects the deliberate popularization efforts to which Hirschfeld turned as a result of repeated failures of the WhK to abolish the legal code through official routes. Furthermore, the review gives expression to an anxiety about the “novelization” of the material – that is, the film’s effective casting of the subject matter in the form of melodrama. In so doing, the film poses a threat in that it advocates for anarchy: the reviewer decries the structures of feeling underpinning its melodramatic form, which in his opinion seek to mobilize the masses against received scientific and judicial procedures. For the reviewer, the film even becomes a limit case for enlightenment practices. Notwithstanding the disgust of the Linz-based reviewer, Anders als die Andern was shown throughout Austria. A look at the 9 November 1919 issue of the Viennese film periodical Die Kinowoche lists the film in the program for a number of movie theaters (Die Kinowoche 1919). And while the Viennese newspaper Neues Wiener Journal welcomed the film’s inaugural screening in the city on 7 November 1919 by announcing it as a “tactful” treatment of challenging material, the December screening in Graz allegedly was suspended by an angry mob of fifty people demanding the film be stopped and never screened again (Neues Wiener Journal 1919, 3; Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt 1920, 18). Steakley has admirably detailed with care the history of the censorship to which Anders als die Andern was eventually subjected. As was the case in Graz, conservative audiences in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg interrupted screenings, organized petitions to police chiefs with requests to ban future screenings, and demanded that newspapers stop advertising film

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screenings all together (Steakley 2007, 81). Ethno-nationalist conservatives, writing in publications such as the protestant magazine Christliche Volkswacht, deployed what would become familiar violent tropes of antisemitism that linked Hirschfeld and Oswald’s investment in homosexual rights as a specifically Jewish impulse destructive to the very core of what they saw as moral German public life (78). As Steakley notes, such racist attacks on Hirschfeld on the basis of his Jewishness activated already existing antisemitic resentments against his person as a result of his involvement in the legal proceedings during the Harden-Eulenburg-Affair – a media spectacle surrounding the public accusation that the inner circle of Emperor William II of Germany consisted of homosexuals (83–4; see also, Steakley 2004). However, this time around the resentment exasperated to the point where violent mobs tracked down Hirschfeld on his lecture circuit to interrupt his speeches in Hamburg, Cologne, and Munich. In Munich, on 4 October 1920, a mob even “spit at him as he left the lecture hall, threw stones at him, and brutally beat him to the ground” (Steakley 2007, 85). The public harassment of Hirschfeld indicates how the dynamics of antiqueerness and antisemitism were in part co-constituted in the German public (Gelbin 2019, 121–2). Oswald likewise faced harassment in the conservative Christian press, which mobilized antisemitic tropes to outline how his orchestration of a media network in the production and dissemination of film threatened the moral order of German life in public (Steakley 2007, 77). As Steakley has shown, the director attempted to intervene in matters where local authorities stopped the screening of the film. This was the case in the North-German town Grevesmühlen, where the mayor banned the screening. After Oswald sent the mayor positive reviews of the film from a number of newspapers – a dossier that might have resembled the one Hirschfeld put together for the Jahrbuch – the mayor replied by dismissing the film as disgraceful. Oswald, angered by the blatant dismissal of someone who had not seen the film, replied with a letter copied to the local judicial administration in

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which he threatened to pursue legal measures, citing the absence of a censorship law in Germany (101). After the mayor hesitantly repealed the ban, the movie theater owners declined to show the film anyway (102). Initiatives across several cities and municipalities throughout Germany to ban the film – which are connected to a broader moral panic about the sexual politics of social hygiene films broadly7 – advanced over the course of the first year after its premiere. Hirschfeld and Oswald attempted to mitigate with special screenings and expert testimonies supporting the scientific foundation of the claims advanced in the film, but none of this would stand up against the legal parameters of a new censorship law, which was passed 12 May 1920 (McElligott 2012, 137). Conservative opponents of the film indeed cited Anders als die Andern as part of a broader campaign to advocate for a reinstitution of censorship (Berlach and Jacobsen 1990, 25). One of the common talking points cited in such critiques relates to youth culture. As Javier Samper Vendrell has shown, “The film exacerbated common fears about the power of cinema to pervert young viewers” (Vendrell 2020, 12). It is this conservative climate that ultimately led to the official ban of Anders als die Andern on 16 October 1920 (Steakley 2007, 106; see also Steakley 1999, 181–203). In the aftermath of the ban, the film was only permitted to be screened to select audiences of experts, including physicians and researchers, and even this was only possible with written support by the censorship office (Steakley 2007, 113).

Dangerous Decency: Potentials and Limits of Cinema I would like to turn to a consideration of “decency” by way of concluding this chapter and anticipating the next. Decency was not only a descriptor actively used by the WhK, but also came to be a common characterisation for the film’s treatment of homosexual love in some of the supportive reviews it received. The second press screening of the film 17 July 1919 mentioned above,

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which was precipitated by complaints by conservative critics about its indecency, indeed resulted in a review whose writer was “grateful” for the film’s “discreet” depiction of homosexual desire (Hirschfeld 1918, 20). The next day, 18 July, the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung am Mittag explicitly announced its support for the film. It noted that during the special screening, which included “physicians, scholars, public officials, and authors,” the attendees “agreed that the impeccable execution of the film material was neither indecent nor immoral” (21). As the next chapter will detail, the film’s plot was indeed a rather subdued representation of homosexual desire in that scenes of innocent touching, dancing, or embrace are the “raciest” components in its repertoire. Kai Nowak’s work on the film focuses on precisely this point by noting Hirschfeld’s political investment as one not dictated by an interest in depicting sexuality among homosexuals but rather the horrendous context in which homosexuals had to live their life (Nowak 2015, 109). However, it was precisely those moments of intimacy among men, in which the director turned to subdued depiction of physicality, that drew the harshest criticism of opponents (111). For conservatives, even the slightest indication of homosexual intimacy already crossed the line and constituted an abuse of a medium capable of not only reaching, but also “affecting,” wide audiences. It did not matter that the contemporary reports by government officials in the early 1920s pronounced that the overall impact of social hygiene films was insignificant in terms of their capacity to enact meaningful social change. The anxieties affiliated with even the idea of a film that endorses what for some were indecent acts of intimacy had enough traction to support the reinstitution of film censorship in Germany.

Chapter 2

The Form of Melodrama Gesture, Anguish, and Queer Life in Anders als die Andern The opening sequence of Anders als die Andern features the protagonist, Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt), seated at a table (figure 2.1). Here, a medium iris shot interacts with the lighting and costuming in specific ways. The white collar of the shirt contrasts with the darker smoking jacket, which in turn is further isolated by the dark outline of the iris. This framing foregrounds Körner’s gestures and expressions. The cinematography prompts us to observe Körner’s anxious reflection as he flips through various newspapers. He scans reports about the suicide of several men at various stations of their lives. One of the notices reads, “For unknown reasons, the respected circuit judge H.W. took his own life by shooting himself.” As Körner slowly lifts his eyes from the newspaper in his hands, he also casts a forward stare that contains an unmistakable flair of seriousness. The sombre mood of the sequence intensifies as Körner continues reading. Another page reveals the next death notice. The highlight of the sequence is Körner’s realization – conveyed partially through intertitles – that the suicide string is connected to Paragraph 175. The legal code not only criminalized homosexual acts among men, but also shaped social conditions that heavily burdened homosexual men. The opening sequence outlines how variously intertwined pressures to live lives as homosexuals drove the victims of this system to desperate terms. The severity of the realization for Körner is expressed through the camera lingering on him as his eyes slowly continue to widen and the newspaper falls

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out of his hands (figure 2.2). Our protagonist is stunned. The sequence ends with access to Körner’s thoughts: he imagines a procession of men, among them many famous figures, who have succumbed to the social and legal prejudice against homosexuality. At the end of the sequence, Körner is left in despair: he seems preoccupied with the thought about how he relates to all this death in the world. The contours of Körner’s burgeoning anguish, which is driven by his slow realization about what caused the deaths of so many men, progressively comes into view in this opening sequence. His expressions and gestures relay information about something that is occluded at first sight, but that becomes

Figure 2.1 Körner reading newspaper announcements about the suicide of various men.

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Figure 2.2 Körner’s expression after he realizes that the suicide announcements must be related to Paragraph 175.

legible if one has access to privileged information related to it. In short, the opening presents us with two ways of “reading” the newspaper. The normative way presumes that most readers will approach the suicide announcements with close attention to the missing motive for the death. Why would a respected judge commit suicide? Why would a student, who showed great promise for a fulfilling life, poison himself? In the case of this latter example, the newspaper explicitly notes that the student left his parents “distraught about the incomprehensible deed of the young man, for whose future they

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had cherished such fond hopes.” Here, respectable people suffer the consequences of an unnamed pressure. The tragedy lies in some invisible threat that steals the lives of people otherwise presumed to be good citizens. The other reading is the type supplied by Körner (Böni and Johnstone 2015, 14– 15). As a homosexual, Körner comes to recognize some patterns which supply him with enough information to deduce the source of the struggle that drove these men to suicide. Unlike the average reader, Körner can eventually put a name to the unidentified source of the struggle for these men. Taboos associated with public acknowledgements about homosexuality might condition family members to be reticent to share any information related to sexuality in such announcements. However, the initiated or – and this is an important rhetorical function of the social reform intentions of the film – the enlightened could see what is hidden behind the veneer of public respectability. Viewers following Körner’s gestural responses to the realization then engage with two dynamics important for the overall understanding of the film. The first one relates to Magnus Hirschfeld’s public advocacy strategies, which specifically aimed to intervene through education in the lack of public understanding about the nature of homosexuality and the social pressures that homosexuals face living in this context. To this end, his speech at the inaugural screening of Anders als die Andern at the Apollo Theater in Berlin cites a motto that is also prominently replicated at the end of the film in the aftermath of Körner’s suicide: “Through Science to Justice” (Hirschfeld 1919, 15). As Robert Beachy has shown, the motto (in its Latin version it reads, per scientiam ad justitiam) captured the mission of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, WhK): “Hirschfeld and his fellow members expected that scientific research (together with public education) would effect a dramatic cultural reassessment of homosexuality within Germany, leading eventually to acceptance and legal reform” (Beachy 2014, 86). Hirschfeld would further activate the motto in a speech on the opening night of the Institute for Sexual Science 1 July 1919, less than two months after the

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premiere of Anders als die Andern, as well as on other occasions (Marhoefer 2015, 4). These first scenes of the film could then be interpreted in the spirit of the WhK. On the one hand, the scenes illustrate for viewers the lethal dangers of not-knowing “the truth” about homosexuality and the systems that plague it. On the other, they draw attention to an unenlightened social and legal context that could begin to be remedied with just the right type of public education and revision of the legal code. In this regard, watching the film is a matter of public enlightenment. The second dynamic to which Körner’s gestural responses relate pertains to viewers’ engagement with cinematography and performance. Just as Körner was able to discern the deep secrets of those discussed in the death announcements – drawing on his personal experience to make sense of the grim fate of others – so, too, are viewers positioned to use Körner’s gestures and expressions as a means to access his innermost thoughts and feelings otherwise kept sealed away from the public. (In the opening, he is not yet “out” to those around him.) The anguish that becomes available through the performance style of Conrad Veidt then offers viewers access to privileged information. Formally, Körner’s stunned stare, his mouth slightly opened as to draw attention to a gasp, and the paper gliding out of his hands afford viewers a chance to share a deeply intimate realization with the protagonist. By foregrounding gestures and reactions, the sequence then draws attention to the protagonist’s vulnerability in a system of oppression that brought about the death of many. In this chapter, I will turn to an analysis of gesture and expression. I am interested in outlining how the film structures its melodramatic effects. The type of intimate viewing that the opening sequence facilitates collides with the unideal conditions of the world in which homosexual men are victims to prejudice and exploitation. As I will discuss below, this exploitation is also affiliated with “looking” and “knowing.” What is at stake for Körner is being recognized as a homosexual by culprits who use this information against him, for their own gain, or to make decisions that negatively impact his livelihood

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(for instance, once it is public information that Körner is a homosexual, he begins to lose income). In contrast to this extrapolative and thus hostile variety of gaining access to his innermost intimate self, the type of viewing that the film facilitates for viewers is more intensely aligned with Körner’s struggles. Consider how the opening sequence implicates viewers not only in personal, but also potentially dangerous knowledge. As we witness Körner’s history, we gain access to scenes in which it is clear that he sought out or maintained a physical relationship with other men.1 However, what viewers also witness are the struggles that attend homosexual life. Körner’s attempts to cope (even by way of conversion therapy) and the impossibility to maintain a loving relationship are characterized by desperation. By relaying these struggles and coupling them with the physician’s lecture in the film about the innateness of homosexuality, the film seeks to inform and encourage a more affirmative relation to the subject matter. However, as the next section will detail, such emotional alignment has many limits. Despite what could appear to be a straightforward solution for a major social problem advanced by the film – namely, the call to abolish Paragraph 175 and demand the public acknowledge the innateness of homosexuality – it is at odds with the very form of the film. Melodrama, and the emotional investments it solicits from viewers, is affiliated with unsolvable structural issues. As such, it is important to acknowledge the genre’s limitations regarding its relation to the material. By doing so, I aim to show what function the formal features of Anders als die Andern as a melodrama served – both for contemporaneous audiences and in the long reception of the film since.

Early Film Theory, Embodiment, Affect, and Melodrama I will begin by outlining some of the considerations about the capacities of cinema by the prominent early Central European film theorist Béla Balázs (1884–1949). Balázs has maintained a canonical status in film theory because

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of his interest to isolate the formal features of cinema that distinguish it from other artforms (see Andrew 1976, 76–103). He was also Hirschfeld’s and Richard Oswald’s contemporary. Balázs’s investment in cinematic corporeality will help me illustrate some of the formal parameters of Anders als die Andern, particularly with regard to how these interact with the melodramatic storyline of the film. In 1924, Balázs proclaimed that “film is the popular art of our century” (Balázs 2010, 4; emphasis in original). The medium’s reach – primarily with regard to urban audiences – had exponentially increased over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century. For cultural commentators like Balázs, the palpability of cinema’s growing presence in modern life and across class boundaries was undeniable. To this end, he remarks, “Every evening many millions of people sit and experience human destinies, characters, feelings and moods of every kind with their eyes, and without the need for words” (10). In Balázs’s assessment, the thriving infrastructure for the Germanophone cinema industry during the 1920s was a testament to the new primacy of the moving image. His writing then aimed to theorize what set the medium apart from other artforms by way of accounting for its popularity. To this end, the last part of the sentence cited above – “without the need for words” – becomes a key point of departure to assess the uniqueness of cinematic aesthetic practices. For him, cinema’s heightened capacity to embody emotional range on screen distinguishes it from other artforms and is thereby immensely successful in appealing to viewers. On screen, he writes, “the body becomes mediated spirit, spirit rendered visible, wordless” (9). Here, cinema traffics in energies related to human essence, which are given expression through gestures. Similar to the claims made by other early film theorists – in particular the work of Vachel Lindsay (Carter 2010, xxiv) – cinema’s relation to embodiment practices attest to the medium’s capacity to cross cultural boundaries. Consequently, Balázs proclaims cinema “the first international language” (Balázs 2010, 14; emphasis in original).

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Cinema grips audiences through its potential to embody human essence on screen. By providing opportunities to study gestures in search for familiar and unfamiliar feelings, it facilitates for viewers intimate moments in which their own emotionality entwines with the feelings patterned on screen. In Balázs’s assessment, such embodiment-aesthetics condition a form of intimacy that offers viewers a more concrete reference point in their engagement with a film than the recourse to concepts by which written texts operate. Here, he insists that words traffic in abstraction – that is, they stand in for a “real” thing in the world – whereas acting makes present human essence without abstraction (Balázs 2010, 33). In this regard, Balázs sees intertitles as minor structuring elements for cinema. In between intertitles, the medium comes to amplify affective attachment when essence embodied on screen meets the viewers’ eye: “the magnifying glass of the cinematograph brings us closer to the individual cells of life, it allows us to feel the texture and substance of life in its concrete detail” (38). Such emotionality is not always a matter of one isolated feeling. Balázs uses facial expressions articulated on screen as example of a type of cinematic lyricism capable of conveying a complex array of feelings in a short amount of time. The face (and by extension the body on the whole) becomes a conduit for a human essence characterized by a range of qualities. The body then channels all these qualities, sometimes in succession and at times all at once. It becomes a site where human essence – in all its excesses and complexities – appears to be “gazing out at us through the eyes of a mask” (36). The body-determined representational strategies offer viewers access to a “narrative of the feelings” (34). By encountering this narrative on screen, viewers can see and reflect upon the connection of these feelings to one another and the human essence from which they emanate. Moreover, they can relate it to their own experience. In Balázs’s assessment, the early film star Asta Nielsen is an excellent case study to illustrate the prowess of embodiment and gesture in conveying ideas on screen. He notes that Nielsen’s big accomplishment as a performer is her

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wide capacity to communicate emotion through a large arsenal of gestures and expressions. Nielsen’s physicality even carries the experience of others. This means that any given scene would capture her relationship to other characters primarily through the physical presence she takes in relation to them. Balázs lists as example her performance as the lead character in Hamlet (dir. Svend Gade and Heinz Schall, 1921). In a crucial scene, Hamlet meets Fortinbras. Hamlet’s face registers a smile upon encountering Fortinbras, but he does not quite recognize the old friend immediately. Writing about the scene, in particular Hamlet’s gradual realization that he is in the presence of an old friend, Balázs notes that Nielsen as Hamlet “takes up [Fortinbras’s] expression; it becomes submerged in hers and returns as something she has recognized, so that the smile, which initially had been no more than a mask superimposed from outside, is gradually warmed from within, and turns into a living expression” (Balázs 2010, 88–9). The realization is captured in the gradual “warmth” of Nielsen’s disposition as Hamlet. This registers mostly in subtle adjustment of cheeks and eyebrows, but also a widening of the smile. Collectively, the close-up of Nielsen’s gestures stages a particular kind of experience that lives without recourse to words. In fact, Nielsen for Balázs “carries the entire dialogue in her features and fuses into it a synthesis of understanding and experiencing” (88). Viewers are positioned to apprehend this experience, drawing on their own understanding of facial expressivity in order to make sense of the subtle facial movements they witness on screen. Richard Oswald understood this process of cinematic emotional embodiment very well. In amplified form, it is part and parcel of a spectacle appealing for audiences. In an extreme form, this cinematic emotional embodiment is indeed a cornerstone of melodrama. Melodramatic sentimentality is derived from the tension when individuals face structural hostilities too large to bear on their own. Much of the struggle affiliated with this contact registers on the body and comes to be articulated corporeally through gestures and expressions of performers. A histrionic collapse on a couch such as Körner’s, for instance, articulates the character’s failing body in the face of a struggle

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too severe to bear for them.2 The emotional turmoil of facing insurmountable obstacles culminates in a loss of composure, a fall, and a tearful outburst. It is not a surprise then that a significant portion of Ben Singer’s authoritative taxonomy of melodrama turns to emotionality to provide some guidance on how to identify its form. For Singer, melodrama is defined by containing at the very least one, but usually at least two, of the following components: “strong pathos; heightened emotionality; moral polarization; nonclassical narrative mechanics; and spectacular effects” (Singer 2001, 7).3 These qualities, in turn, revolve around key cinematic/narrative features that permit melodrama to articulate what Singer calls “the adversities and insecurities of the modern world” (133). In this light, melodrama’s fundamental interest in insurmountable conflicts that burden the everyday of characters in some fashion comes to resonate with viewers’ everyday anxieties about living life in a modern world. And yet, such appeal to viewers’ concerns is not direct. Jonathan Goldberg, whose work on melodrama I have evoked at the opening of the previous chapter, discusses the capacity of melodrama to speak to viewers’ everyday concerns in terms of defamiliarization. For Goldberg, who examines the work of Douglas Sirk (in particular his 1955 film All That Heaven Allows) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (in particular his 1969 film Liebe ist kälter als der Tod [Love is Colder Than Death]), melodrama traffics in familiarity only to disturb it in the service of generating “new feelings” among viewers (Goldberg 2016, 27). That is, melodramatic sentimentality can generate a host of affective responses for situations that in some fashion resemble but never have to represent actual experiences of viewers. Melodramatic excess is then less a mirror image reflecting viewers’ own experiences back to them, and more a mechanism by which a relatable factor about navigating modern life is transfigured for viewers in the service of emotional excess. When Oswald expresses his interest in a type of filmmaking concerned with “purely human qualities that have always remained the same at all times and will remain the same” – which I discussed in the previous chapter – he partially means the capacities of melodrama to

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engage viewers on familiar grounds (Oswald 1990, 70). Here, gestures and expressions are central means by which the image-viewer intimacy comes about. The struggling body facing insurmountable structural issues becomes for viewers a recognizable cypher of struggles living life in a modern world riddled with social inequalities. It is this indirect relation to the material on screen that tethers viewers to melodrama and accounts for its lasting popularity. In short, melodrama feels strangely familiar, and we willingly or otherwise come to be invested in it as a result. While Hirschfeld sought to harness this cinematic intimacy for his social reform interests, the intention must be considered via the operational potential of cinematic/melodramatic form. The intimacy based on embodiment strategies that melodrama affords is rather weak, even bad propaganda. Here I mean to say that intimacy is certainly a formal capacity of melodrama, but this intimacy does not guarantee transformation akin to what is afforded through mesmerism, brainwashing, or some type of forced conversion. For one, an evening screening of a film is but one component embedded in an advanced media ecology in which viewers’ attention is challenging to maintain. Some movie-goers would attend multiple film screenings a week or would turn to different cinematic spectacles from one week to another. In between, their attention would be dedicated to other popular media (newspapers, periodicals, radio) or pursuing life in the aftermath of a war. Spectacles, then, have a short shelf life – notwithstanding the intensity of their initial reach. Secondly, as Goldberg has noted, melodrama traffics in issues that have no easy solution (Goldberg 2016, 43). In the case of Anders als die Andern, the critical eruptions during screenings are an extreme case in point. As discussed in the previous chapter, some screenings of the film were interrupted by audience members repulsed by the material on screen. In the dossier on the film that Hirschfeld compiled for the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), he identifies two broader groups of critics averse to the film’s cinematic treatment of homosexuality: those enraged by the purported moral failure of the film for whom the cypher “Paragraph 175”

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already announced nothing but disgrace and those driven by ethnonationalist and antisemitic ideologies (Hirschfeld 1919, 20). With regard to the latter, James Steakley has described in detail an antisemitic public outrage campaign fuelled by the conservative newspaper Deutsche Zeitung. There, a critic called for audiences to take matters into their own hands as needed in order to prevent immoral material produced by Jews from “contaminating” German culture (Steakley 2007, 80–1). The article noted that already the procession of famous homosexuals in the opening sequence – including Peter Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Frederic II of Prussia, and Ludwig II of Bavaria – caused for righteous outrage among audience members, who should be applauded for intervening in the program.4 Meaning, Veidt’s careful gestures that communicate Körner’s most intimate reaction to the perils he faces as homosexual did not suffice in aligning these viewers with his struggle. Valerie Weinstein has discussed this type of antisemitic outrage against the film in terms of conservatives’ attempt to “politicize homophobia” (Weinstein 2021, 156; see also Baer 2012, 172–3). As a rhetorical strategy, politicized homophobia mobilizes anti-queer sentiment against another minoritized group and thereby generates conditions in which solidarity structures among minoritized groups are challenged. To this end, Weinstein discusses the German-Jewish journalist Walther Friedmann’s response to antisemitic charges against the movie as a “reactionary tactic to force the reinstatement of censorship laws” (Weinstein 2021, 156). Friedman goes out of his way to note that homosexuality “can be found among Jews and non-Jews,” while also distancing Jews and Jewishness from homosexuality, which he deems an “extremely regrettable … repulsive degeneration of the sex drive” (157). Notwithstanding the antisemitic charges against the film and Friedmann’s anti-queer attempts to distance himself from it, the affirmative politics regarding homosexuality espoused by Anders als die Andern indeed connect to Jewish struggle. To this end, S.S. Prawer’s work has demonstrated how the film’s social reform message draws on “a traditional Jewish sense of social justice, based on biblical and Talmudic traditions and strengthened by long experience of injustices in

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the Diaspora” (Prawer 2005, 81). Weinstein argues that the film indeed “connects the political projects of homosexual and Jewish emancipation and codes the actors’ performances of masculinity as both Jewish and queer” (Weinstein 2021, 154). The ideological hostilities through which anti-queerness and antisemitism were co-constituted in the writing by critics of the film are instructive. They call on us to be cautious when drawing extreme conclusions about the effectiveness of the queer intimacy at the core of Oswald and Hirschfeld’s project. The ethnonationalist and antisemitic critiques of the film underscore critics’ own anxieties and hostilities about cinematic capacities. They feared a power Anders als die Andern did not have. Conservative critics’ primary concerns about the film were that its affirmative message about homosexuality would make homosexuality seem attractive to viewers. But they also entailed fears about the slow erosion of “German values” – epitomized in the image of the middle-class family and its highly valued offspring – that the film’s affirmative message about homosexuality might engender.

Conrad Veidt and the Appealing Qualities of Male Vulnerability Before turning to an analysis of what Anders als die Andern can accomplish through its melodramatic form, I would like to address the actor and the public persona behind the film’s title character. Veidt’s physical appearance and initial audience appeal, which would catapult him into becoming one of the foremost picture personalities of the Weimar era, are closely related to the structures of intimacy his performance in Anders als die Andern affords. Richard Dyer and Elizabeth Otto have written the most authoritative studies on Veidt’s screen persona, both of which will be central for my analysis here. Dyer, for instance, established that Körner “is being played by someone considered at the time to be attractive and seductive” (Dyer 1990, 30). He was a “popular pin-up in the magazines of the time,” a status in part secured by

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Veidt’s seductive appearance in a number of films (30). In movies such as Unheimliche Geschichten (Uncanny Stories, 1919), which was also directed by Oswald, or Der Gang in die Nacht (Journey into the Night, 1921), which was directed by F.W. Murnau, Veidt plays figures that range from dangerous seducer to frail lover (30). However, Dyer describes his screen history as one marked by an “ambivalence” derived both from the roles he played, but also his physical appearance: “He was handsome, but his tall, gaunt figure, drawn, pallid, even skeletal face and dark, brooding eyes meant that he could seem tragic or sinister, and often the two together” (30). If asked to list Veidt’s Weimar performances, cinephiles in the 2020s would likely mention his most iconic role from the era: as the somnambulist Cesare in Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, which premiered in 1920, one year after Anders als die Andern. Although he plays a dangerous character, one of the most famous scenes from the film casts him as vulnerable, easy to manipulate (he serves at the pleasure of his master, Dr Caligari), and perhaps even for one moment as gentle. At the fairground, Cesare is awakened by his master and stuns the audience. A close-up from the scene shows his eyes slowly opening, as he stares directly into the camera (figure 2.3). The diegetic audience response patterns for viewers their own astonishment about the spectacle of a “dead” body coming alive, which scholars of Weimar cinema have described as an astonishing commentary on the capacities of cinema overall (Choe 2014, 2–4). And at the core of this astonishment lies an infatuation among viewers mesmerized by the physical presence of a character epitomizing the descriptors Dyer deployed for Veidt. His brooding eyes, quivering lips, and ultimately his lanky features are part and parcel of the ambivalence Dyer mentions, which in some moments might repel but in other moments absolutely intrigue audiences. A 3 May 2021 review of Veidt’s performance in Anders als die Andern by the user Adrián on letterboxed.com speaks to this intrigue quite directly, and supports the claim that Veidt’s personal has intergenerational reach. I cite it here purposely to illustrate the enduring allure of the actor, whose performances still resonate with viewers today. Adrián

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Figure 2.3 Cesare awakens during the spectacular fairground scene in Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari.

unabashedly proclaims, “Conrad Veidt is hot. Never settle for less ladies” (Adrián 2021). Veidt’s performances that feature seductive but also vulnerable characters shaped his public image in the 1910s and 1920s. Otto has shown how these roles came to represent “a new masculinity” that was at times affiliated with feminine qualities, and was ultimately responsible for Veidt’s popularity with a range of audiences (Otto 2010, 136). His role as Körner epitomized this in a lot of ways: a frail, accomplished, gentle man, who appeals to both men (Sivers) and women (Else). The role playing Körner also secured him admi-

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ration from queer fans in Weimar Germany. In this regard, Otto notes that Veidt was a central feature at queer subcultural events in the aftermath of the film’s premiere, in particular the costume balls described in Christopher Isherwood’s personal reflections about queer life in Weimar-era Berlin (141). Here, Otto admirably outlines that some of the public press (and scholarship that takes this press as point of departure for its analysis), have taken Veidt’s heterosexuality as a given. Newspapers, magazines, and other announcements frequently foregrounded Veidt’s family life, likely as a measure to counterbalance some of the roles he played. Take, for instance, a full-page autobiographical note Veidt printed when he departed for Hollywood. In the post, he thanks his fans for the support over the course of the years and offers them a goodbye. He also, however, ends the article by foregrounding the happiest moment of his life: not the moment that he received a call back for a role, but rather the moment he found out he was going to become a father (figure 2.4). Notwithstanding such discursive insistence on his heterosexuality, Otto’s description of Veidt as a central feature of queer nightlife of Weimar Berlin, evidenced by Christopher Isherwood’s writing, at the very least creates some possibilities to speculate that there is more at play.

Systemic Burdens, Queer Joy, and the Pattern of Melodrama in Anders als die Andern The system of values conservative critics of the film sought to defend, which I mentioned in a previous section of this chapter, finds expression in the film. This is most readily captured in those portions of the film that feature the families of Körner and his lover Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz). It is important to note that Körner’s family’s confrontation with his homosexuality takes place in scenes that are lost. However, drawing on Hirschfeld’s summary of the film in the dossier for the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen along with information from other archival documents, we know their content. Concerned about their

Figure 2.4 Veidt’s autobiographical note and goodbye to German viewers published on the occasion of his move to Hollywood in the January 1927 issue of the Ufa-Magazin.

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son being unmarried at such a late stage in life, Körner’s parents enlist the help of his sister and her husband to convince their son to remedy the situation. Despite Körner’s success as violinist – for instance, he lives in an opulent house with a servant – the lack of a wife and children is a breach of a social contract. Here, family not only signals successful heterosexual attachment, but rather is a social-economic category by which familial lineage, social obligations, and ultimately attachment to a broader community of the nation are defined and policed. Körner’s familial delinquency then threatens a system in which his parents, sister, brother-in-law, as well as a broader network of loved ones and neighbours are invested. Belonging to this system is not a matter of choice; it is compulsory. In this regard, the family stages a party at which they hope to acquaint Körner with a rich widow. During the party, however, Körner evades the widow’s intense advances. Disappointed, his parents confront him about his behaviour afterward, at which point Körner sends them to a reputable physician (Magnus Hirschfeld). In the end, the physician explains to his parents why Körner will never marry: he is a homosexual. Familial policing of individual behaviour is also a prominent factor in those scenes where we find out more information about Sivers’s parents. These scenes are likewise reconstructed from archival documents. Sivers meets Körner during the latter’s violin concerts and quickly becomes an admirer. After one such concert, Sivers seeks out Körner at his house and requests that he become his instructor. Although the parents hesitantly approve of this at first, Sivers’s father quickly grows concerned. For him, Sivers’s infatuation with Körner is disturbing in its own right. Moreover, he does not want his son to become a musician, demanding he instead seek out a more practical profession. The father’s intervention here functions as what Sara Ahmed has called a “straightening device” in that it seeks to recover Sivers for a path from which he strayed (Ahmed 2006, 96). An irritable attachment to a man with an investment in the musical arts offers a prospect for masculinity not welcome in the father’s broader vision of family legacy. As was

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the case with Körner’s familial network, Sivers’s father evokes a system of respectability in which personal behaviour must be in sync with the system itself. Any irregularities regarding expectations established for the offspring must be resolved in favour of the system. I foreground the familial reaction to highlight what is at stake in the film’s fashioning of an intimacy based on embodiment practices. The film’s form elicits such intimacy from viewers from the beginning and throughout. Bookended by the opening sequence and those scenes in which the family structures make themselves explicitly legible for Körner and Sivers are scenes that outline the couple’s burgeoning relationship. Take, for instance, Sivers’s first visit to Körner’s house. A medium-long shot captures Körner seated at the piano in the right segment of the frame. A smiling Sivers approaches and asks Körner if he would take him on as a student. Körner reaches out and the two shake hands, signalling that the master musician accepts the proposal. For a moment, Körner’s glance shifts from eye-contact with Sivers to cast a glare at his interlocutor’s midsection (figure 2.5). Here, the dramatic glare makes legible queer desire. Moreover, Körner appears happier in this scene in comparison to the opening sequence. A relaxed forehead and a gentle smile meet Sivers’s cheerful disposition. The result is playful, flirtatious banter between the two. A certain lightness qualifies the mood in this scene. Unlike in the opening sequence, Körner faces a moment of possibility for a queer relationship. A young man is not only enthusiastic about spending time with him, but Körner himself appears attracted to Sivers. A cut to a medium two-shot of the two during Sivers’s violin lessons extends this intimacy between the two into another scene. The intertitles note Körner’s growing fondness for Sivers (here, explicitly, focalized through Körner). A medium two-shot shows Körner handing over a violin to his pupil, then leaning against the wall, cupping his face with his hand, as his admiring glance meets Sivers playing the violin. An eyeline match provides us with what is in view for our protagonist: a medium iris shot that isolates Sivers’s youthful features (figure 2.6). As he gently plays the violin, a resting smile is a focal point

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of the iris shot. The cinematography of this shot echoes that from the earlier scenes, which communicated Körner’s desperation about living life as a homosexual. However, whereas the iris shot previously foregrounded Körner’s desperation, here it foregrounds his joyful indulgence of Sivers’s presence. Like Körner, viewers rest on the promise captured in this youthful, innocent, gentle image of Sivers. It is as though this scene resists the devastation from the opening sequence as Körner savours the splendour of the moment.

Figure 2.5 The beginning of a relationship: Sivers asks Körner to become his teacher.

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Figure 2.6 Sivers playing violin as Körner watches.

Notably, the pleasantries of such isolated moments in the film do not last. The melodramatic quality of the film’s plot rests on its premise that it calls forth social issues for which there are no easy solutions. Körner’s devastation about living life queerly from the opening scene is then not in place in order to intensify the experience of the joy from the moments he spends with Sivers. It is the other way around. The scenes featuring Körner’s slowly unfolding relationship with Sivers, which brings him joy, are part of a narrative structure devised to amplify the frustrations announced in the opening. Here, the queer joy in the intimate scenes the two share soon meets the parental surveillance system, which seeks to prevent unions such as theirs. Were their attachment to one another to be found out for what it is, it would shatter the social system

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into which they are embedded. Their affair is consequently a private one. It needs to be shielded and protected to avoid detection. And so, the scene in which a culprit recognizes and seeks to blackmail Körner on the basis of his homosexuality activates anew and then comes to amplify Körner’s devastation from the opening scene. The scenes of intimacy between Körner and Sivers serve the function of calling viewers’ attention to what is possible – namely, queer joy – only to shatter this vision. The blackmailer Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) notably meets the couple on a walk in an unnamed park. The scenario is shaped by a toxic variety of queer spotting: a hostile gaze discovers two homosexuals in public and thereby subjects them to anguish. A long shot shows Körner and Sivers walking on a path with arms interlocked. They appear to be enjoying a stroll and a conversation. Bollek walks past them. He glances at the two. In a later scene we discover he had blackmailed Körner once before. Here, the reacquaintance with Körner is introduced to viewers via Bollek’s daunting look. A medium closeup shows Bollek’s glare follow Körner and Sivers as they walk away (figure 2.7). Körner takes a quick look at Bollek before gently encouraging Sivers, who seems confused by the scenario, to hurry up and move along. But Bollek’s gaze does not expire. He squints, lips resting, head gently nodding forward as though already signalling ill intentions. The iris shot and the dark makeup around his eyes foreground both the culprit’s eyes and the mouth, followed by a long shot as he decides to follow the couple. The sequence ends in a long shot showing Bollek slowly catching up to the couple. Körner, who recovered from the momentary concern about running into Bollek, appears keen to resume the stroll and seems in good spirits again. However, as Bollek catches up, Körner’s momentary repose is shattered. Bollek creeps up from behind, takes a quick glance in the other direction as though to make sure that no one is watching him, and whispers to Körner, “Pretty Lad!” (figure 2.8). Körner’s disposition immediately shifts to concern. He angrily dismisses Bollek’s remark and again somewhat hurriedly guides a confused Sivers as they both walk away from their harasser.

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Figure 2.7 Franz Bollek spots Körner and Sivers on a walk in the park.

Bollek’s disruption of the queer intimacy in the scene is the beginning of a series of burdens he places on the relationship between Körner and Sivers. The parental surveillance may have reached a limit in that it cannot follow Körner and Sivers everywhere they go. But Bollek replaces it. He becomes a persistent instance through which the hostility of the anti-queer world around Körner and Sivers infiltrates the sanctity of the queer intimacy the couple nurtures. The scene in the park foregrounds this infiltration through looks and gestures. The camera’s lingering on Bollek focuses on his glare. His squint and attendant facial expression intensify our sense of his as-of-yet unknown scornful intentions. An air of villainy paints this framing, which the

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Figure 2.8 Bollek confronts Körner as Sivers witnesses the interaction in the park.

next shot intensifies. Bollek leans somewhat sideways in the direction of the couple. His whisper augments the breach of personal space he committed. Even though Körner brushes him off as he guides Sivers away from the interaction, Bollek remains standing in the same space. Enshrined as the villain, he is left confidently taking up space in the park. Körner, in turn, is frazzled by the interaction. His departure is inflected by a sense that he is both angered and concerned by the unexpected confrontation. A calm walk in the park twice jolts Körner into a rash departure – namely, the first time he saw Bollek and then when he departs after Bollek confronts him. His anxiety about the encounter is palpable.

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If melodrama is concerned with individuals facing issues too large to resolve, then the severity of this impossibility is patterned in Anders als die Andern by scenes of queer joy being dismantled by the structures of oppression embodied in the familial surveillance network and Bollek’s intrusion. As the film’s storyline unfolds, viewers follow this pattern in which extremes occur one after the other. Here, queer joy and intimacy offer characters repose momentarily; however, these queer pleasures on their own are not able to sustain the characters in enduring the violent system itself.5 Viewers invested in the narrative and cinematic spectacle of the film then gasp along as characters manage to secure some privacy only for this private space to be infiltrated by representatives of an anti-queer system. When Körner runs off the spot in which Bollek confronted them, his gestures and facial expression – a swift grab of Sivers’s arm, leaning forward as though wishing he could instantly remove their bodies from the scene, and arched eyebrows – embody his unease. The tension of the scene is then attached to a tense body through which our protagonist’s innermost uneasiness finds expression.

The Erosion of Capacities to Endure Anti-Queer Structures in Anders als die Andern In my previous work, I have focused on the “architecture of melodramatic impossibility” in Anders als die Andern (Malakaj 2017, 222). My interest was to describe how the anti-queer world that Körner faces is articulated in the film through various narrative and cinematic features that collectively patterned a type of “cinematic claustrophobia” in the film (222). In this analysis, the encroachment of the social orders hostile to homosexuals like Körner becomes a key feature of illustrating the protagonist’s perils. Here, I would like to turn to the effects of such encroachment on the body and the person. If, as Balázs notes, film “involves the direct transformation of spirit into body,” then the chronicling of Körner’s slowly failing body prompts viewers to face

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the essence of a character defeated by anti-queer structures burdening his life (Balázs 2010, 12). In my reading, the waning body of a homosexual man slowly worn down by the struggles facing a world not made for him becomes the ultimate melodramatic cypher in Anders als die Andern. Körner’s slow undoing – already announced in the opening scene – is catalyzed once Bollek shows up at Körner’s house unannounced. The miseen-scène and camera placement are vital components that foreground the tension of the encounter. The sequence opens with an establishing long shot that shows Körner smoking a cigarette on a couch as Bollek makes his way into the room. Körner’s butler backs away from the door to signal the forcefulness with which Bollek makes his way into the space. A cut to a medium shot highlights Bollek’s threatening gaze directed at the butler (figure 2.9). We are not given information about what he utters to him, but there is no doubt that Bollek asks the butler to leave the room. As the butler slowly walks past Bollek, the villain jerks his head in a gesture reiterating that he wants the butler to leave. After the butler exits, an evil smirk registers on Bollek’s face as he addresses Körner. A cut to a medium-closeup of Körner gives us access to our protagonist’s response to this intrusion (figure 2.10). Körner turns his head from the door and casts a brooding stare in front of him. As he exhales smoke through his nose, his brows are furrowed, and he presses his lips together. This is the stare of concern as Körner yields to Bollek’s invasive entrance into the house. Our protagonist cannot stop the culprit from having his way. A cut back to the same camera position of the longshot that opened the sequence shows Körner as he gets up from the couch, casts a sideways glare at Bollek, and recedes to the background as Bollek takes up space on the same couch. Throughout the scene, the villain indeed continually exerts confidence in traversing the space without any concern that he might be overstepping boundaries. Bollek’s determination even echoes his tenacious presence at the end of the park sequence. In the end, Körner’s private space becomes accessible for a person who forcefully lays claim to it and seeks to manipulate its owner.

Figure 2.9 Bollek’s threatening entrance into Körner’s house.

The intrusion greatly upsets Körner. The centerpiece of the sequence is a medium-closeup of his response to Bollek’s demand for hush money: unless Körner pays up, Bollek threatens to go public about Körner’s homosexuality (figure 2.11). Viewers watch Körner press his lips and furrow his brows once again as he stares ahead. This is the second time he registers the same expression, the first time being just moments prior in the scene in which Bollek initially shows up at the house (figure 2.10). The gestural repetition underscores the recurrence of the burden on Körner’s disposition. Here, as was the case in the previous scene, Körner’s pressed lips indicate his struggles with what is going on. It is as though he keeps himself from bursting out into tears by pressing them together. The prominent forehead, clearly lit by the lighting in the scene, frames his scowl as he ruminates. An array of negative feelings registers in his face. Concern, agony, frustration, fear.

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Figure 2.10 Körner concerned about Bollek’s sudden appearance in his study.

Bollek’s grotesque presence in the scene is in turn characterized by sadistic pleasure. He not only appears confident about his exploits, but indeed smirks throughout. This is particularly the case in moments when Körner’s desperation about the situation is at its peak. Bollek’s villainy then takes on a monstrous quality in that he derives a particular type of gratification from taking on a dominant role in this dynamic between him and Körner. There is no doubt that Bollek is after the money. But his position in these scenes, his confident traversing of a private space, and the liberties he takes with Körner’s possessions point to an enjoyment he derives from torturing Körner as well. He is not a petty criminal, who was driven to his crimes out of desperation; instead, he is painted as rather resolute.

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And so, viewers are not surprised when Körner collapses at the end of the sequence. The gesture speaks to the severity of the abuse our protagonist experienced in the sequence. Bollek’s gratuitous access to his intimate self in order to hold it hostage and exploit it enacts a severe type of infringement upon Körner’s person. The villain rescinds from Körner any power he may have in his own home and walks away victoriously from the setting. Viewers are left alone with Körner, as it were, who is shown in a long shot (figure 2.12). Körner falls onto his sofa with his hands pressed against his face. His pulsating body betrays his tears. The collapse indexes his devastation about what transpired. It also points to Körner’s concern about what else might be on the

Figure 2.11 Körner’s visceral reaction upon being confronted by blackmail.

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Figure 2.12 Körner devastated by Bollek’s intrusion.

horizon. The splendour of the upper-middle class household as expressed in the rich décor of the interior frames this collapse in this long shot. Körner’s pulsating body, which emanates the energies of multiple negative feelings at once, sharply contrasts the setting. Here, in the comfort of his own home, Körner is not safe from those who wish him ill. And he is left with little more than giving himself over to the pain of the situation. The film’s melodramatic arc draws its energies from scenes in which Körner’s pained relation to Bollek – and by extension the broader anti-queer structures that enable the villain – recurs. The point here being that the pain affiliated with Körner’s abuse is not a one-off event. Rather, it is a type of

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pain that resurges and starts to haunt the protagonist in all aspects of his private and professional life. For instance, Sivers brings Körner a letter that was delivered to the house. As Körner takes note of Sivers’s presence in the room, he momentarily lights up from a brooding reflection (presumably about the situation with Bollek). The scene occurs just after Körner successfully persuades Sivers’s suspicious parents that they should support their son’s investment in music. A joyous Sivers does not appear to fully understand the matter at hand. Körner brushes it off as a “silly affair at work,” implying he is keeping the matter a secret from Sivers. However, the scene’s joyous moments are crushed by the severity of the situation at hand, which spills over and increasingly starts to concern Sivers as well. A medium shot shows Körner placing one arm around Sivers in a soothing gesture (figure 2.13). As Körner casts a concerned stare ahead in the direction of the camera, Sivers’s tilted head and concerned look are directed at Körner. Here, Körner’s struggles to manage Bollek also shape the task of managing how much information about him can be shared with Sivers. The secrecy, however, is challenging to keep up in the context of Körner’s body failing to conceal it. The stare, his grinding teeth, and his hand slowly receding into a fist from being laid flat against Sivers’s back point to troubles that our protagonist’s interlocutor begins to apprehend. The scene ends with the convicted Körner’s proclamation that he will no longer give in to the blackmail. Queer cinema aficionados would recognize in the blackmail scene an intertextual moment to another famous queer film: James Ivory’s 1987 film Maurice. In fact, Maurice features a protagonist who seeks out two doctors to get advice about his homosexuality (even pursues conversion therapy), takes place in part in educational institutions, and, beyond that, shares quite a lot of other plot elements with Anders als die Andern. The blackmail matter is ultimately resolved in the film: Maurice (James Wilby) misunderstood gestures by Alec (Rupert Graves) to be blackmail. However, the threat of a legal culture in early twentieth century England, where homosexuality was punishable by the law, continues to burden the burgeoning queer relationship

Figure 2.13 Körner’s concerned stare after another blackmail attempt.

between the two. The couple ultimately finds their way to one another. There are many famous scenes from the film that show their intimacy, for instance their encounters in hotels (figure 2.14). But the path to this intimacy is a difficult one. And we are left to believe that the relationship beyond the end of the movie will have to face many challenges in a world giving homosexuals many reasons to fear the consequences of being discovered. In fact, there is a longer history of international queer cinema in which some of these tropes, particularly the matter of blackmail targeting queer people, find expression. Among the most famous of these films is Basil Dearden’s 1961 film Victim. Set in the conservative climate in the uk of the post1945 era, the film’s plot is propelled by the devastation an organized set of blackmailers place on queer men. The film’s title character, Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) aims to shut this network down. Himself a gay man who is married,

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Figure 2.14 Alec (Rupert Graves) and Maurice (James Wilby) in an intimate scene in Maurice, 1987.

Farr indirectly comes into contact with the blackmailers and is ultimately one of their victims. At the end of the film, he is left with the decision to either help prosecute the criminals and face the public scandal that will ensue – the matter would make his homosexuality a public affair – or let them go. A particularly powerful scene from the film shows Farr in the background of a medium shot staring at Phip (Nigel Stock) (figure 2.15). Phip, trembling because of what transpired – the police raided the blackmailers’ home – relays the story of how he became victim to the blackmail operation. The burden of the world weighs heavy on this man who, even in the face of justice, is anticipating the hostilities of an anti-queer world. Meaning, even if the blackmailers were arrested, the broader culture that gives rise to them still operates beyond this moment of justice.

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Figure 2.15 Farr (Dirk Bogarde) staring at Phip (Nigel Stock) in the raid on the blackmailers in Victim, 1961.

The effects of Bollek’s infiltration of Körner’s private space in Anders als die Andern linger. Even when he is not in the house, Körner’s reflections about him make him present, as it were. The type of sociopathic emotional abuse to which Bollek subjected Körner then tempers his mental health. It also gives the impression that Bollek is a practiced abuser. As I intimated above, the villain’s deliberate investment in his craft finds expression within the scene in which he shows up at Körner’s house unannounced; however, it also takes centre stage in the follow-up scene. A medium-long shot shows Bollek seated at a table in a queer venue – presumably a nightclub with drinking, dancing, and other excitement (figure 2.16). The venue is important here. An ostensibly “safe” space in which various types of queer people cheerfully dance in community frames a blackmailer with a history of blackmail. From a later scene

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we find out that Körner first met Bollek during another queer event: a costume ball. It is not entirely clear if Bollek is himself a homosexual man or not, although a case could be made for him being one. What is more pressing in this scene is that he is shown firmly embedded within the broader queer community. He traverses it with confidence as he did Körner’s private space. Moreover, he is shown in the company of an accomplice. An unnamed figure – whose delicate walk and queeny tap on Bollek’s shoulder convey queerness – brings a newspaper to Bollek and points to an announcement of a concert by Körner accompanied by Sivers. The accomplice asks if there is nothing to be done, suggesting back knowledge of Bollek’s operation. Bollek, in turn, stares ahead in a gesture of contemplation. To me, this scene reads less as an indictment of the queer community for harbouring people hostile to it than it aims to illustrate how efficiently a system can breed hostility that infiltrates the most intimate queer spaces. The risks for queers living queerly are omnipresent, as it were, and Bollek and his accomplice together with their broader operation are but one instantiation of this hostility. The series of flashback scenes in which Körner’s long history of struggles to reconcile his homosexuality with public life then historicize his pain. They give insight into its extensive history and a recurrence pattern that led up until his relationship with Sivers. The function of the physician in those scenes is quite interesting. The professional (played by Hirschfeld himself) assists Körner to come to terms with his homosexuality. Later in the film the physician even testifies on behalf of Körner in front of the court that seeks to convict him on the basis of a breach of Paragraph 175. Katie Sutton’s work has shown how Hirschfeld’s presence in the film in the role of the physician aids the overall project of supporting a message the sexologist sought to advance in the public domain: namely, that “the authoritative discourses of science might be used to further the cause of social justice for sexual minorities” (Sutton 2015, 63). In my reading the physician’s recurrent appearance in the film serves the same function that the moments of queer joy served: it is part of Körner’s long history of devastation about facing an anti-queer world.

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Figure 2.16 Bollek deliberating his next moves at a queer nightclub venue.

Here, the physician momentarily provides hope, but the devastation indexed by the anti-queer structure that haunts lives like Körner’s is too vast to be contained by the simplistic solutions the physician advances. Despite the physician’s hopeful interventions – especially at the end of the film when he intervenes in Sivers’s suicide ideation – must be read as small gestures that cannot account for the broader pain faced by queer people elsewhere. Witnessing the slow decay of the protagonist in the face of a system hostile to him – a process that culminates in his suicide – generates a type of desolate mood in the film that tempers the physician’s recuperative message about the

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death at the end of the film. To illustrate this, let us turn to Körner’s suicide scene and the events that led it. During the concert, Bollek takes matters into his own hands. He breaks into Körner’s house to rob it. Sivers intervenes and a fight scene ensues between Körner and Bollek. In the aftermath, Körner reports Bollek’s blackmail operation to the officials. The villain in turn sues Körner on the basis of Paragraph 175. A trial scene shows both men prosecuted (figure 2.17). While Körner’s sentence is only one week, Bollek’s is three years in prison. The former is stunned, even by the relatively “mild” sentence, while Bollek’s demeanour in the scene underscore his monstrous side: his initial response is apprehension, but as the scene unfolds, he smirks at Körner’s reaction. Körner is free until he decides to sit out his sentence. Despite the relative care with which the judge engages his case – he recognizes Körner’s

Figure 2.17 Körner and Bollek at the trial scene. The former is devastated by the ruling, while the latter appears mildly irritated by it at best.

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record as good citizen – Körner faces a public repulsed by the news about him. Moreover, his agency cancels his concert performances and its contract with the musician. Körner’s life is forever changed. Whereas his previous history facing anti-queer hostility could be read as a history of resistance in that he was able to move on and recover from hostility, his mental disposition and his physical body seem too worn to persevere through this latest episode of violence. All the social systems around him seem to be collapsing: his work, his family (Körner’s father encourages that he takes matters into his own hands), and his romance (Sivers runs off after the fight scene with Bollek) are all in shatters. A medium shot shows Körner depleted (figure 2.18). His inner anguish about the situation registers in his slow movement throughout the scene and a downcast glance. The hostilities and disappointments he faced result in a fragile mental state and a brittle body. The affected stare as Körner takes an unnamed pill to end his life likely stuns viewers. What is left of a person and their body when exposed to so much struggle? The answer is a difficult one, because as viewers we know we cannot intervene and Körner is convinced there is no other way out of his situation. The camera lingers on Körner, who slowly sinks into a chair as the dulling effects of the pill transform his disposition. The protagonist dies in our presence, as it were, with no one else in sight. Recalling the opening scene and the gestural intimacy it offered, here, too, we are prompted to witness the fatal effects of the devastation cited there. In his assessment of Hirschfeld’s unyielding investment in historical progress – captured in the slogan per scientiam ad justitiam – Steakley sees a flair of naivete about the actual state of things (Steakley 2007, 32). The sexologist’s extensive investment in queer rights is most certainly admirable; however, at times the public reform messages he advanced announced a hope for a world transformed through science and activism that felt truly unavailable for most. In reality the situation was glum for queer people, who were far from susceptible to such discursive hope at the time the film was made. In fact, as Heike Bauer’s excellent work has shown, even Hirschfeld’s own writings serve

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Figure 2.18 Körner takes a pill to end his life.

as “an archive of queer death” (Bauer 2017, 38). In chronicling suicide ideation and the history of suicide among the homosexuals he encountered in his private praxis and beyond, Hirschfeld established an archive that documents “the damaging terms that governed queer reality in the early twentieth century” (56).6 In this regard, Anders als die Andern is part and parcel of this pained archive. Moreover – and this is a key contribution of this present book – melodramatic form itself resists recourse to simplistic solutions for the problems to which its content points. Despite Hirschfeld’s authoritative presence in the film as mentor, therapist, and enlightenment expert who converts

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Sivers’s sister, Else, to fight along in the battle against the legal code and the social context that brought about Körner’s death, and despite the affirmative message at the end of the film in which he proclaims gestures toward a better future, the extreme negative affect of previous scenes persists. That is, all that suffering Körner experienced over the course of decades of his life, which is emblematized in the traumatic suicide scene in which his body and mind can no longer endure it, spills over and contaminates Hirschfeld’s hopeful message. True to the form of melodrama, even the social reform message at the end is but a pointer to an issue the film itself can give expression to but on its own cannot solve.

Chapter 3

Feeling Backward with Anders als die Andern

Instead of extracting lessons learned about queer struggle in the past as captured in Anders als die Andern and making those available for contemporary viewers I want to foreground how intricately the film makes queer pain available for engagement. Such investment in negativity might appear counterproductive in light of affirmative contemporary queer rights politics. These revolve around the public discourse valorizing a broader sociability framework afforded by what Lisa Duggan called “the new homonormativity” – namely, the privatization of “gay politics and culture for the new neoliberal world order” (Duggan 2002, 188). Homonormativity champions queer rights as a mechanism by which to expand social formations traditionally affiliated with cis heterosexuality. In this regard, gay marriage, adoption, and forms of capital accumulation are partially constituted on the premise of older (straight) structures. Making room for queers to marry, adopt, and accrue wealth in order to secure a legacy has come to constitute queer advancement in public life and policy. Why, then, dwell on injury when we can give ourselves over to an unrelenting forward swing of historical progress in our time of queer rights? What function would such investment in negativity serve for our time? Are there not affirmative moments in Anders als die Andern that could align with progressivist political agendas around queer life in the present? Why not celebrate those?

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Figure 3.1 Körner visits a sexologist.

Here, one could foreground the scenes from the flashback sequence, in which Körner visits a sexologist. Devastated by the challenge of living life as a homosexual, and following a failed conversion therapy session, Körner meets a physician. A medium closeup shows Körner conversing with the physician, who informs his patient that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality. In fact, the physician notes that same-sex love can be beautiful, and that homosexuals can productively contribute to society. With regard to this last matter, Körner was not certain if he, as a homosexual, could find a way of being in the world given that his experiences in school and other social

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settings taught him the opposite. The physician’s intervention calms Körner by assuring him that he is right as he is. The session with the physician indeed propels him into the future. The discussion facilitates for the protagonist his first engagements with Berlin’s queer nightlife: the following scene shows him at a costume ball. In this regard, the scene is affirmative and generative for queer life. I do not aim to erase these scenes, of which there are a number in the film (for example, the opening scenes featuring queer joy in the early phases of Körner’s relationship to Sivers). What I do want to accomplish is attending to the film as a whole. The film represents queer suffering. It patterns its mode of engagement with viewers on the basis of queer suffering as much as its plot development is propelled by it. As such, moments of repose, affirmation, or even queer joy are but temporary features in a cultural text for the most part invested in negative feelings. To explain what function these bad feelings serve in the film, I turn to Heather Love’s discussion of queer negativity. I believe that Love’s work offers some pointers that can help us acknowledge the role of queer suffering indexed in the film in ways that do not sideline, render secondary, or even refuse it. Tackling a hopelessly optimistic investment in gay pride, Love notes that publicly affirmative queer feeling does little by way of tending to the “marginal situation of queers who experience the stigma of poverty, racism, aids, gender dysphoria, disability, immigration, and sexism” (Love 2007, 147). The affective registers characterizing life under those conditions are shaped by the stultifying effects of queer injury. With a recourse to queer injury, Love seeks to foreground the historical and material pain burdening queer life in an antiqueer world. In this regard, Love is not interested in valorizing negative feelings by noting how these can be manipulated to serve as a foundation for affirmative politics. In fact, Love critiques scholarship in queer studies in which the history of violence against queer life serves the function of mobilizing political activism. By thinking about how bad things were in the past, such work aims to build a resistance culture that would shape a more affir-

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mative, hopeful queer future. These types of discursive gestures that make use of negativity, in Love’s assessment, leave much behind. What do we do with “the stigmatized and unproductive forms of queer suffering” (161)? For Love, these forms of use-resistant negativity – for example, “self-pity, despair, depression, loneliness, remorse” – are branded as antithetical for political action because of the danger they pose for progressivist thinking (161). Chronic depression or refusal to be conscripted under the banner of a collective struggle are, for example, not the stuff of a movement. And yet it is precisely in those negative feelings that much of the hostility toward queer life registered in the past and continues to register in our current moment. Love notes that “queers are intimately familiar with the costs of being queer – that, as much as anything, makes us queer” (162–3). “Pride” and “rights” tend to want to sweep us up into the path of the winds of change, but they all too frequently neglect our hyper-awareness of the injuries we sustained living life queerly. Cultural products structured around such use-resistant negativity then afford a type of relation that Love describes as “feeling backward.” When queers turn to such products, their investment in them tethers them to states of mind and structures of feeling that appear counter to the progressivist narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century queer rights. Here, feeling backward is a gesture that refuses to cling to an unrelenting and unaccommodating optimism affiliated with progress. This does not mean that feeling backward has no relation to queer politics. It just means that feeling backward is a mechanism by which to “develop a vision of political agency that incorporates the damage that we hope to repair” (Love 2007, 151). Acknowledging the long history of queer injury through feeling backward then means not losing sight of the fact that the world is still a very hostile place for queers – queer rights frameworks and progressivist accounts of queer history notwithstanding. Watching Anders als die Andern is, for me, an act of feeling backward. The film’s melodramatic storyline – true to the genre’s form – calls attention to social perils too large to resolve through a film. Already in its generic premise then the film acknowledges a particular investment in negativity. The film’s

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relation to viewers is shaped by offering them an opportunity to sit in tension with insurmountable issues. Here, the film’s primacy on gestures and expressions that call attention to the protagonist’s failing and ultimately failed body and mind in the context of anti-queer social and legal structures is central. In facilitating for viewers the acquisition of intimate knowledge about the protagonist’s struggle, the film affords viewers insight into a deep history of pain he endured. One moment of access to intimate knowledge pertaining to this pain then becomes a gateway through which an entire lifetime of shame, anxiety, and refusal find expression. The affirmative moments, as I have argued above, do not abate the severity of queer suffering presented in the film; they indeed enhance it. In this chapter, I will outline what function this negativity can serve for viewers today. I will particularly focus on what contemporary audiences attuned to queer struggle might glean from the film’s negativity.

What’s the Political Use of a Corpse? To begin articulating the film’s relation to feeling backward, I will turn to the optimism of the physician (played by Hirschfeld) at the end of the film, which I began addressing at the end of the previous chapter. The final sequence in the film is lost. Meaning, as is the case with other parts of the film, we know the contents of the sequence as a result of meticulous archival reconstruction work. Archivists and scholars recovered the ending by narrating its contents through intertitles and two static images. The first image is likely a promotional still for the film showing Körner’s dead body, crowded by those who knew him (figure 3.2). Körner’s corpse, positioned in the lower right of the frame, radiates a lightness unlike any other scene in the film in which he was alive. The daunting pressures to move on for those he left behind are expressed by the glum mood in the room and the dark colors affiliated with their costuming. However, there is nothing straightforward about this mood.

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Sivers’s devastation indexes his regret for leaving Körner behind and the intricacies affiliated with the profound loss of a lover. His sister’s sombre expression partially relates to the resentment she feels toward the familial and legal structures that led to the death. In fact, she lashes out at the family members upset by Sivers’s presence at the wake. Körner’s mother mourns the death of her son, while his father maintains an air of hostility shaped by his implication in his son’s death: he encouraged Körner to take his own life. In this scene, the father also sneers at Sivers. In the far background, Körner’s sister and her disproving husband stare ahead. Sivers gives in to suicidal ideation

Figure 3.2 Körner’s dead body and the mourning people who knew him. Reproduction of an archival still used in the 2011 version of the film.

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in light of the corpse before him. The physician, however, intervenes. The second and final image in the sequence is a portrait of the physician (figure 3.3). Pointing at Körner, the physician implores Sivers to stay alive and use his life to honour the memory of the dead: “instead keep on living to change the prejudices whose victim – one of countless many – this dead man has become.” The physician then remarks, “what matters now is to restore honor and justice to the many thousands before us, with us, and after us.” The physician’s response here is quite admirable. He effectively intervenes in Sivers’s suicide ideation and, we are led to believe, thereby prevents yet another queer death. However, Hirschfeld does much more in this sequence. He deploys the dead queer corpse as a catalyst for change. The physician’s intervention seeks to redirect the pain the dead body still indexes into a more affirmative direction. In other words, he wants to make Körner’s corpse useful for the social reform message of the film. Meanwhile, the resigned and resentful mood among the other characters in the scene – let alone that of viewers witnessing what is transpiring – is characterized by a series of “useless” emotions, as it were. Those are the type of stultifying negative feelings and states of mind that prohibit progress. The physician’s message of empowerment is then also an ardent interruption of the negativity in the room. What can we learn from this corpse? How quickly can we move on to build a better, queer affirmative future for those alive and those not yet born? Sivers’s sister, Else, is, next to Sivers himself, a key conduit for such progressivist narratives. She transforms into an ally as a result of her personal engagement with Körner and also by attending the physician’s lectures. Her scorn for Körner’s family – members of which leave soon after Sivers arrives – is important. It embodies the type of transformation Hirschfeld envisioned in the real world. This is an example of the “enlightenment” didacticism the sexologist advanced in his advocacy work and which he sought to feature in Anders als die Andern. In fact, Hirschfeld calls for a broader transformation in the public at the end of the film. His prompt to those around him and, by extension, the audiences watching the film, asks to use the anger and frustration they feel

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Figure 3.3 A portrait of the physician reproduced in the film.

about the suicide as a fuel toward meaningful change – lest one be stuck in feeling bad without an aim. In my reading, however, Körner’s corpse, as epicenter for much of the negativity indexed in the scene, is partially also a liability for the logic the physician advances in this moment of the film. The physician’s confident call for

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reform implies there is no space to doubt his politics (or, if you will, to feel backward). As such, the queer injury enshrined in the protagonist’s dead body at least partially resists conscription into the physician’s rhetorical gesture. At first sight the corpse is adorned with an air of peacefulness. Körner’s face lacks the marks of a life-long tension that shaped the ways in which he was presented throughout the film. The bright white of his death shirt works in tandem with the flowers resting on his body to announce that he is finally at rest. And yet, attuned viewers arrive at this sequence after following the pattern of intimacy on screen throughout the course of the film. Just moments prior they witnessed Körner’s slow death. In the suicide scene, viewers faced his body and mind caving under the pressures of a hostile social and legal system. In this regard, the suicide is less characterizable as a single event triggered by a discrete phenomenon than it is a consequence of decades of struggle. Each scene in the movie in which this struggle registered – primarily by way of gestures and expressions pointing to slow decay – is a scene in which this long history of pain is channelled through the body of the protagonist. These scenes seek to evoke the severity of historical queer injury by reminding viewers that the wounds Körner sustained never healed. By the time we face Körner’s corpse one final time, its resting features do not resolve the pain we witnessed. The mournful scene at the end indeed activates the pain affiliated with queer injury anew for viewers. The frustration about having witnessed what Körner had to endure in his life lingers. Just as it did in previous scenes, where it was part of the melodramatic story arc, the defeatist logic of melodramatic impossibility extends into the end. It contaminates the scene with a bad feeling. The physician’s intervention might seek to redirect this negative affective force into more “useful” aims, but what of those of us who are not easily swayed by his optimism? Despite the converted surrogates on screen – namely, Sivers and his sister Else who are transformed by the physician’s call for more affirmative use of their bad feelings – some of us are left tethered to the pain that caused Körner’s death. The ending might not have “wanted” this negative

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attachment for us, but the film nonetheless affords it. We watch Hirschfeld’s enthusiasm not as ardent viewers prone to emoting and ready for a change, but rather as viewers attached to the mourning and not ready to let go of our entwined relation to it. We sit by the corpse, as it were, tears running down our cheeks as we shake our head at the pity of it all. Like the little shop girls, whose affective investment Siegfried Kracauer dismissed as useless for transformational politics, we wipe those tears at the end of the film, uncertain about the pain of queer injury, which still continues to linger (Kracauer 1995, 302–3). I do not revere Kracauer – as is sometimes the case among Weimar cinema scholars. I certainly find his sexism disturbing. But I bring his work up here again to make the point that where he sees an issue with useless emoting, I see as a quite powerful viewer-image engagement and want to reformulate his assessment of emotionality. Where he sees politically dubious indulgence, I find appreciation: namely, in the emotive attachments that Anders als die Andern affords viewers, which are for the most part affiliated with feeling badly in the world.

Technologies of Feeling Backward in Anders als die Andern Beyond the ending, Anders als die Andern deploys cinematic-narrative devices by which it facilitates feeling backward. One could make the case that melodrama’s investment in insurmountable social issues itself makes the genre a prime mode for feeling backward. In Anders als die Andern, the structures of intimacy evoked through performance style are instructive. Performers’ gestures solicit from viewers an intensified emotional investment in a given scene which tethers viewers to a type of negativity that is resistant to any attempts to make it useful. Take, for instance, the aftermath of the brawl scene. Sivers confronts Bollek, who has broken into Körner’s house. In the scene, Bollek suggests that Sivers is nothing but a purchased lover. In so doing, Bollek divulges his own past

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and present relation to Körner. The news cast Sivers into a state of shock. When Körner arrives in the scene, he goes berserk. A longshot shows Körner, in a moment during which he is overcome by anger, attacking Bollek in the background (figure 3.4). Körner beats up the culprit and ultimately throws him out of his house, as Sivers stands in the foreground of the image, stunned by the events that just transpired. The final scene in the sequence is a medium shot in which Körner seeks to console Sivers (figure 3.5). Two sets of affective forces collide here. Körner’s face channels a deep concern. His messy past found expression in this scene without him wanting to divulge its complexity to Sivers. Körner is overwhelmed by the event: he is overcoming an intense confrontation with the person who had emotionally abused him for a long time. Although he threw Bollek out of his house, the problem attached to Bollek – namely, Bollek’s threat that he will go public about Körner’s homosexuality – remains. We know those pressures affect our protagonist and at least partially shape his gaze at Sivers. The other matter relates to what the news about Körner’s past would do to his relationship with Sivers. Körner gently caresses Sivers’s head while the other arm holds his shoulder tight. However, Sivers’s shock and confusion about what just transpired persists in the scene. Firstly, Sivers might be facing the severity of the anti-queer world firsthand for the first time. Besides those struggles affiliated with his parents over a career in music, there are no other scenes in the film in which he is shown tending to blackmail, harassment, or all the other pain affiliated with queer injury that Körner faces. Sivers’s trembling in this scene then offers viewers access

Figure 3.4 Opposite top Körner and Bollek fight in the background, as Sivers is caught in a state of shock by the events of the scene. Figure 3.5 Opposite bottom Körner consoles Sivers after the brawl with Bollek.

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to the visceral effects of a fragile body beginning to crush under the weight of a hostile social system. Secondly, Sivers’s trust in Körner suffered damage in a scene where he found out intimate information about his lover he was previously denied. As discussed in the previous chapter, Sivers anticipated that something might be on the horizon, but Körner regularly deflected his interest in his pain. When the matter comes to light, Sivers is unable to overcome the pain of the moment. He pushes Körner’s hand off his shoulder. In the next (lost) scene, Else informs Körner that an unnamed pain drove her brother to run away from home. The interpersonal struggle between the two lovers pertains to heightened emotionality that registers for each in different ways. This difference – the contours of which we can recognize in our engagement with their gestures and expressions – is further intensified by what becomes an impossible condition for reconciliation. We do not know what ultimately drove Sivers away, but we know that the context in which their relationship was formed does not let it thrive. And so, we wallow in despair along with our protagonist, gazing at the impossible situation driving the pain on screen. Richard Dyer has described this negativity as “down-beat,” explaining the discrepancy between it and the physician’s “unambiguously affirmative character of the lecture” as conditioned by the fragmentedness of the film (Dyer 1990, 28). He cites the missing up-beat ending in which Sivers’s enthusiasm about the future comes to be expressed as reason for this lopsidedness. I argue that even an approach that centers Sivers’s enthusiasm and Hirschfeld’s unbridled optimism about the future does not mitigate the pain of these scenes. In fact, one accomplishment of the film is that it affords us queer viewers a chance to mourn the loss of our fellow queers. This does not mean that these scenes are invested in rampant pessimism. They simply afford a more honest engagement with the pain of the past that continues in the present. As such, the flashback scenes in the film offer a particularly powerful method for feeling backward – for tethering us affectively to heightened negativity of the use-resistant variety. They are announced as Sivers leaves Körner. A

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medium shot shows our protagonist sorrowfully looking at an older portrait of himself (figure 3.6). The despair of the situation comes to the fore through Körner’s prominent frown and a quivering lip as he stares at the picture of his past self. His elbows are pressed up against his body, while his shoulders are slumped. This tense gesture is soon followed with Körner slowly looking up from the image as he lowers his hands. A pose of self-pity if there ever was one. He wallows in hopelessness. We are not only prompted to wallow along with him, but soon notice that the scene frames even more pain: it introduces the flashback sequence of the film.

Figure 3.6 Körner mournfully stares at an older portrait of himself.

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The scenes in the flashback sequence quickly cover the timeframe of Körner’s teenage years at the boarding school, his years as student, down to his first encounter with Bollek. At each station of his life, we come to experience Körner’s pain through the intimacy afforded by reading his gestures and expressions. Take, for instance, Körner’s devastation standing in front of a tribunal of teachers. A long shot shows five teachers deliberating and ultimately voting to expel Körner (Karl Giese) from the boarding school for being found out kissing another male student (figure 3.7).1 Körner stands in front of the tribunal, but faces away from it. The lighting in the scene calls our attention to his blank stare. In comparison to the scene in which the older Körner sorrowfully stares at his own picture (figure 3.6), the young Körner’s stare is less severe. However, there is no doubt that he is concerned about the situation. In a lot of ways, this comparison underscores the point that the progressive exposure to anti-queer hostility slowly breaks him, causing more devastation as he ages. Cinephiles familiar with Weimar cinema would find in the setting of the boarding school a familiar setting at the centre of at least two other queer films from the era. The first one pertains to G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film, Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl). Louise Brooks plays the title role of Thymian Henning, who is sent to a boarding school for wayward girls. Thymian’s fellow students are subjected to a highly routinized schedule at the school. However, in moments between chores or in those where they can steal a glance of another student, they are able to secure some sort of intimacy. For instance, one scene gives viewers access to the sleeping quarters. A tracking shot provides a panorama of the various interpersonal interactions among the girls. For a brief moment, we see two girls lean back and closer to one another, their presumed kiss and other physical pleasure being hidden by the footrest of the bed (figure 3.8). The second film has a more iconic status in the history of lesbian cinema: Leontine Sagan’s 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform). It also

Figure 3.7 Young Körner (Karl Giese) facing a tribunal of teachers, who expel him from the boarding school after he is caught kissing another male student.

Figure 3.8 Two girls in an intimate scene at the reformatory in G.W. Pabst’s Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl), 1929.

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takes place at an educational institution, and relays the life there as experienced by Manuela von Meinhardis (Hertha Thiele). In the film, the protagonist falls in love with a compassionate instructor, Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck). After confessing her love to Bernburg, the teacher is reprimanded and tells Manuela that the two can no longer speak to one another. Moreover, Bernburg loses her job at the institution. Devastated by the events, Manuela climbs up to a high spot in the stairwell and jumps to her death. A longshot shows her clinging to the railing, as her fellow students rescue her (figure 3.9). Although we have no access to what happens after this stage in her life, Manuela at the very least has a community of supporters. Scholars have variously commented on the setting of the educational institution in Mädchen in Uniform. Barbara Mennel, for instance, has noted how the narrative and visual styles of the film collectively advance a critique of the “institutional repression determining the girls’ lives” in the boarding school (Mennel 2012, 17). Kyle Frackman has likewise foregrounded how the boarding school setting and the various power dynamics it enacts invariably present their students with “unreasonable expectations” devised to keep in check, suppress, or eradicate students’ “inappropriate” tendencies (Frackman 2019, 124; see also Iurascu 2019). These repressive dynamics are, of course, also at the core of Anders als die Andern. We do not get access to what happens in Manuela’s life after this scene – the film ends shortly after she is saved – but we are presented with a similar sense about the state of things that was at play in Anders als die Andern: Manuela’s fate, as is the case with Körner, is bound up with the fact that various social pressures will interfere with her queerness. The second segment of the flashback sequence in Anders als die Andern is then instructive when it comes to tracing Körner’s progressively worsening exposure to anti-homosexual tendencies in his context. His concern about being a homosexual in the world is activated again in a series of scenes at a party during his university years. Fellow students drag him there after he declines their initial invitation. At the party, Körner is less affected by the de-

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Figure 3.9 Manuela (Hertha Thiele) rescued by her fellow students from an attempt to commit suicide in Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform), 1931.

bauchery itself than by the aggressive physical advances by two women interested in him. As he vigorously pushes the women away, we witness the suffocating effects of the social system that facilitated his presence at the party. His fellow students interrupted his solitude to urge him to accompany them. Their insistence is part of a compulsory culture that affords the scene a sense of hopelessness about Körner’s future trajectory. And it is in fact the daunting outlook for what lies ahead that slowly drives Körner to conversion therapy.

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A longshot shows a physician holding a device through which Körner might have been subjected to a form of mesmerism or similar procedure aiming to redirect his “unnatural” impulses to more “appropriate” behaviour (figure 3.10). Of note here is that Körner subjects himself to the procedure willingly. He earnestly hopes that the procedure might succeed; but this hope is conditioned by a hostile world that pressures the protagonist to pursue desperate terms. Ultimately, the procedure fails. And while this failure drives him to seek out the advice of a supportive physician, who “enlightens” Körner about his homosexuality, the next (and final segment of the flashback sequence) introduces Körner to Bollek. On the whole, the flashback sequence in Anders als die Andern illustrates well the impossibilities Körner faces living a life as a homosexual. It generates some hope. For example, the physician’s presence in the flashback sequence offers much repose for Körner (and for viewers) from the pain in previous scenes. The physician’s intervention is a welcome alternative to the conversion therapy. However, the recuperative scene itself cannot stand up to the severity of a system of social relations and legal parameters hostile to homosexuals like Körner. And so Körner falls victim to this system shortly after finding some peace with his own homosexuality. Even finding his way into the queer community does not suffice to shield him from the harms that can befall homosexuals. In this regard, the flashback sequence structures bad feelings for viewers, who trace Körner’s turbulent life trajectory, scene by scene hoping he would find repose, only to realize this may never come.

The Politics of Mourning: Queer Negativity and Watching Anders als die Andern In her remarkable book, The Hirschfeld Archives, Heike Bauer reflects on her work writing the history of queer injury affiliated with Hirschfeld’s broader scholarship and community practice. She notes that focus on the pain cap-

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Figure 3.10 Körner undergoes conversion therapy.

tured in his writings in particular “shows that violence experienced, committed, and ignored is an intrinsic part of modern queer culture” (Bauer 2017, 134). Here, Bauer reflects that suffering is not and cannot be the only category by which queerness comes to be defined, but it is most certainly an important one. It is in this spirit of acknowledgment of historic queer injury that I welcome the type of feeling backward that Anders als die Andern facilitates for those of us watching the film today. The conversion therapy scene in the film might stand out to us in particular. The 2010s and early 2020s have seen various reports about conversion

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therapy emerging in different contexts in North America (and beyond). At the core were the violent means by which conservative and religious communities sought to eradicate queerness, which they saw as antithetical to their core values. Critics of the practice, writing from a vantage point of post-gaymarriage progressivism, were outraged by how widespread conversion therapy was in the North American context. They called for immediate action in the form of community reform and new legislature devised to protect queer people from the harmful effects of conversion therapy. For instance, the USbased Human Rights Campaign, working in partnership with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, published a report on conversion therapy violence titled “Just as They Are: Protecting Our Children from the Harms of Conversion Therapy.” The report, among other material, documents the experience from select queer people who survived conversion therapy made compulsory by their communities. Some of the stories reflect Körner’s experience in the film. For instance, Lynse from Colorado Springs reports how her church community imparted on her a sense that “homosexuality was wrong” and that if she “wanted to be godly” she “would make efforts to change that” about herself (Human Rights Campaign, “Just As They Are”). Her social context exerted such pressure on Lynse that, years after breaking with the church and developing a more accepting relationship to her queerness, she still felt its effects. Lynse notes how the experience “changed my interaction with everyone … Internalized shame can affect how you interact with the whole world.” The report also offers information about the persistent dangers of conversion therapy in contemporary life. For many queer individuals subjected to it, this means they are more prone to suicide attempts, depression, as well as a likelihood to pursue illegal drugs than are their nonqueer counterparts. 16 June 2021 saw the release of the Netflix documentary Pray Away (dir. Kristine Stolakis). The documentary relays the stories of survivors like Lynse as well as those of former leaders in an organized conversion therapy movement. Pray Away focuses in particular on the long and messy history of con-

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version therapy advocacy by the religious nonprofit organization Exodus International, which was initially founded in 1976. In a review of Pray Away, Adrian Horton notes the centrality of Exodus International in popularizing “the idea that it was possible – and preferable – to change one’s sexual orientation” particularly among Evangelical circles (Horton 2021). The leaders in the organization were self-professed converted queers. In the documentary, they talk about the struggles with shame, resentment, and pity about who they were, who they thought they should be, and their ultimate admittance of how misguided (and harmful) their actions were. Horton’s assessment, which I share, is that the makers of Pray Away are less interested in attributing blame to these figures than they are about calling attention to the severity of the situation for so many people struggling with their queerness in some communities in the 2020s. The documentary makes clear that a broad structure comprised of various networks of people and institutions advocates for conversion therapy. This structure is vast, has a long history, and cannot be reformed with simple measures. In 2021, we have seen some new policies and legal initiatives emerge intended to ban conversion therapy across North America and elsewhere. In the spirit of Pray Away we are to presume that these are but the beginning to remedy the situation. Broader structural dismantling of the systems built to harm queer people are necessary to enact more meaningful change. In this regard, shame, resentment, pity, but also regret and frustration – among other related negative emotions at the heart of the stories about the former conversion therapy leaders in Pray Away – resist easy conscription into a broader political mission. Such an engagement with negativity, in my view, slows down our impulse to act – no matter how righteous the gesture may feel. It instead prompts us to sit with the tension afforded by realizing (yet again) the vastness of the robust system of violence queer people in our time have to endure. Such engagement with violence is, however, not meant to facilitate a gratuitous engagement with negativity. Documentaries like Pray Away are certainly not interested in positioning viewers to enjoy the suffering

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of others. Rather, their slowing down is intended to lay a hold on our attention for as long as possible. These cultural texts thereby prompt us to remember the suffering in the world when we invariably have to move on with our daily lives. Let me illustrate this with an example from Pray Away. Toward the very end of the documentary, an interview with Julie Rogers, a former leader of Exodus International, offers insights about her life after leaving the organization and living her true self. Rogers remarks on her happiness, moments after we are presented with some scenes from a ceremony in which she was married to Amanda Hite. Rogers proclaims, “we are doing well,” referring to her relationship and the newfound happiness this queer bond affords. This proclamation is supported by the images from the ceremony, which was well attended, and suggests, beyond a strong interpersonal and affirmative relationship, the existence of a strong community that supports the couple for who they are. Rogers then follows this proclamation with, “but not everybody is.” This relation between “having survived” and “others are still facing danger” is not meant as a gesture to quell hope. In my reading, this proclamation is meant to prompt a pause for viewers, grip them in the hold of the moment in which they apprehend the truth that the world is still hostile for some of those around them. Pray Away, in this regard, not only relays the story of how former conversion therapy leaders reverted their position, feeding our impulse that with the passage of time past wrongs will be set right; but it indeed very adamantly catapults us into a mode of backwardness – of anger, frustration, and depression about the state of things in the world. Anders als die Andern stages a similar relation to negativity. Its cinematography and narration positions viewers to wallow in pity, despair, and mourning. Past queer injury as captured on screen, in turn, affords us a chance to acknowledge historical pain. What is more, those of us prompted to compare our present to the past mediated through the film will not have to search long to identify that some of the social issues the film casts as major obstacles for queer thriving in Weimar Germany find expression in different constellations

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Figure 3.11 Julie Rogers interviewed for the documentary Pray Away, 2021.

in our own time. I believe that some of the scholarly assessments and popular responses (such as those captured in reviews of the film on the website letterboxd.com) complaining about the death of the queer protagonist are related to this long history of struggle. In this regard, Dyer playfully remarks: “yet another gay film with an unhappy ending” (Dyer 1990, 28). A popular review of the film by the user amaya on Letterboxd likewise reads, “gay people, not getting happy endings since 1919” (amaya 2020). Such sardonic statements are part and parcel of a line of thought in queer cinema studies that was advanced most fiercely by the film scholar Vito Russo. In the afterword to the revised edition of his landmark study The Celluloid Closet, he proclaims, “Mainstream films about homosexuality are not for gays. They address themselves exclusively to the majority” (Russo 1987, 325). For Russo, the suffering that gays endure in such cinema does little by way of advancing a more

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affirmative culture about gay public life. On the contrary, this representational culture serves heterosexual dominance by feeding heteros sad stories about gay lives. Russo, instead, calls for a queer cinema culture that does not study homosexuality, but rather features gays in their daily lives as embedded within culture. He celebrates films that “do not view the existence of gay people as controversial” (326). I sympathize with Russo’s complaint – to a point. I, too, appreciate the rise of more affirmative queer mediation practices in screen culture and am grateful when I encounter lighthearted, cheerful, generous, and happy queers on screen. For example, I, like many of you, very much appreciated how the popular Canadian tv series Schitt’s Creek (2015–20) handled its queer characters. Of particular interest here is the relationship between David Rose (Dan Levy) and Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid). The two are initially business partners – they run a general store in town – but soon become more than that. In an episode titled “Open Mic” (season 4, episode 6), Patrick hosts an open mic night at the store to generate interest in it. David, who is uptight about everything, feels uncomfortable about the idea. A medium-long shot shows the two conversing about the matter, with David progressively pouting about his discomfort (figure 3.12). Patrick then gets on stage and sings a rendition of Tina Turner’s famous song, “The Best” (1989), dedicating it to his beau. David is stunned by Patrick’s talents, and his sweet gesture of glancing at his partner throughout his performance. Amanda Bell, writing about the show for tv Guide, notes that “it was impossible not to fall in love with them as a couple from the very beginning” (Bell 2020). Bell here echoes the assessment by a number of other critics, as well as those by viewers enamoured by the cuteness of their relationship (one just has to search Twitter or other social media platforms for their names to see how vast the response was). In short, the critical and popular reception felt drawn to their relationship. And why not? The two traverse a story world that accepts them for who they are and in which they thrive as a couple.

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Figure 3.12 David (Dan Levy) and Patrick (Noah Reid) before Patrick’s performance during open mic night.

However, the truth about queer life in the past as in the present is that the world remains hostile to so many queers – despite the cuteness afforded by David and Patrick’s affirmative experiences in the story world of Schitt’s Creek. The negativity in films like Anders als die Andern then might help facilitate for us a way to keep that in mind.

Conclusion

The Queer Cinema of Mourning

In the introduction to this book, I noted my astonishment when I first discovered Anders als die Andern. Apprehending the grandeur of a cultural artefact that evidences queer life in the past felt very good. The dangers affiliated with living life as queer people often lead many of us to hide who we are, covering up any trace that could point to our queerness where necessary. And so, a film about queer lives is deeply moving. Its plot spoke intimately to my personal history of navigating life in the closet and many of the experiences I made navigating predominantly straight spaces since coming out. In short, Anders als die Andern felt very relevant to me. This was the case when I first watched the film. It has also been the case each time I watched the film since. In fact, Anders als die Andern’s mournful energies speak more to me as I am growing older. This is particularly the case as I keep witnessing anti-queer harm both close to home and further away. Some might find the film’s mournful imagery – for example, the famous procession scene of dead queers or the still image from Körner’s deathbed – excessive. These scenes are examples of high melodrama in that they feature extremely sentimental material. They ooze of emotionality in ways some viewers might find distasteful because of its explicit mediation of queer death. But some queer viewers, like me, respect them. We do not find comfort in the mediated pain and suffering, but feel that the negative emotionality of

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these scenes calls on us to mourn the dead and be mindful of how harm against queer people still proliferates around us. Viewers watching the film in the 2020s regularly cite the film’s negative emotionality as a strong point of engagement for them. Take, for instance, the 13 November 2021 review of Anders als die Andern by the user ignorama on Letterboxd.com. The user describes the film’s melodramatic energies as a means by which it seeks to access the public: “This film serves as a cry to the public, even now, to view the plights of the queer community more sympathetically” (ignorama 2021). A review by the user Hull from 21 November 2021, goes even further: “I want to give Paul a hug and tell him it’s going to be alright, that things will get better. I feel so sorry for him. I’m pleasantly surprised at how accurate and sympathetic this film (from 1919) is toward the Queer community. I got genuinely saddened at the end which is more emotions that I thought I would feel from a film that has no sound, is in fragments (because of the fucking Nazis) and has jamming piano music playing over it. I loved it and would recommend it” (Hull 2021; emphasis in original). Hull calls attention to the matter of feeling backward that I have outlined in the previous chapter. The mournful engagement with the violence against queer people the film depicts is a deeply intimate cinematic encounter. Hull wants to reach out and hug Körner. The film moved the viewer so much that they felt “saddened” by its storyline in a way that gave rise to strong supportive feelings for its main character. Hull’s response certainly resonated with my own reaction to the film. One particularly moving scene from Anders als die Andern is the one in which Körner, in a moment of excessive self-pity, stares at an image of himself from his youth. Our protagonist trembles, troubled by what transpired, and terrified of what might lie ahead. I, too, just want to reach out and hug him. I want to tell him that he does not have to struggle on his own to navigate these hostilities and that there are people like him who could help him face the troubles of the world. But I am not able to do so. Körner and I occupy different worlds.

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What I, and what viewers like Hull, can do instead is mournfully relate to the story we are told by the film. We can sit with Körner’s story, even if we cannot be there for him in 1919. We witness his struggle, pity the circumstances in which he finds himself, and give ourselves over to the sorrow attending his suicide. Crying, after all, means we care in some fashion about that which we saw. Our tears are a testament to our relational engagement with Körner’s plight. The structures of emotionality patterned by the film were devised for audiences from another time and place. And yet they serve as a springboard for me to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle. Anders als die Andern positions us to pursue a sober way to move forward in the world. What do I mean by that? My most recent encounter with the film was among the saddest ones. The day after I re-watched the film (in preparation for a talk about it), I received news that a friend was the victim of an anti-queer crime in my hometown. After being verbally assaulted and fearing for his life, he was able to get to safety. The scene left him terrified to leave the house for quite some time. This was not the only example of a queer person facing anti-queer harassment in my immediate context. My partner and I fear showing affection toward one another in public, because we feel we would be subjected to the anti-queer resentment our friend faced. In the past, we certainly experienced public resentment when the wrong person caught us showing our affection for one another. In fact, despite being in a relationship for fifteen years and living in what many call a queer-friendly city (Vancouver), we are terrified to hold hands walking down the street. Körner’s growing concern when he and Sivers take a walk through the park evokes disturbingly familiar feelings in me. Furthermore, stories come up regularly in our friendship circles about people who fear losing their jobs for being queer, being disowned from family for being queer, and being driven to self-harm by the crushing pressures they face in a world that keeps on telling them that there is something wrong with their queerness and with them as people. The severity of these stories is com-

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pounded by periodic news reports about anti-queer violence both domestically and internationally. When I was younger, I would avoid dwelling on the realization that the world is a hostile place for queer people. My strategy for coping was Chicago’s nightclub culture, where I “grew up gay.” My friends and I drew much energy and inspiration from the extreme joy and pleasure that this context afforded us. Some weeks we would be out and about each night, coming home only to get the necessary sleep, going to work to endure crappy jobs, only to get back to the nightclub as quickly as possible. I cherish my experiences during this time. But I also have come to understand that my personal relation to this queer culture was conditioned primarily by chasing moments in which I could be in the gay nightclub scene. In the nightclub, me and my friends could be unapologetically queer in ways we felt we could not be outside of it. It was not until I had the chance to reflect longer about my own relationship to the world that I realized that this sense of safety drove my investment in this night culture. The more time I spent “outside” of the nightclub, the more I realized just how hostile the world can be. What slowly emerged for me was an understanding that my turning to the nightlife industry was active avoidance of acknowledging the hostilities of the world. Again, I do not regret my past. Indeed, it is no wonder that I chased these affirmative moments where the actual world as it was around me was suspended in favour of joy. I could never blame myself, my friends, and many other queers for seeking to avoid painful truths. But over time the avoidance accrues into something of an unbearable dissatisfaction with the state of things. Looking the other way feels like abandoning your comrades who succumb to anti-queer hostility. Chasing joy alone in a world heavily equipped to harm your comrades means not taking seriously their (and by extension your) plight. Negative feelings have been a quite generative means by which I broke this cycle of pleasure and delusion about the world. They have taught me to be more aware of the hostilities that drive some of my decisions and that shape my life.

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Anders als die Andern is an example of what I call the queer cinema of mourning. This cinema is well-equipped to generate the type of negativity capable of breaking cycles of avoidance to recognize that our world continues to be a hostile place for queer people. The film, and others like it, helps me take seriously the pains of the past and link them to our present. And so, I respect the film’s extensive melancholy without the need to recuperate it – without the need to make it useful beyond the mourning itself. First, mourning is an important means by which to establish relations to others – even the fictional dead. As such, mourning does things. Through it, we recognize the pain of the world, let it seep into our disposition, and apprehend the pitiful situations that gave rise to it. For those of us conditioned to avoid pain, recognizing it is a big deal. It changes us, and the way we relate to the world. We become more attuned to the structures that cause pain. We become intimate with knowledge about structures and thereby can recognize their shifting shapes more readily. Second, focusing on the few moments of joy in Anders als die Andern means neglecting the severity of the corpse enshrined at the film’s end. It means abandoning the pain to which the movie carefully gave expression. Who among us is capable of readily moving on so quickly from such intense pain in order to seek out a politic that leads us away from it? In this regard, the queer cinema of mourning pursues a politics of sustenance that is not tethered to a future-oriented political project akin to the one advanced by José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz’s remarkable study, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), pertains to an interest “to push beyond the impasse of the present” (31). Like Heather Love, Muñoz partially writes in response to the underwhelming public initiatives of the gay marriage movement of the 2000s. Their political prowess centred on expanding the heteronormative institution of marriage to include queers, thereby neglecting to attend to the broader structural forces that continue to burden queer life. What Muñoz then advances is a theory for queer utopian longing that contains within it the capacities to glean a nurturing queer future. By turning to hope, he seeks to envision sociability which negative ap-

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proaches to queer culture often stifle. In the face of dissatisfying public queer politics and a neoliberalized queer representation culture industry, Muñoz pursues a type of manoeuvring through queer cultural history that actively seeks to find within it the affirmative moments of queer joy. Such moments would prime us, as it were, on our path to imagination that might yield social structures we come to pursue that are more nurturing than those to which we have access in our unideal present. The cinema of mourning is categorically incompatible with the futureorientedness in queer utopian thought such as Muñoz’s. The excessive negativity that characterizes the cinema of mourning contaminates even the hopeful moments often articulated within it. As such, the cinema of mourning might even be anti-utopian. But this does not mean that it serves as material to refute the important work of Muñoz and other scholars like him. It simply means that, as a cultural genre, it does different work. As such, the cinema of mourning requires its own theory. The most important component of the cinema of mourning remains that its recourse to negativity does not mean it is entirely devoid of sustenance. Cinematic negativity is not exclusively antisocial. In fact, as I hoped to outline in this book, films like Anders als die Andern pattern social relations through mourning. Generations of viewers have expressed their supportive emotions for the protagonist, whose struggles and ultimate death left them aligned with his plight. For many, such as myself, Körner’s struggle and death also served as a prompt to remember the ongoing hostilities of the world for queer people. As such, Anders als die Andern not only generates feeling, but also attunes viewers to the structures that might cause them and their comrades harm. It presents them with the daunting realization that their own plight is linked to a history of struggle that reaches from the past into their present and will pattern the future. Watching the film, then, means giving ourselves over to this intergenerational queer struggle.

Notes

Introduction 1 Stiller’s film was based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel Mikaël, which was the foundation for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1924 film Michael, another queer movie from the Weimar era. 2 Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code was not abolished until 1994. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German original are my own. 4 The dossier Hirschfeld compiled also contains less favourable reviews of the film. 5 In the context of trans studies, Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska have critiqued historiographic practices that dismiss transhistorical deployment of “trans” as analytic category and descriptor. They note that such complaints “can at best be characterized as a knee-jerk historicism, and at worst as a thinly veiled form of transphobia, used to refuse, reject, or simply shut down scholarly inquiry” (2021, 8).

134 Notes to pages 37–68

Chapter One 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German into English are my own. 2 Oswald was married and had two children. His wife, Käte, starred in a number of his films. Although marriage is not conclusive evidence proving Oswald’s heterosexuality, there is no evidence to suggest he was homosexual. We might never know. 3 For more background on the history of homosexual suicide in Germany during the early twentieth century, see Heike Bauer (2017, 37–56). 4 For a discussion of the shifts in sexological scholarship during the First World War, see Sutton (2019, 91–117). 5 For an excellent overview of queer discourse in the Germanophone context, see Tobin (2015). 6 For a longer discussion of the emotional reception of the film, see Malakaj (2017, 11–12). 7 For a comprehensive example of how moral panics about the sexuality shaped public discourse about social hygiene films, see Moreck (1926). Chapter Two 1 A focus point of Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Prussian Penal Code was to punish physical relations among men. See Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich (February 1876). 2 As was the case for a number of actors during the 1910s and 1920s, Conrad Veidt was professionally trained for the theatre before taking work for the screen. Here, histrionic acting style in part had practical value: exaggerated movements on stage help articulate states of mind in explicit ways so that audience members seated further away from the stage could apprehend the action. For cinematic melodrama in the

Notes to pages 69–98 135

3

4

5

6

silent era, exaggerated acting style is reserved for emotionally charged scenes in order to articulate their emotional force on the character (see Brewster and Jacobs 2004, 69–70; Naremore 1988, 48–9). Singer provides an excellent overview of the writing on melodrama. For some melodrama scholars – here Singer cites the work of Linda Williams and Peter Brooks – melodrama is best characterized as a “mode” rather than a “genre.” In Singer’s assessment, such an approach facilitates accounting for melodramatic impulses “in a wide range of cultural texts.” However, Singer is invested in melodrama as a “historical object” with a set of parameters by which filmmakers in particular sought to define their work. Without aiming to reject the important insights by scholars such as Williams and Brooks, he establishes what he calls a “middle-ground position … somewhere between a specific, fixed, coherent single genre and a pervasive popular mode spanning many different genres” (Singer 2001, 7; see Williams 2001; and Brooks 1985). Sara Friedman noted that while queer Weimar-era periodicals like Die Freundschaft (Friendship) accused some conservative critics of not even having watched the film before dismissing it, conservatives “argued that it was not necessary to see Anders als die Andern to find it offensive” (Friedman 2019). Compare here the work of Thomas Waugh, who has shown how the film “projects moments of innocent schoolboy play and devotion, and chaste gay mentorship and coupledom (bowlers and overcoats for a stroll, arm-in-arm, through the Tiergarten) – not to mention precious inside glimpses of camp extravagance in Berlin nightlife” (Waugh 1996, 380). Samuel Clowes Huneke’s work has shown how cultural figures like Hirschfeld indeed shaped a narrative around queer suicidality that persists in queer discourse today (see Huneke 2019, 127–66).

136 Note to page 114

Chapter Three 1 The young Körner is played by Karl Giese, who was Magnus Hirschfeld’s partner at the time of the making of Anders als die Andern.

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Index

antisemitism, 37, 56–7, 71–2 Apollo Theater, 36, 53, 63 Aufklärungsfilm (enlightenment film; social hygiene film), 36, 42–3, 106 Balázs, Béla, 29, 65–8, 84–5 Berber, Anita, xvii, xx, 9, 46 Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex), 30, 51 blackmail, xvi, 23, 35, 54, 81, 88, 90–4, 96, 110 Bloch, Iwan, 45 Cabinet des Dr Caligari, Das (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), 2, 73–4 censorship, 3, 19–21, 27, 40, 52, 56–9, 71 commemoration, 12–15, 17 conversion therapy, xvi, 65, 90, 101, 117–22 Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, The, 5–6 Decla-Bioscop, 37 DeMille, Cecil B., 6 Dieterle, Wilhelm, xxi Dreyer, Carl Theodor, xxi, 133 Drössler, Stefan, xi, xx

early homosexual rights movement, 4–5, 12–13, 18, 32, 49, 56 Es werde Licht! (Let There Be Light!), 44–6, 49 feeling backward, 25, 100, 103–4, 109, 112, 119, 127 Filmmuseum München, xi, xiii, xix–xxi, 17, 19–20 firsts discourse, 6–7 First World War, 39–40, 43–4, 50, 139 Gefährliche Neigungen: Die Skandalgeschichte von ‘Anders als die Andern’ (Dangerous Urges: The Scandalous Story of “Different from the Others”), xx German Democratic Republic, 20 Geschlecht in Fesseln (Sex in Chains), xxi Gesetze der Liebe: Aus der Mappe eines Sexualforschers (Laws of Love: From the Dossier of a Sexologist), xx, 19–20 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 13, 15 homonormativity, 100

150 Index Ich möchte keine Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man), 6 Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), 13–15, 22, 24, 52–3, 63 Isherwood, Christopher, 75 Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), xiii, 21, 49–52, 54, 57, 70, 75 Kracauer, Siegfried, 41–2, 109 Lesben- und Schwulenverband Berlin Brandenburg (lsvd), 13, 15 Love, Heather, 25–6, 102–3, 130

Rich, Ruby B., 11 Russo, Vito, 11, 16, 123–4 Schitt’s Creek, 124–5 Schünzel, Reinhold, xvii, xix, 27–8, 46, 81 sexual indeterminacy, xvi, 9 Soviet Union (ussr), 20 Steakley, James, 16, 19–20, 36, 52, 55–8, 71, 97 Stiller, Mauritz, 7, 133 Stonewall, 4–5, 16, 25 suicide, xiv, xvii, 11, 23, 27, 35, 49, 60–3, 95–6, 98–9, 105–8, 117, 120, 128, 134–5 transmutation, 19–20, 27 Ufa, 37, 76

Macor, Claudio, 12, 15 Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform), 114–17 Manslaughter, 6 Maurice, 90, 92 Michael, xxi, 133 Nielsen, Asta, 67–8 Paragraph 175, xiv, xvi–xvii, 18, 21, 34, 49–50, 55, 60, 62, 65, 70, 94, 96, 133–4 Pray Away, 120–3 pride, 5, 15–16, 25–6, 102–3 Prostitution, Die (Prostitution), 46–7

Veidt, Conrad, xiv, xix, 3, 10, 45, 60, 64, 72–5, 134 Victim, 91, 93 Vigarne (The Wings), 7 Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, WhK), 15, 29, 49–53, 56, 58, 63–4 Wings, 6–8