Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany 9780812294118

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction. Human Science and Cinema in Germany After the Great War
Chapter 1. Cinema and the Visual Culture of the Human Sciences
Chapter 2. Film Reform, Mental Hygiene, and the Campaign Against “Trash,” 1912–34
Chapter 3. Hypnosis, Cinema, and Censorship in Germany, 1895–1933
Chapter 4. What Is an Enlightenment Film? Cinema and Sexual Hygiene in Interwar Germany
Chapter 5. Scientific Cinema Between Enlightenment and Superstition, 1918–41
Conclusion. Science, Cinema, and the Malice of Objects
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Homo Cinematicus

Intellectual History of the Modern Age Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-­Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld

Homo Cinematicus Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany

Andreas Killen

u n i v e r s i t y o f p e n n s y lva n i a p r e s s phi l a d e l phi a

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Name: Killen, Andreas, author. Title: Homo cinematicus : science, motion pictures, and the making of modern Germany / Andreas Killen. Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age Identifiers: LCCN 2016053770 | ISBN 9780812249279 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. | Motion pictures—Germany—Psychological aspects—History—20th century. | Cinematography—Scientific applications—Germany—History—20th century. | Psychoanalysis and motion pictures—Germany—History—20th century. | Social sciences—Germany—History—20th century. | Social change—Germany—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.G3 K44 2017 | DDC 791.430943—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053770

Contents

List of Abbreviations  vii Introduction. Human Science and Cinema in Germany After the Great War  1 Chapter 1. Cinema and the Visual Culture of the Human Sciences  23 Chapter 2. Film Reform, Mental Hygiene, and the Campaign Against “Trash,” 1912–­34  65 Chapter 3. Hypnosis, Cinema, and Censorship in Germany, 1895–­1933  103 Chapter 4. What Is an Enlightenment Film? Cinema and Sexual Hygiene in Interwar Germany  137 Chapter 5. Scientific Cinema Between Enlightenment and Superstition, 1918–­41  164 Conclusion. Science, Cinema, and the Malice of Objects  195 Notes 205 Bibliography 247 Index 261 Acknowledgments 267

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Abbreviations

BA Bundesarchiv (Berlin-­Lichterfeld) Bundesarchiv-­Filmarchiv (Berlin) BA-­FA GStA Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin-­ Dahlem) HUB Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Reichsministerium des Innern RMdI

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Introduction

Human Science and Cinema in Germany After the Great War

On the evening of April 4, 1919, Richard Kiliani of the German Foreign Office’s Press Department delivered a lengthy speech to officials of his ministry on the topic of “film propaganda in foreign nations.” During the war, Kiliani had overseen the public relations campaign conducted by Germany in neutral countries like Switzerland. Now, slightly less than six months after the cessation of hostilities, Kiliani turned his attention to the role of film propaganda in the tasks facing the defeated nation. In his remarks he placed particular emphasis on film’s tremendous power to mobilize “mass emotions.” Kiliani did not speak in vague terms but cited directly the findings of experimental psychology. He invoked a model of audience response that took into account the key faculties of attention, memory, and the will, and that acknowledged the basic human need for entertainment, yet at the same time remained cognizant of the moral hazards associated with the “trash” (Schund) that dominated much commercial filmmaking. In claiming a central role for film in the methods of modern statecraft, Kiliani advocated a strategy that avoided direct propaganda and relied instead on what he called an “associative technique”: “The effects of propaganda can and should only be sought through associative, that is to say not direct but indirect methods. . . . ​This does not mean, however, that we must sink to the depths of the sensational or the merely titillating. Trash, kitsch, and unmoral material, [which] unfortunately constitute for primitive people the basis of true art, must be strictly avoided.”1 A likely source for Kiliani’s observations was Hugo Münsterberg’s recently published The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916).2 The German-­ born, Harvard-­based Münsterberg was a world authority in the discipline of

2 Introduction

scientific psychology, a highly influential figure best known for his founding of the field of psychotechnics (or industrial psychology). Prior to the war, Münsterberg had adopted moving images as a scientific research medium, using quasi-­cinematic techniques to conduct experiments on the reactions of motormen as part of an effort to reduce accidents in Boston’s public transportation system. In The Photoplay, however, he turned his attention to popular film and to the relation between audience reception and processes of attention, memory, and emotion. We shall look more closely at this text later, but for now it is enough to note here that the results of this and related studies signaled that the young medium had acquired a new respectability and provided figures like Kiliani with the scientific underpinnings of a form of political communication that would assume immense significance in the postwar era.3 Many Germans, however, were far from prepared to grant the moving image the respect that Münsterberg showed it. In the fall of 1919, the arch-­ conservative opinion maker Wilhelm Stapel published a short article titled “Homo cinematicus” in the pages of the nationalist journal Deutsches Volkstum. In it Stapel described a new anthropological type that, he claimed, had been conjured up by the emergence of the cinema as a social institution. The term homo cinematicus functioned for Stapel as a shorthand for mass man; in terms echoing those of French crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon, Stapel described this type as a member of a suggestible throng, lacking willpower or discrimination, addicted to slogans, and prone to becoming hypnotically fixated on any image that commanded its field of vision. He cast film as one of the chief dangers facing Germany, both a political and a public health problem of major proportions, and implicated the new type of cinematically conditioned mass man in many of the crises that had overtaken the nation, not least the short-­lived revolution that had accompanied the end of the war. Without indulging in the overt anti-­Semitism that marked many of his other writings, Stapel used coded language to convey what was at stake in confronting the essentially alien forces associated with cinema: “Either film-­capital or our culture will go smash.”4 He dismissed the possibility that censorship could adequately combat the dangers that he associated with popular cinema. Stapel’s views reflect the dark mood of conservatives at this turbulent moment in German history. At the time his article was published, censorship had been officially abolished by the new Weimar government, and in the absence of the controls formerly exercised by the German empire’s rather patchwork

Introduction 3

system of censorship, German theaters were flooded by films that included not just some of the landmark works of early Weimar filmmaking—​­notably, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nerves, and Different from the Others—​­but also a host of now mostly forgotten works trafficking in erotic themes, often under the banner of “sexual enlightenment.” The baptism of a national film industry amid the conditions of political and social breakdown that marked the war’s end was experienced as a cultural catastrophe by conservatives such as Stapel, and such figures would repeatedly invoke this period as one of deep horror. From such a perspective, even the reinstatement of censorship in 1920 could do little to right a world whose moral values had been turned upside down, especially given that such measures remained powerless in the face of the real danger: the appearance of a new crowd type emboldened to demand new rights and forms of emancipation as well as of entertainment. Extreme though Stapel’s views were, they nonetheless capture a basic truth about the role that film had assumed in the lives of Germans at this moment—​ ­a moment in which the vacuum left by collapsing institutions was partially filled by moving images, whose power to mediate citizens’ perceptions of reality was frequently attested to by contemporaries. Describing a scene in revolutionary Berlin on the historic day of November 9, 1918, Harry Graf Kessler (who served as Kiliani’s representative in overseeing German propaganda in Switzerland) evoked its resemblance to scenes from “a film of the Russian Revolution”; a few days later, with the initial disturbances having passed, Kessler reflected on the lack of disruption of tram and telephone services in the capital and wrote that “[t]he colossal, world-­shaking upheaval has scurried across Berlin’s day to day life like an incident in a crime film.”5 By the end of a war in which cinema had been mobilized to an unprecedented degree, motion picture imagery had also found its way into depictions of the psychic breakdown that was a hallmark of this uniquely traumatic conflict.6 We shall later consider examples of wartime psychiatric filmmaking, but here I will cite two examples of the way the new medium had begun to condition the inner reality of those affected by war. In a poem he wrote in 1917, future Dadaist George Grosz, who had been commissioned by Kiliani and Kessler to produce animated propaganda films in the war’s latter stages, described his own wartime nervous collapse in lines that evoked the vivid image of a film projector run amok.7 And in 1919 the psychiatrist Viktor Tausk, who worked in a military hospital in Belgrade during the war, delivered a talk to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in which he discussed a new form of paranoid syndrome—​­the

4 Introduction

“influencing machine”—​­characterized by delusions in which the patient felt himself to be under the control of a doctor who showed images like those in a cinematograph.8 In the war’s aftermath, the medium’s perceived power to influence its audience’s perceptions and behavior became a major concern for officials and censors. This concern found expression in many censorship rulings. Fritz Lang, for instance, was forced to cut scenes from his film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) that officials feared would awaken public memories of the street violence associated with the Spartacist uprising in January 1919. And, in an illustration of Weimar film’s status as what Anton Kaes calls a “post-­ traumatic cinema,” the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche submitted an expert opinion that recommended banning All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) on grounds that the film’s images of war-­traumatized soldiers could trigger widespread “psychological depression” among viewers.9 Hoche’s opinion represents one variation on this study’s central theme: the many-­faceted engagement of experts in psychiatry and other human sciences with the medium of film. At a time when representatives of these fields claimed a newly expansive role in adjudicating many social problems, it became one of their chief tasks to analyze and regulate the “mass emotions” unleashed by cinematic imagery. The concerns voiced by Kiliani—​­ who stressed film’s enormous power to galvanize people both to “crime, war, and revolution and to order, peace, and work”—​­capture the remarkable ambivalence surrounding film in this era.10 By contrast with the total condemnation voiced by Stapel, however, Kiliani’s speech underscored the need for the type of analysis provided by the likes of Münsterberg, an analysis that suggested that, properly understood according to tools furnished by scientific experts, film could be reformed and made a constructive, even a socially transformative force; and that its public—​­the “primitive” type homo cinematicus—​­could similarly be known, reformed, and “improved.”11 It was in this spirit that one of Münsterberg’s German acolytes, the psychotechnician Fritz Giese, integrated film into his wide-­ranging studies of postwar society. Having come of age during the war, Giese was part of a medical front generation, which, in the war’s aftermath, experimented with novel methods aimed at the reconstruction of German society along new lines. His writings breathe the spirit of high modernism’s claim to design a new man through techniques of social engineering—​­a claim in which he assigned film a vital role. The moving image’s power to mobilize productive forces became central to new forms of workplace rationalization widely adopted in postwar

Introduction 5

Germany: time-­and-­motion studies, aptitude testing, and accident-­prevention propaganda. The “vast expansion of the field of the testable” that Walter Benjamin identified as a hallmark of this era found expression in the production of films like UFA’s Berufseignung und Leistungsprüfung (Menschen-­Ökonomie) (Job Aptitudes and Performance Testing [Human Economy]) (1921).12 But Giese saw work science as merely one facet of a more far-­reaching process of cultural transformation. Taking a view diametrically opposed to that of Stapel, Giese found in the gestural language of popular cinema clear evidence of the new type of rationalized, eugenically fit individual that was being molded by the techniques of modern society.13 Whereas Giese conceived of film as a research medium into mass behavior, other scientists, by contrast, saw it as a tool of individual psychodiagnostics. In 1932, the military psychologist Philipp Lersch’s influential study Face and Soul reported on the results of his experiments with the moving image to study human facial expression and emotion. As he wrote, “It is in the first instance from the manifold realm of expressive phenomena that we derive, in the un-­theoretical, naïve existence of our everyday lives, our knowledge or conjectures concerning the nature of others, in particular their emotional and mental states. . . . ​We exist in a condition of perpetual inter-­personal exchange, completely unaware of the effects of the fluidum of finely nuanced expressive phenomena, of which we have virtually no objective understanding.”14 Lersch used film to bring scientific analysis to this fluid realm. While his research built on the nineteenth-­century photographic studies of emotion conducted by Duchenne de Boulogne and Charles Darwin, Lersch argued that the camera captured only static appearances, whereas film—​­as he wrote in invoking what by this time had become a standard claim—​­captured movement, both inner and outer: “Film can be applied here with the greatest profit; in the first instance, because it enables the capture and analysis of the fleeting appearance of expressive forms, and above all because it uncovers for observation forms that, thanks to their ephemeral quality, completely elude the naked eye and that . . . ​have characterological significance.”15 A typical test involved administering a stimulus (usually electrical current) to the subject while, unbeknownst to him, a film camera recorded the scene: “The test subject MG held two electrodes in his hands and awaits the current. In image 17 the current has not yet been switched on; in image 18 it is on and continually increasing” (see Figure 1). In keeping with Lersch’s holistic view of the psychophysical organism, the results were then subjected to two kinds of analysis. The first involved quantification: the sudden, maximal

6 Introduction

opening of the eyes, which pointed to a condition of “apperceptive shock,” was measured in order to determine the eyeball’s position within the eye socket’s “coordinate system.” The empirical result here obtained was then followed by psychological analysis: “The expressive reaction of MG is not without characterological significance,” as became clear, he wrote, in comparing this result with the result of a similar test involving test subject AD. Whereas the attitude of MG toward the electric current was that of a “passive type,” who simply awaits what befalls him, the attitude of AD—​­as the expressive set of his mouth makes visible (in image 15)—​­was that of an active or willful type. These different expressive styles corresponded to the differences in overall disposition that emerged from the test subjects’ respective psychological profiles (which Lersch included as an appendix). Also noteworthy in Lersch’s study is the next step taken: as the images show, he used scissors to cut up the face, separating the eyes and mouth from its other features. There was a precedent for this in the work of Duchenne de Boulogne, yet Lersch’s adoption of this technique is striking, not least given his frequently voiced insistence on recuperating a holistic conception of selfhood.16 Whereas the masking used by Duchenne did not completely destroy the integrity of the face, the more radical surgery performed by Lersch results

Figure 1. Philipp Lersch, Gesicht und Seele (1932). Excerpt from Table 1.

Introduction 7

in a set of features completely severed from their facial or any other context. This suggests the existence of a degree of ambivalence regarding the evidentiary value of cinematic imagery: if moving images captured the full and authentic range of human expressive possibilities, they also contained, in some sense, a surplus of information, and had thus to undergo a further process of mediation in order to be made fully legible.17 In this form, Lersch’s methods were taken up in the German military, where they became part of a search for reliable techniques for assessing leadership qualities, a central objective within the larger field of Menschenökonomie. Lersch also claimed that his techniques could be used in the field of psychiatry to help diagnose conditions like hysteria, neurasthenia, and schizophrenia. Every individual, he wrote, was characterized by his or her own personal “expressive valence”: a rich inner life corresponded to highly expressive tendencies, a poor or monotonous inner life to a flatness of expression that could approach autism. It was, for instance, typical of hysterics that they existed at the furthest extreme of the expressive spectrum, exhibiting what Lersch called a kind of “forced expressive tendency”: “Here the least psychic movement is, in magnified form, projected in the sensory expressive sphere. The diagnostic hallmark of such cases lies in what is to us an evidently disproportionate expressive relation between the individual and the given situation.”18 Here the face becomes a kind of screen onto which emotional states of the inner world are projected; inner emotion, as Giuliana Bruno observes in another context, is registered as outer motion.19 Yet though Lersch assumed a natural, nonarbitrary identity between inner and outer, his references to the hysteric’s disproportionate facial reactions and “forced expressive tendencies” suggest that, under certain circumstances, expression may become unmoored not just from external coordinates but from known internal determinants as well. This makes it all the more striking that at key points in his text Lersch turns to images of film actors to provide supplemental proofs for his claims. The most significant is that of Emil Jannings, playing the role of Mephisto in F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1925), whose image served both as frontispiece and as illustration of what Lersch called a type of “veiled gaze.” But as film-­studies scholars have shown, Faust is also one of the many “grand enunciators” who feature in Weimar cinema and who assert their own proprietary claim over film. Highlighting its qualities as a medium of magic and illusion, Faust puts in question its status as medium of scientific truth.20 Lersch’s study demonstrates, on the one hand, how film became a crucial resource in the human

8 Introduction

sciences, providing a form of epistemic guarantee for scientists intent on probing the secrets of human nature; and, on the other, the extent to which scientific cinema of this period remained entangled in a productive yet also uneasy relation with its Doppelgänger the popular cinema. Ironically, with its radical alteration of his subjects’ faces, Lersch’s quest for a reliable science of expression further contributed to the destabilization of the human visage brought about by a war that had produced an extensive iconography of facial disfigurement and deformation.21 • • • In his speech in April 1919, Richard Kiliani stressed the need to adapt wartime techniques of mass mobilization to the problems of postwar society. One of the first fruits of his initiatives was the film The Effects of the Hunger Blockade on National Health (1921), a film conceived as part of a campaign to arouse both domestic and international outrage against the blockade imposed by the Entente on Germany at war’s end. Combining statistical information on mortality, disease, malnourishment, and birth rates with graphic images of human suffering, this film depicted in the most vivid possible terms the state of “biological catastrophe” that had been produced by the blockade. It served as a harbinger of a postwar cinematic campaign meant to enlighten the public on a host of public health–­related issues.22 A crucial role in the realization of the film’s treatment was played by Curt Thomalla, a figure who, as Ulf Schmidt has shown, became closely identified with the development of the so-­called Aufklärungsfilm.23 Like Fritz Giese, Thomalla’s identity as a member of Germany’s medical front generation shaped both his tendency to invoke continually the lessons of the war and his willingness to experiment with novel and increasingly radical solutions to the health crises facing Germany in its aftermath.24 Trained as a neurologist, Thomalla was stationed at a military hospital where he treated cases of shellshock and traumatic head injury. There he was first exposed to the virtues of film as a means of capturing certain types of disease pictures. Thomalla wrote that he had become interested in an unusual case of a rare nervous disorder that proved difficult to record by conventional means: “Despite extensive photography the peculiarities of this case of pathological movement could not be captured. . . . ​I eventually recognized that only film footage could render this kind of complicated motion perfectly and unambiguously clear.”25

Introduction 9

In 1919, he was appointed head of the Medical Film Archive of the newly formed film conglomerate UFA. Thomalla took up this position at a period when the rapid expansion of the field of neuropsychiatry was accompanied by extensive reliance on the moving image for purposes of research, teaching, and public health education.26 Over the course of the 1920s, he made or oversaw the production of a large corpus of films on topics ranging from venereal disease and sexual hygiene to industrial accidents and eugenic sterilization. In a 1919 pamphlet promoting the creation of the Medical Film Archive, Thomalla singled out the fields of neurology and psychiatry to illustrate film’s virtues as a medium of research, instruction, and public enlightenment. He saw motion pictures as a means of improving on ordinary perception and producing new knowledge, and he claimed that film helped optimize the observational powers of the clinician by creating new possibilities of “rapid-­ diagnosis” and of identifying disease syndromes at “first glance.” Especially in the case of hysteria, which one encountered “true forms” of only rarely, “film has the virtue of making it instantly recognizable.”27 As Lersch’s text similarly suggests, no medical disorder of this era was more significant or fraught than that of hysteria (or its close cognate, war neurosis), which represented a kind of limit case for psychological science. By helping differentiate between true and false forms, the moving image became a key tool in stabilizing the disease picture associated with it. The faith espoused here by Thomalla had significant ramifications. Over the course of the 1920s, the knowledge claims he made with regard to such disease pictures would be used to support larger claims for his field’s ability to identify and administer cures for a wide array of social afflictions. In a 1922 article, Thomalla stated his intention of enlisting film in a process of mass hygienic enlightenment that would encompass all of society in its grip, ultimately penetrating even to its “remotest corners” (“in die breitesten Volkskreise, in die letzte Hütte”). Doing so entailed not least an understanding of and ability to penetrate the mass psyche, since—​­here he echoed Kiliani’s views—​­Thomalla stressed that an effective public health campaign must disavow overtly propagandistic methods and employ an “indirect” approach addressed to the subconscious strata of the public mind.28 This faith was, however, a far from untroubled one. Throughout his career, Thomalla’s work remained marked by an abiding concern with the shadow side of mass enlightenment. His engagement with the vexing issues of audience response specific to the cinema reflected the larger role being claimed by scientists in the regulation of the new medium. Thomalla’s recognition of

10 Introduction

these issues became a leitmotif of his career, already signaled in a programmatic article of 1919 and repeatedly echoed in later writings, most forcefully in 1928 when he referred to the eighteen-­month period following the war’s end and prior to the reinstatement of film censorship in May 1920 as the “dreadful time without censorship” (“die zensurlose, schreckliche Zeit”).29 As he saw clearly, the German scientific community’s investment in the possibilities of the moving image compelled it to confront head on the questions surrounding its effects on the public, a public whose psychic life became an endlessly theorized object of expert discourse at this time. Among those who weighed in on this subject—​­and on whose ideas Thomalla drew freely—​­was Sigmund Freud, who offered one of the most vivid contemporary analyses of the mental characteristics of the crowd, writing in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921 that the mass psyche was marked by a kind of disabling of the “mental superstructure”—​­an overthrowing of the “internal censor,” whose presence in the psyche he likened elsewhere to a “garrison in a conquered city.”30 In its dual capacity for mass instruction and mass suggestion, film thus exemplified the “dialectic of enlightenment” later analyzed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Pivoting between these two poles, Thomalla employed numerous strategies to protect his films against undue criticism, on the one hand, and misreading, on the other. We will examine some of these in later chapters, but for now we will consider the example of the film Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele: Der Film vom Unbewussten (A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul: A Film of the Unconscious [1923]), on which Thomalla collaborated with the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld. The film is now lost, but archival documents allow us to reconstruct its basic outlines.31 It dealt with the important topic of hypnosis, a technique that Thomalla, like many other physicians, had used to treat soldiers during the war. In the war’s aftermath, hypnosis was also widely and ambivalently thematized in popular films like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. Following the release of Lang’s film in 1922, in an article that provides further evidence of an ongoing Weimar dialogue between scientific and popular filmmaking, Thomalla voiced a forceful critique of its sensationalistic portrayal of the “psychoanalyst” and hypnotist Mabuse as master criminal.32 By way of response to Lang’s film, Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele treated the subject of hypnosis in a popular yet scrupulously sober fashion. It began with diagrammatic models of the nervous system and brain, followed by images of the conscious and subconscious mind. Next followed an animated

Introduction 11

sequence depicting the nervous system of a man who has narrowly escaped being run over by a car and is in a state of shock. This scene links the film to the discussion about war neurosis: during the Weimar era, the shocks associated with vehicular and industrial accidents were seen as peacetime equivalents of war-­related trauma (in the late 1920s, Thomalla became deeply involved in a campaign to spread awareness of the dangers of industrial accidents).33 Subsequent scenes depict cases of somnambulism and autosuggestion, the phenomenon of fakirism, and incidents depicting “mass psychology and the madness of crowds”; diagrams of the nervous system in a state of trance; and sphygmographic measurements of the effect of hypnosis on pulse rate. The film’s last two parts portray the successful treatment of nervous invalids by hypnotic means; and finally, the problem of so-­called criminal ­suggestion—​­crimes committed under hypnotic influence—​­by means of experiments conducted with patients from a Berlin clinic (see Figures 2 and 3). (One of these, Thomalla later wrote, was so upset by the experience that he lashed out at and destroyed a camera.) In a final rebuttal to Dr. Mabuse, the film ended by reassuring its audience that hypnosis could not be used to force someone to do something against his or her will.

Figure 2. Curt Thomalla, A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul (1923). Patient under hypnosis.

12 Introduction

Figure 3. Curt Thomalla, A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul (1923). “The so-­called ‘Forel experiment.’ In a state of hypnosis, an otherwise peaceable woman calmly points the revolver at the doctor.”

If Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele asserts the psychiatric profession’s claims to produce knowledge of and treat illness—​­and by implication the moving image’s capacity to represent faithfully such claims—​­it also shows that neither set of claims can be taken for granted. This is especially borne out in its treatment of the figure of the medical charlatan and the related dangers of “mass suggestion.” In its effort to reclaim the doctor’s methods and authority from the realm of popular culture, this film also endeavors to restore professional controls over the process of image-­making that is increasingly central to that authority. It does so by addressing an issue obsessively treated in reformers’ and censors’ writings on film, namely, its alleged capacity to cast a powerful spell over its audience. Thomalla stressed that, in its treatment of unusual subject matter, his own film had been subjected to what he called conditions of “rigorous scientific control.”34 Such control secured not just the objective representation of complex thematic material relating to hypnosis and the unconscious but also the implicit links between this material and the enunciative act itself. In thus reflecting on its own mediality, Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele affirmed the conditions of possibility for the project of filmic enlightenment. With this film behind him, Thomalla’s subsequent cinematic ventures would

Introduction 13

be accompanied by broad claims about the significance of the role of the unconscious in medicine and politics.35 Concerns about film’s reliability as a medium of mass education took on new urgency as filmmakers moved into increasingly controversial territory. As the public health campaign undertaken by figures like Thomalla assumed ever more ambitious dimensions, the issues surrounding audience response—​ ­ hat Philipp Sarasin calls the “unstable discursive relations of popular w ­hygiene”—​­posed renewed challenges. Following the release of his 1923 film, Thomalla’s subsequent productions took him in increasingly bold directions, culminating in the film The Curse of Heredity (1928), which presented the case for compulsory sterilization of the “incurably” mentally ill. It may come as little surprise to learn that he eventually became a Nazi, assuming a position as expert on health and population policy in the Third Reich’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. There are distinct continuities between Thomalla’s early writings and his later writings, most strikingly evident in the connections he drew between the suggestible psyche of the soldier-­ patient and the suggestible psyche of the German populace.36 Yet there was nothing inevitable about his trajectory; the form of bio-­politics that he espoused throughout his career was compatible with democracy, even if by the end of the 1920s he was beginning to voice frustrations that anticipate his later turn to National Socialism.37 During the interwar period, the alliance that Thomalla and others like him forged between cinema and human science became central to the search for new strategies of governance grounded in what Kathleen Canning has called the “regulation of body, sexuality, and reproduction.”38 If, following the argument of Michel Foucault, we understand governmentality as a cluster of techniques for influencing the behavior of individuals and societies, then it becomes evident that the regulation of affect formed a central objective of such techniques.39 Crucial to this objective was the development of a form of censorship that could serve as a reliable tool of post-­authoritarian methods of governance. Their involvement in this field illustrates the increasing penetration of the human sciences into essential matters of Germany’s postwar political, social, and cultural life. • • • Thomalla’s avowed goal of using filmic enlightenment to reach into the most remote corners of society contains distinct echoes of the historical process

14 Introduction

that historian Lutz Raphael has dubbed the “scientization of social phenomena.” This development originated in the turbulent decades of the late nineteenth century, when German unification set in motion a highly accelerated and conflict-­ridden process of industrial transformation that affected many levels of society. In response to the late nineteenth-­century discovery of the field of the “social,” experts in the “young sciences” (to paraphrase Freud) of psychiatry, criminology, industrial psychology, sexology, eugenics, and psychoanalysis claimed increasing responsibility for the task of identifying, interpreting, and solving social problems.40 Debate continues about the extent and limits of this process, but Raphael’s periodization remains broadly useful: He identifies 1880–­1910 as a period of “social reform,” followed by a period of “social engineering” that extended from 1920 through 1945. During this period, the human and social sciences asserted jurisdiction over many areas of social policy, offering, in place of what Max Weber defined as value-­laden criteria, ostensibly nonpartisan criteria of analysis. Scientific cinema became an important vehicle of the objectivity effects mobilized as part of this process, whether in the context of debates about war neurosis, in the arena of postwar “human economy,” or in related fields.41 This reflects the medium’s contribution to a consequential ideal of scientific observation that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have termed “mechanical objectivity”: the standardization of the object under observation through mechanical means, ostensibly free of all traces of intervention on the part of the observer.42 Thomalla’s claims concerning film’s role in the resolution of questions about the disease picture surrounding war neurosis, or those of Lersch concerning its advantages in analyzing facial expression, are but two examples of this ideal. They bear out the importance of cinematic processes of scientific knowledge formation to the search for a new and more reliable foundation for social policy in the postwar era. Aspirations for creating a new social order out of the ruins of the one that had collapsed at the end of the war became inextricably bound up with the creation of a new epistemic order—​­a powerful, if nevertheless contested, form of perceiving, organizing, and shaping social “reality.”43 If scientific filmmaking became one pillar of this new order, another was erected by the claim scientists staked to jurisdiction over the regulation of popular film. The recognition of this claim was by no means a given: at the dawn of the cinematic age, clergy and pedagogues dominated public debate about popular film and its perceived moral hazards. But by the early 1920s,

Introduction 15

scientific experts had become increasingly influential arbiters of the boundaries of what was permissible in this realm. The assumption of this role was based on their claims to produce knowledge of crowd psychology and to assess reliably the moral and behavioral effects of film (the field of what Kiliani called “mass emotions”). Such claims functioned at several levels: they reflected the professed diagnostic and predictive value of these new sciences as well as their ability to define specific disease pictures along with wider patterns of behavior, affliction, and amelioration. As Annette Kuhn has written in the British context, the early twentieth-­century alliance between science and cinema represented a bid to advance the epistemic claims of science against those of religion.44 While scholars have in recent years greatly qualified long-­standing narratives concerning the secularization and disenchantment of German society, it remains largely true that in the interwar period science took on a newly assertive position in many realms of social policy.45 Much work needs to be done, however, to properly historicize conflicts over the role of expertise in social policy. An important feature of the process by which, according to theorists like Raphael, Jacques Donzelot, and Nikolas Rose, the human sciences became embedded in modern societies concerns their role in elaborating new behavioral ideals and blueprints. One such ideal that receives particular emphasis in this study arose out of the field of popular hygiene. Hygienic doctrine emerged as a key response to the discovery of “the social”: it was under the auspices of this doctrine that political and medical authorities organized their campaigns of social reform and national regeneration. Laying down new norms of health, defined in bio-­political terms of productive and reproductive well-­being, they embraced hygiene as the organizing principle of modern life. As Philipp Sarasin has shown, hygiene became a “magic formula” by means of which the risks of contemporary existence could be identified and managed.46 He identifies the spread of hygienic codes of behavior as a constitutive feature of the history of bourgeois society and processes of self-­formation since the Enlightenment. In the early twentieth century, the role of “hygienic enlightenment” in producing powerfully normative images of health acquired a greatly expanded scope with the advent of the modern mass media and of a new genre of enlightenment films on matters of sexual and social hygiene. Identifying and proposing solutions for an array of risks to individual and social well-­being, such films (and the normative viewing practices that assured their proper reception) played a crucial role in delineating the contours

16 Introduction

of a specifically German hygienic imaginary. Hygiene opened up broad horizons, allowing new measures—​­including some, as we shall see, that were highly transgressive—​­to become thinkable. In connection with the history of the Aufklärungsfilm, the theme of enlightenment is a central one of this study. Several chapters chart the fortunes of this highly mutable and contested term, which was claimed by actors ranging from Jewish sexologists to Nazi racial scientists. Readers conditioned by the Frankfurt School theorists will doubtless react skeptically to the use of this term in this context.47 Yet it is necessary to give due weight to the original sense of meaning that surrounded it in the postwar era to avoid the back shadowing created by the Nazis’ appropriation of the term. A recent wave of scholarship has, by bringing fresh analytic tools to the study of the Aufklärungsfilm, recognized its significance within the history of this period. This significance is due not least to the way that the genre often complicates the standard film-­studies divide between feature and nonfeature filmmaking.48 In examining this genre, I make the need to restore the dialogue between these two strands of film history a basic premise of this book. Meanwhile, rediscovery of this “hidden Weimar” has coincided with the emergence of another body of work that, in contrast with scholarship stressing the near inevitability of Weimar’s demise, asserts its more optimistic, open-­ended potentials—​­what Rüdiger Graf and Moritz Foellmer identify as the productive aspects of the “Weimar consciousness of crisis.”49 The enlightenment film, I suggest, represents a significant expression of this. The transformation of enlightenment that occurred under the Nazis was far from inevitable and, despite the continuities that exist between the Weimar and Nazi eras, it is crucial, as Edward Ross Dickinson has argued, to place proper interpretive weight on the fundamental break that occurred in 1933, when the Nazis put an end to the polyvocal discourse of the Weimar era and imposed monopolistic controls on the process of “mass enlightenment.”50 • • • This study connects the emergence of cinema as a social institution with an inquiry into the history of knowledge and theory production in the emerging human sciences. During the first decades of the twentieth century, these sciences assumed a key role in negotiating the transition not only from an authoritarian to a democratic system but also from a democracy to a dictatorship,

Introduction 17

by helping to set the terms for how German society analyzed itself and found solutions for the problems it had inherited as a legacy of the authoritarian past, the modernizing process, and war. Particularly in the war’s aftermath, Doris Kaufmann has argued, psychiatric categories and modes of reasoning increasingly permeated German society. Yet debate continues about the extent to which psychiatry and related fields in the psy sciences exercised real power during this period.51 One issue at stake in this study is precisely the uncertain status of these young sciences at a moment when they claimed new authority yet had also become enmeshed in challenges to authority of all kinds. As I show in the chapters that follow, this social drama was frequently played out in film. My argument takes seriously the power of cinematic images and the professions that make them to produce, as Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter put it, “cultural representations of reality.”52 But it also explores how those representations acquired complex, unintended meanings once released into the public realm. Powerful though it was, this new form of image-­and knowledge-­making, and the claims to expertise associated with it, were far from uncontested. Scientist filmmakers were continually forced to reassert their professional authority against competing discourses and images that fed on popular misgivings and unease concerning, for instance, widespread accounts of abusive treatment of soldiers by doctors during the war. Cinematic portrayals of “mad scientists” like Mabuse as well as the persistent popularity of alternative, or lay, healers both serve as indices of the ongoing public relations problem facing psychiatry and allied professions in the war’s aftermath. This problem only intensified in the 1930s as the forms of human engineering associated with these sciences became ever more deeply entangled in transgressive policies. Throughout his career, Thomalla framed the process of hygienic enlightenment as a battle against the forces of ignorance and superstition. Like campaigns meant to combat fear of inoculation, he wrote, “the swindle of the pseudo-­occultist, the layman’s superstitious fear of the insane asylum . . . ​ could not be fought more effectively, and a healthy physical culture, a rational form of population politics, could not be better propagated than through the medium of film.”53 In the interwar period, “superstition” came to stand for the myriad possibilities of misreading, false, or deviant knowledge that haunted the enlightenment project. In combating such possibilities, authorities used film not only to educate the public but also as a control apparatus for rendering judgment on the claims of occultists, in much the same way that it had helped adjudicate claims for war-­related psychological disability. For the

18 Introduction

knowledge problem surrounding the war neurotic—​­were his symptoms real or fake?—​­was in many ways identical to that posed by self-­professed clairvoyants, a high number of whom, police reports documented, were former war neurotics.54 Yet Thomalla’s faith in the power of Aufklärung to resolve such problems was frequently belied by the outcome of trials involving such figures, whose persistent popularity in this era complicates any narrative of advancing scientization. Recent work has shed new light on the extent to which belief in alternative medicine and magic persisted alongside the expansion of Weimar’s highly rationalized system of medical welfare.55 Under the Nazis, initial efforts to reconcile these divergent strains in German medicine gave way to an escalating campaign against the problem of medical charlatanry, culminating in 1940 with the arrest of astrologers and the release of enlightenment films targeting the phenomenon of superstition. This development should not be seen simply as the outcome of a straightforward process of medical modernization, even if that was one of its aspects. Rather, the coincidence of this moment with growing public unease about the regime’s Aktion T4, or “euthanasia,” program underscores the degree to which scientists still contended with marked resistance to their authority. As their mounting involvement in the regime’s racial hygiene policies brought them into conflict with church leaders, the battle against “superstition” was gradually extended to organized religion. Throughout this era, scientists who used film both to conduct research on psychiatric disorders and to enlighten the public about the regime’s policies remained haunted by popular images of “mad science” and by residual “superstition” concerning the figure of the hypnotist. Such images, lamented the eminent psychiatrist Carl doctor-­ Schneider, were evidence of an “anti-­psychiatric complex” against which the profession was compelled to redouble its efforts at enlightenment.56 A key aspect of this cinematically produced hygienic imaginary thus concerns the history of the external and internal controls required to ensure its successful operation. This history is deeply inscribed in the tangled legacies of the Enlightenment. Robert Darnton long ago showed how a figure like Franz Anton Mesmer could destabilize the boundaries of Enlightenment thought by popularizing a doctrine of “mesmeric” influence that had many points of contact with contemporaneous discoveries about the invisible forces that made up the universe.57 A similar development occurred in postwar Germany: even as mass enlightenment took shape as a central aspiration of postwar social reform, officials and scientists struggled with the proliferation of Mesmer-­like figures, both real and cinematic, that challenged this aspiration.

Introduction 19

The regulation of cinema and of the hold it seemed to exercise over its audience became a key front in this struggle. Yet there are reasons to be skeptical of the view that homo cinematicus—​ ­this figure that haunted the imagination of doctors and censors—​­was an essentially passive, agentless entity akin to the somnambulist Cesare, instrument of Dr. Caligari’s crime spree, or the victims of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. Among other things, this view is difficult to square with the demands for rights and emancipation and the corresponding struggles over social issues that marked this period. Such conflicts extended into struggles over the means of representation and the politics of image-­making. As we have seen, in their efforts to assert a proprietary claim over this realm, doctors made it central to the assertion of new forms of what Michel Foucault calls “psychiatric power.” Yet one distinctive feature of Weimar popular cinema is how many films interrogate this new form of power and the complex effects associated with the processes of scientific image-­making central to its assertion.58 Scientization, as the authors of a recent study put it, was not a “one-­way street.”59 In being constituted as a new research object of human science, the figure of homo cinematicus did not always remain stationary, as the story of the patient who lashed out at and destroyed a camera during the making of Thomalla’s film illustrates. Even as they adjusted their lives in accordance with new behavioral scripts regarding work, sexual conduct, or viewing habits, ordinary Germans did not always submit gladly to these scripts; sometimes they tried to write their own. For Walter Benjamin, it was precisely in the endless “expansion of the field of the testable” that new possibilities of agency and emancipation could be discerned. He welcomed the contribution of an engaged cinema to the creation of a more politically aware public in place of the audience that commercial cinema had rendered “a mass of hypnotized test subjects.”60 Many films of this period may be read in terms of how they position themselves in relation to the general problematic defined by the increasing importance of the mass media in modern society. Often they do so, as Stefan Andriopoulos has shown, by weaving variations on the Mabusean formula of crime under hypnotic compulsion.61 The now forgotten films Unter fremdem Willen (1912) and Das Verlorene Ich (1925), which exist for us only in the form of censorship documents, told similar tales of “criminal suggestion.”62 In both cases, the films’ producers responded to the censor’s concern that such scenarios posed risks for suggestible audience members by arguing that their film performed a kind of “counter-­hypnosis” that would release filmgoers

20 Introduction

from the medium’s spell. As we shall see, many films of this period sought to perform such a feat of counterhypnosis, to educate the public about its relation to the powerful effects of cinematic imagery—​­in a word, to enlighten them. Indeed, Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, the film that provoked Thomalla into making his film about hypnosis, constitutes the single most self-­reflexive film of the entire Weimar era, and it is no accident, as we shall later see, that its narrative reflects directly on the forms of authority that Thomalla mobilized in his own film. Stripping Stapel’s coinage of its pejorative meaning, this study examines how a new professional caste—​­made up of psychiatrists and experimental psychologists, industrial experts and crowd theorists, sexologists and psychoanalysts, mental and racial hygienists—​­converged on the figure of homo cinematicus, and in so doing placed this figure at the center of major narratives and policy initiatives of the interwar era. While adopting a critical attitude toward Stapel’s views, it also takes its distance from those of left-­wing cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, whose brilliant yet highly problematic From Caligari to Hitler has long been a monument of scholarship on this topic. In terms that are ironically evocative of Stapel’s, Kracauer’s “psychological history of German film” emphasized that the hypnotists and somnambulists that populated the Weimar screen corresponded to something pathological in the German soul that presaged the Nazis’ triumph. Like Stapel’s, this reading must be historicized: as an outgrowth of studies Kracauer had carried out as part of the Allies’ World War II psychological warfare program, it exemplifies the mobilization of the human sciences in and through the medium of film during the modern era.63 Against such readings, this study stresses the open-­endedness and multiple trajectories that marked the alliance between cinema and human science in the postwar era, which were only foreclosed with the Nazis’ ascent to power. Weimar film, I argue, was neither a medium of cynical enlightenment nor one of hypnosis; nor was its public a merely suggestible throng. In tracing the emergence of a new nexus between science, cinema, and social policy in Germany between 1895 and 1945, this study highlights the ambiguous faith in “the molding of peoples” identified by Peter Fritzsche as a hallmark of this era.64 Films of this period allow us to witness the emergence of this faith as well as its vicissitudes, dark possibilities, unintended effects, and limits. • • •

Introduction 21

Chapter 1, “Cinema and the Visual Culture of the Human Sciences,” presents an overview of the book’s themes. It traces film’s emergence from the experimental life sciences and its appropriation by the human sciences as a tool both for producing knowledge and for communicating and popularizing this knowledge. It then explores how this highly productive alliance was turned on its head, in the form of popular films that interrogated the truth claims both of modern science and of scientific cinema. It concludes by looking briefly at how this development compelled scientists to become authorities on questions of audience reception and censorship. Chapter 2, “Film Reform, Mental Hygiene, and the Campaign Against ‘Trash,’ 1912–­34,” looks more closely at scientists’ response to popular cinema through campaigns of reform, regulation, and censorship. It traces the emergence and vicissitudes of a medical paradigm of film censorship in connection with efforts to come to grips with the problem of “trash”—​­films trafficking in themes of sex, crime, and forbidden knowledge—​­a problem that doctors defined in hygienic terms. Chapter 3, “Hypnosis, Cinema, and Censorship in Germany, 1895–­1933,” examines the theme of hypnosis in popular film and within the medical discourse about the medium. Drawing on the archives of the Ministry of the Interior, it rereads several canonical films of the Weimar period (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse the Gambler) through the lens of a wider preoccupation with and effort to regulate the dangerously “suggestive” properties of film. Chapter 4, “What Is an Enlightenment Film? Cinema and Sexual Hygiene in Interwar Germany,” reconstructs the complex history of the so-­called enlightenment film from Weimar-­era sexual hygiene to the Nazis’ racial hygiene campaigns. The Aufklärungsfilm represented the purest expression of the transformative powers that were vested in the alliance between cinema and human science. Throughout this unstable period, as Germans oscillated between the poles of crisis and emancipation, films on sexual, mental, and racial hygiene offered new blueprints and prescriptions for behavior and identity. But the history of this genre was also marked by intense debates about the social meaning, moral effects, instrumental uses, and control of moving images, debates that extended well into the Nazi period. Chapter 5, “Scientific Cinema Between Enlightenment and Superstition, 1918–­41” extends the argument of Chapter 4 by looking at interwar cinematic campaigns against esoteric “new sciences” such as clairvoyance and occultism, which, like psychoanalysis and sexology earlier, were often condemned

22 Introduction

as forms of “Jewish science.” Chapter 5 relates this campaign to controversies surrounding medical authority and practice that stemmed both from World War I and from the institutionalization of racial hygiene under the Nazis. It analyzes the treatment of the medical “charlatan,” or the occultist, in connection with the efforts of scientists and physicians to manage their public image at a time when that image had become deeply contested.

Chapter 1

Cinema and the Visual Culture of the Human Sciences

Writing in 1917, the neurologist Walther Poppelreuter observed that “[f]ilm gives us processes as they really are, and is thus ideally suited to allow us to form judgments, free of any scruples we may attach to experimental findings.” Stationed at a hospital in Cologne during the war, Poppelreuter published an account of his work with brain-­damaged soldiers that included a section describing his use of motion pictures to test his patients’ comprehension and memory. Poppelreuter sought with the aid of such tests to resolve questions surrounding the still poorly understood disease picture associated with the traumatic brain injuries of war.1 Following the war, cinematic studies were also widely adopted in the new field of industrial psychology, or psychotechnics, for which Poppelreuter became a leading apostle. In that context as well, specialists like Poppelreuter harnessed film to the goal not only of analyzing but also of improving subjects’ performance in the workplace. Claims for the enhancement of scientific observation would be echoed in similar claims surrounding the optimization of human labor power. In the statement cited above, Poppelreuter expressed a view that had, in the two decades since the invention of cinematography, become an article of faith in many fields of science and medicine. By virtue of its ability to record and reproduce the phenomena of life with seemingly total fidelity, film was accorded by researchers a privileged epistemic status: the power of providing access to objective truth. If photography was famously credited with being what one researcher called the “retina of the scientist” then cinematography represented the further extension and improvement of a consequential new

24  Chapter 1

alliance between science and visual media forged by nineteenth-­century investigators.2 This chapter explores some of the forms taken by this new alliance, and its many reverberations in early twentieth-­century German society. It traces the history of the mutually constitutive relations between the scientific culture of the cinema and the cinematic culture of science, thus connecting two narratives usually kept distinct from one another: film’s emergence from the experimental life sciences and its appropriation by medical and human sciences; and its simultaneous emergence as a mass entertainment medium, a medium in which science figured as a recurring theme, and one which at the same time became itself the subject of scientific study. It has long been recognized that film was from its inception both a scientific and a popular medium. Film-­ studies scholars have tended to reproduce this division by studying these dual aspects separately. Yet the boundaries between them were unstable and the two strands of film history remained in continual if uneasy dialogue with each other. This is particularly true in the case of the human sciences. whose emergence coincided with that of the new medium and which accorded film an especially enthusiastic reception. At the same time, as part of the increasingly public role claimed by members of these fields—​­psychiatry, neurology, sexology, eugenics, industrial psychology, and psychoanalysis—​­they asserted priority over regulating the medium’s popular form and its relation to its audience. But this exchange did not flow in only one direction: on the contrary, the growing visibility of such scientists was widely thematized in the popular cinema, and in a final expression of this complex loop, this development had a discernible impact on scientific cinema and on scientists’ relation to the medium they had embraced. Tracing the simultaneous emergence of the filmic medium and of the disciplines comprising the human sciences in the early twentieth century, this chapter examines the tangled relations between these developments. Film, which served these disciplines as a means of advancing their professional claims and status, also—​­in its popular form—​­became a key site for registering how this process was experienced by ordinary Germans, many of whom found themselves coming into increasing contact with representatives of these sciences. Accordingly, one question posed throughout is: What reactions, hopes, misgivings, and terrors did this encounter arouse? Many feature films of this era depict images of “mad science”: of transgressive medical and scientific figures, experiments, and forms of knowledge.3

Human Sciences  25

Such images registered popular anxieties about the expansive role that new forms of clinical and scientific expertise were assuming in everyday life. To some extent, this reflects the self-­consciously modernist, taboo-­breaking stance adopted by members of these fields—​­their efforts to spread knowledge and to dispel ignorance, shame, and superstition—​­and their advocacy of novel, sometimes radical, solutions to social problems. But this emphasis on images of mad science, as significant as they undoubtedly are to film history, has obscured other possibilities for thinking about the interaction among science, cinema, and the public. The new place of the human sciences within the modern social imaginary was nothing if not complex: it reflected popular interest and fascination as well as anxiety and fear. Many welcomed the new blueprints for behavior offered by these sciences, the solutions they promised to numerous problems of personal and social life, their promise not just of knowledge and control but of self-­knowledge, self-­control, and emancipation.

Science and the Moving Image At the time Poppelreuter recorded his observations in 1917 the motion picture medium was scarcely two decades old. Not surprisingly, although this moment coincided with the birth of a vibrant commercial film industry in Germany, the writings of German scientists on the medium tended to adopt a narrative of origins that stressed the scientific lineage of the moving image. This tendency was echoed by scientists elsewhere, among them the German American industrial psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, whose formative work on psychotechnics was hugely influential for figures like Poppelreuter in the postwar era. In his landmark study The Photoplay (1916), Münsterberg asserted that the moving image had been largely invented in the laboratories of nineteenth-­century experimental physiology and psychology.4 Though, as we shall see later in this chapter, Münsterberg’s study was largely devoted to popular film, he stressed that in its purest form cinema was a scientific medium: it owed its origins to the chronophotographic research of figures like Etienne-­ Jules Marey into animal and human locomotion, and from its inception it offered physiologists and experimental scientists a tool for the analysis of bodies in motion. Although this account leaves out the complex relation of the cinema’s birth to a range of nineteenth-­century popular visual practices, there is little doubt that, following the Lumière brothers’ premiere of their new invention

26  Chapter 1

in Paris in 1895, researchers in numerous fields fell under the spell of what Münsterberg called the “incomparable intensity” of the moving image. Ironically, this quality was lost on Marey himself, who saw the medium as inferior to the graphical method that he also helped pioneer.5 Many scientists of the day, however, did not share Marey’s skepticism about cinematography. They quickly seized on its possibilities, adopting it as a tool of observation and analysis, as an aid to diagnosis or instruction, or—​­through cures or methods of optimizing performance—​­as a means of intervention and transformation. According to Lisa Cartwright, cinematic frame analysis soon established itself in many fields as the key to the scientific knowledge of “life”—​­a development reflecting the emergence of a new dynamic paradigm in the life sciences.6 Nowhere was this truer than within medicine. As numerous scholars have shown, the history of cinema is closely bound up with that of medicine.7 Physicians in fields ranging from surgery to gynecology integrated the moving image into their research and clinical practice. Whether utilized for studying disturbances of movement, or in the form of x-­ray cinematography or microcinematography, motion pictures allowed clinical phenomena to be captured and represented with new precision, bringing into view processes, tissues, and structures that had previously been undetectable or invisible. This capacity became an essential part of the mystique surrounding the moving image, a mystique to which both specialists and wider audiences paid tribute. An article that appeared in a German daily in the early 1920s captures this quality, crediting the medium with revelatory, even transformative power: film, its author wrote, corrects reality, extends the senses, allows us to “gaze inside man.”8 In few medical specialties did cinematography receive a more enthusiastic reception than in neurology, psychiatry, and related fields.9 In these disciplines, film granted access to what Siegfried Giedeon later called “the inside of processes” by enabling researchers to analyze the outward form of those processes.10 Motion picture technology gave clinicians a means of capturing and recording the visible signs of their patients’ disorders, signs that by their nature were often highly ephemeral: the seizures of epileptics, the motor disturbances of syphilitics, the fits of hysterics, the shaking of alcoholics, or the nervous tremors and spasms of shell-­shocked soldiers. In the tradition of Marey, who used chrono-­photography to probe the secrets of animal and human locomotion, doctors scrutinized the resulting images to gain new insight into the phases and dynamics of their patients’ movements. As Sander Gilman and Georges Didi-­Huberman have shown, neurologists and psychiatrists like

Human Sciences  27

Duchenne de Boulogne and Jean-­Martin Charcot had long used photography to document the expressions and poses of their hysteric and other patients.11 Early medical cinematography built on and extended this tradition as well as its fascination with the figure of the hysteric. Hysteria, indeed, proved to be one of the camera’s favorite subjects, whether in the photographic studies of Charcot’s assistant Albert Londe, in Charles-­Emile François-­Franck’s cinematic studies, or, as we shall see later in this chapter, in medical films of shell-­ shocked soldiers (so-­called male hysterics) during the Great War.12 Freed of dependence on patient testimonials, doctors believed they came closer to the truth of mental illness. The use of slow motion or frame enlargement allowed them to make precise adjustments to the observational parameters and further improve their ability to analyze movement and its disorders.13 Cinematography thus helped them explore aspects of the neuropsychiatric disease picture that lay beyond the threshold of human perception. In addition, by preserving clinical knowledge in a form that could be retrieved and made available to audiences at will, the medium became an archival as well as a perceptual tool. Scientific film, it was argued, would overcome not simply the defects of the unaided human eye but also those of the live demonstration that had long served as the cornerstone of medical teaching, in particular the problem that faced even highly skilled physicians when confronted with difficult or willful patients. Rather than suffer the embarrassment of the patient’s failure to present the syndrome that the specialist wished to demonstrate to his audience, he could now train his camera on the patient until the requisite event—​ a­ n epileptic attack, a fit of trembling, or an episode of wild ­gesticulation—​­could be captured and preserved, and then presented independently of the vicissitudes of the clinical setting.14 In an era deeply enamored of technological aids to natural scientific method, cinematography was endowed from the outset with special charisma. Together with the graphical method (which recorded what Marey called the “automatic writing” of nature), it represented the most technically sophisticated manifestation of an obsessive quest for “the language of the phenomena themselves.”15 In this respect, it conformed to a nineteenth-­century scientific ideal that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison identify with the name “mechanical objectivity.”16 The term refers to the privileging of mechanical means for producing images of natural phenomena, images held to be completely natural and true. Photography was one such means, and its wide application in fields like anthropology, psychiatry, and criminology attests to the hold of this ideal over many forms of scientific research.17

28  Chapter 1

For all its power, however, neither the ideal itself nor the techniques of realizing it were accepted without reservation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the criticisms voiced about the “great optical machine” created by Charcot at the Salpêtrière. While the photographic images of hysteria that emanated from Charcot’s clinic were ostensibly produced under circumstances that were free from all traces of intervention on the physician’s part, skeptics observed that the process by which Charcot made hysterical symptoms visible often appeared highly staged. Rather than an authentic disease picture, such skeptics argued, what was captured on camera seemed to be the result of manipulation on the physician’s part or of unconscious collusion between physician and patient.18 As we will see, similar criticisms would later be made in connection with the cinematic representation of syndromes like war neurosis. At the same time, the mode of scientific observation associated with photography and then moving images became subject to a more far-­reaching critique. As Scott Curtis has shown, film did not merely become an accessory to scientific method but stood at the very center of turn-­of-­the-­century debates about that method. Around 1900, the analytic mode of observation that dominated late nineteenth-­century science, which operated by disassembling processes like human motion into their component phases or parts, came under sustained attack. The status of this observational paradigm was contested by scientists and philosophers who argued for the superiority of a more intuitive, holistic mode of observation. And yet while film seemed in many ways the exemplar of a disenchanted scientific gaze, it was also recognized as a medium that opened up new possibilities for a more synthetic form of perception—​­that, in the words of Henri Bergson, it was capable of reproducing “life itself.” Curtis accordingly stresses the dialectical nature of the relation between analytic and synthetic forms of observation that pervades the history of scientific cinema.19 The impact of these new possibilities of scientific observation was felt in many medical fields but was especially powerful in fields like neurology and psychiatry. This was so for two main reasons: because these were still in a process of emancipating themselves from other clinical disciplines, and thus still sought means of attaining their “threshold of scientificity”; and because the object at the center of their focus—​­nervous or mental illness—​­so insistently defied representation. With its promise of capturing symptoms and pathological states with new precision, film seemed to resolve the basic knowledge problem haunting these disciplines, thus contributing materially to the process of what Foucault calls the “formation of objects.”20 The same

Human Sciences  29

held true in other areas of the emerging human sciences, each of which carried with it the mark of being what Freud called a “young science.”21 Indeed, despite Freud’s own professed break with the visual conventions of nineteenth-­ century neurology, psychoanalysis turned as well to the cinematic medium, as we shall later see. By that time, the moving image had become firmly established within the epistemology of the human sciences, an epistemology that privileged the visible and the observable, and that frequently operated at the juncture of medicine and jurisprudence. In response to rising numbers of insurance claims stemming from industrial accidents, for instance, American neurologists turned to film footage as a means of distinguishing between true and false cases of disability.22 In this they anticipated German doctors’ later response to the problem of shellshock. Commitment to the ideal of mechanical objectivity did not eliminate the need for selection and organization of the new facts obtained by means of the motion picture camera. As Robert Kutner noted in 1911, film was especially valuable to researchers confronted by what he called the “Tücke des Objekts” (malice, or recalcitrance, of objects), insofar as it enabled isolation of precisely those features of the disease picture considered most meaningful.23 In the fields of neurology and psychiatry this was significant with regard both to the ephemeral character of symptoms and to another oft-­noted feature of clinical practice: the patient’s frequent refusal to submit docilely to or perform willingly according to the needs of the live demonstration. Confronted with this recalcitrance—​­which practitioners often ascribed to a form of willfulness—​ c­ linicians welcomed the control afforded them by the film image. In freeing them from the symptom’s transience, or from the patient’s mood or utterances, this image enabled them to stabilize the disease picture, to transform it into a scientific object, and in so doing to address a basic problem of knowledge in their field.24 It was on the basis of such operations of intervention and selection that Kutner rested his frequently echoed claim that the cinematic image possessed a “persuasive evidentiary power as does no other form of documentation.”25 But Kutner went further, ascribing to the moving image the power to modify the performance of its user. He argued that the film image served as an “important ‘controller’ of its own activity,” and he illustrated this claim by citing the case of the celebrated French surgeon Eugene-­Louis Doyen, who discovered that watching footage of himself perform an operation revealed how many superfluous movements he made in the course of the procedure. “When I saw one of my operations take place on the screen for the first time I saw how

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little I knew myself [emphasis added].”26 Studying this footage closely enabled Doyen to impose a “strict new economy of surgical technique” in the operating room. Here we encounter another version of the efficiency mystique associated with film and of its role in, as Giedion put it, revealing the “inside of processes.” The new medium did not merely improve on human perception: as Doyen here noted and as acolytes of scientific cinematography like the time-­and-­motion specialist Frank Gilbreth claimed, it helped modify and optimize human performance more generally, generating new norms of knowledge, behavior, and performance. This, as figures like Poppelreuter later stressed, was as true in the workplace as it was in the field of clinical observation and practice.27 Such claims were echoed repeatedly. In the writings of enthusiasts, film embodied a powerful will to knowledge, whether of patients, diseases, or cures; at the same time, it also became a vehicle of self-­knowledge. Moving images generated new possibilities of data, of methods of treatment and intervention, and of a new relation to the self. That these possibilities contained something more than a little uncanny in them is already implicit in the force of Doyen’s astonished statement “how little I knew myself.” The implications of this discovery were far from straightforward. Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympics, embraced film as the modern era’s answer to the age-­ old axiom “Know thyself,” and extolled the possibilities of self-­knowledge to be gained through studying film footage of the body performing athletic feats; close study of the “mechanical figure,” he argued, yielded important insights into the capacities and limits of the “physiological ensemble,” and thus conferred significant advantages on individuals.28 Yet, as we shall see, Doyen’s statement attests as well to other possibilities. Not least among these was an anxiety surrounding the circulation of such images in the public realm.29 Apropos of this anxiety, Walter Benjamin later noted the deep sense of estrangement or “exile” the film actor experienced in relation to his own image. At the same time, he welcomed the new forms of knowledge afforded by the cinema, its contribution to a vast “expansion of the field of the testable” that he associated with fields like occupational psychology and psychoanalysis.30

Madness and the Moving Image Many of the themes enumerated above are echoed in the first documented account of medical cinematography in Germany. In 1897 Paul Schuster, a

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young neurologist at Berlin’s Charité hospital, made a short film depicting several patients in the hospital’s clinic. This followed by one year the birth of neurology as an independent discipline: in 1896 the first German department of neurology was created in Hamburg under the direction of Max Nonne, a figure who, as we shall see, produced an important example of wartime filmmaking twenty years later. The turn to moving images reflected neurology’s status as a fledgling specialty that sought to position itself within a rapidly changing medical landscape in which technology was identified with scientific authority and progress. Schuster used cinematic frame analysis to study the “movement-­complexes,” or tremors, associated with disorders like syphilis, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy. Close scrutiny of film imagery, he claimed, yielded important new insights into these illnesses.31 Schuster also reported that he used film to facilitate the demonstration and instruction of “theoretical questions” by means of moving images, independent of what he called the hospital’s clinical “material” (i.e., patients). Such demonstrations would, he hoped, become over time the basis for creating a medical film archive encompassing all known disease syndromes. Numerous practitioners in neurology and psychiatry subsequently embraced this approach in the conviction that cinematographic studies opened up, as one put it, “a wealth of absolutely new facts.”32 As film became an increasingly important resource in research, diagnosis, and teaching, presentation of these facts became a standard feature of medical congresses from the turn of the century on. This interest in medical cinematography developed rapidly over the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, but the field truly came into its own after the war, when neuropsychiatry became the medical specialty in which film production developed most extensively in interwar Germany.33 Giessen psychiatrist Robert Sommer was one figure who developed an early and abiding interest in medical film. In addition to his research in psychiatry, Sommer made major contributions to the fields of criminology and experimental psychology, and he founded the German mental hygiene movement. Conceived of as part of a broad program of social reform, mental hygiene in Germany developed close institutional ties to racial hygiene.34 As we shall see in Chapter 2, the field of mental hygiene also played a key role in film-­censorship policy. Sommer’s turn to motion pictures represented a natural outgrowth of his interest in experimental psychology, with its emphasis on sophisticated instrumentation. In the late 1890s, Sommer invoked the important contribution

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of Charcot and Paul Richer to establishing a new standard of objectivity in psychiatric observation; photography, he wrote, enabled the profession to move beyond the written case record and to largely free itself from “the interpretive problems inherent in language.”35 Yet Sommer saw that cinematography’s ability to capture motion gave it a distinct advantage over still photography. His first experiments with cinematographic studies, dating from around 1900, focused on recording motor disabilities and on producing visual records of specific disease pictures. He eventually incorporated film into his methods of psychological and forensic examination.36 In the mid-­1930s, he published an article citing his early contributions in this field, noting somewhat mordantly that the old footage he still used for instruction had the effect of bringing dead patients “back to life.”37 Sommer is a key figure in this story insofar as his career spans the period between the turn of the century and the Nazi era, when the alliance he helped forge between cinema and psychiatry became highly consequential. Not only did his research on the heredity of mental illness contribute to the development of racial science, but the institutionalization of this science under the Nazis was aided by an extensive program of the kinds of scientific-­medical films championed by Sommer, in which images of madness and of disabled and imperfect human beings served to rationalize programs of forced sterilization and murder.38 Sommer was far from alone in using the film camera to capture and record clinical data. Emil Kraepelin, the preeminent German psychiatrist of the era, wrote in 1909 that “the chief task of psychological methods was the scientific investigation of disease pictures,” and he too adopted film as a key resource of such investigation. Having seen a film of Doyen performing a surgery, Kraepelin praised its “fidelity to life and uncanny speed,” and added a studio for shooting footage of patients to his newly built psychiatric clinic in Munich in 1904.39 He continued to report on his cinematic studies through the early 1920s. Footage from his clinic was the basis for a wartime film (now lost) titled The War and the Nervous System.40 The moving image, he wrote, was an ideal means for documenting attacks of all kinds—​­for instance, hysterical fits—​­that occurred only seldom and for that reason were rarely amenable to the needs of live demonstration.41 At the same time, Kraepelin expressed deep misgivings about popular cinema and, as we shall later see, played a significant role in censorship proceedings of the early Weimar era. Under the direction of Theodor Ziehen at Berlin’s Charité Hospital, scientific cinematography became wedded to a research program on intelligence testing and forensic psychiatry. As part of a major revision to existing

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classification systems, much of his research focused on defining the disease picture surrounding the diagnosis of psychopathic constitution. Ziehen devoted his laboratory’s resources to charting its various forms, relying particularly heavily on measures of intelligence. His student Kurt Boas experimented with new methods of intelligence testing by means of the cinematograph. He first showed patients films based on short narratives such as fairy tales, then he asked them a series of questions meant to gauge comprehension.42 Such tests became part of a constantly evolving intake procedure designed to extend the fine mesh of psychiatric classification ever more deeply into the border zone between normality and mental illness. Boas later also wrote about film’s forensic uses, arguing that, by helping detect errors in perception, memory, and statement, it could assist investigators in arriving at an “objective analysis of facts.” He conceived of the moving image as a kind of lie detector, a means of uncovering, for instance, cases of simulation involving soldiers or industrial workers claiming compensation for psychological disability. As we shall see later in this chapter, Boas’s interest in the scientific possibilities of the medium was matched by his concerns regarding the dangers of commercial cinema and, in particular, the portrayal of psychiatrists in popular film.43 Ziehen’s student Helenefriedericke Stelzner likewise explored new methods of testing and diagnosis involving both quasi-­cinematographic or serial imagery tests and explicitly filmic methods. Stelzner linked the diagnosis of psychopathic constitution strongly to the conditions of the modern urban environment and the dangers her patients—​­primarily working class ­adolescents—​ ­encountered there.44 Among these dangers she singled out trashy literature, sexually explicit material, and popular cinema, against which she adopted a stance of total censure. She wished to preserve the cinematic medium for exclusively scientific purposes, and, like Boas, she employed filmic images and narratives to test her patients’ comprehension and attention, using their responses to draw conclusions about intelligence defects. The cinematic tests used at Ziehen’s clinic illustrate how contemporary psychiatrists, in their efforts to analyze the impact of the modern urban environment on their patients’ lives, imprinted what might be called a second order of modernity on them: the regular, calculable, preventive order of medical science. Film served not merely as a research medium but as a strongly normative social technology. Having come of age in an era of reform, the medium not surprisingly became a vehicle of reformist impulses (as well as, in its popular form, an object of reform, as we shall see in Chapter 2). Its aura of impartiality and objectivity lent it to such impulses and to the larger social

34  Chapter 1

goals and institutional imperatives that stood behind them. Scientific cinema, intelligence tests, and personality profiles all formed part of a larger ensemble of classificatory and therapeutic practices that emerged around 1900. This cluster of new tests and practices, Ian Hacking has argued, offers evidence of a consequential shift in psychology’s object of inquiry from individual subjects to populations—​­populations that included schoolchildren, juvenile delinquents, asylum inmates, and military recruits.45 Theodor Ziehen’s initial interest in intelligence testing grew out of his collaboration with the War Ministry, and it was, not surprisingly, in connection with the multitude of problems associated with military recruitment, assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation that such methods gained wider legitimacy. This becomes clear when we turn once more to the work of Walther Poppelreuter. As noted earlier, Poppelreuter served as a specialist in brain injuries at a hospital in Cologne during World War I, in the course of which he published a study on the disabilities of soldiers suffering from shrapnel wounds to the head or from other brain-­related trauma. His chief interest lay in establishing reliable measures of agnosia, a syndrome characterized by the loss of the ability to recognize objects. Reporting on the results of tests designed to determine the effect of head injuries on his patients’ ability to comprehend and recall cinematographic images and narratives, he wrote: “The behavior of visually impaired people towards film is uncommonly instructive. Film gives us processes as they really are, and is therefore ideally equipped to allow us to form judgments, free from any scruples that we may attach to experimental findings.”46 Because, in his view, “simple people” tended to favor images, Poppelreuter believed that films were ideally suited to test visual disturbances among his mostly working-­class patients. Having assembled a small collection of commercial films, Poppelreuter compiled a series of “objective film synopses.” After screening the films for his patients, he asked them to produce their own synopses, which he then compared with his own. The results showed that most patients could follow simple filmic narratives with relative ease, but that more complex scenarios involving multiple narrative threads, time frames, and geographic locales produced striking failures of comprehension. The case of one patient who had suffered a serious wound to the back of his head was characteristic: while able to recall many of the individual scenes in detail, he seemed unable to link them together or grasp the dramatic connection among them. Elsewhere, Poppelreuter noted that he also found films useful for measuring weakness of retention or memory. In addition, he claimed, these tests had not merely diagnostic

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uses but in some cases served the added purpose of helping train patients to recover lost function. Poppelreuter went on to become a leading industrial psychologist of the Weimar era, applying his experiences in treating soldiers with head wounds (which earned him the title “father of the brain-­injured”) to the task of rationalizing work processes.47 Subsequently he became an early member of the Nazi party and embraced the new regime in 1933. In many respects, the Great War served him and like-­minded researchers as a laboratory, both as a proving ground for methods that had until that time found no widespread practical application and as an incubator for completely new approaches. Another figure who trod a path similar to Poppelreuter’s was Fritz Giese. He served in a wartime hospital for soldiers suffering brain trauma before becoming a leading psychotechnician during the Weimar era and then an enthusiast of the Nazi revolution. For Giese, the war represented a “natural experiment,” a tragic event that nevertheless afforded scientists unparalleled opportunities to gain new knowledge. Such knowledge found numerous practical social applications in the postwar period.48 During the 1920s, the science and psychology of the workplace became the key point of entry for a whole series of endeavors concerned with rationalizing and optimizing human performance. These developments in the field of “human economy” were in turn closely related to the simultaneous rationalization of perceptual and representational practices. Film was widely used in the time-­and-­motion studies that became ubiquitous in the field of efficiency engineering as well as in the related field of accident prevention. Like Poppelreuter, Giese was deeply intrigued by the medium of film. But in Giese’s case, it served as a research medium for studying mass behavior rather than clinical disease pictures.49 His widely read book of cultural analysis, Girlkultur (1925), included a chapter on the Weimar public’s film-­going habits, and asserted that “nowhere can mentalities be so well observed as in the comparative study of motion pictures.”50 Popular cinema, wrote Giese, had contributed to the emergence of a new anthropological type, and analysis of film culture thus represented a crucial resource in the postwar search for new paradigms of behavior, performance, and efficiency. In the hands of figures like Poppelreuter and Giese, what had formerly been academic disciplines took on a new public role; “called up” during the war, the human sciences moved out of the clinic and the university and into society.51 War and its aftermath enabled these fields to gain new institutional footholds and to claim an increasingly assertive role in many areas of social policy. While many

36  Chapter 1

German elites envisioned restoring prewar forms of political and social authority, those of a younger generation called for wholesale renovation along completely new lines. The wartime mobilization of human science belongs to a larger development that Peter Holquist connects with the Great War: the shift from territory to population as the central object of governance, along with a corollary shift in strategies of governance from policing to surveillance.52 The social and ideological upheavals that accompanied this watershed of political modernity produced an unprecedented need for knowledge of the restless and often deeply afflicted populations ruled over by the new postwar states. Much of this knowledge was supplied by specialists from a range of young disciplines, who made their ideas and practices central to discussions of national recovery, health, and power.53 The wartime experiences of figures like Poppelreuter and Giese helped lay the groundwork for an ambitious postwar program focused on the problem of “human economy” and the rationalization of work. A related program emerged from the mental hygiene movement. In the war’s aftermath, specialists in psychiatry, biology, and anthropology undertook large-­scale research projects intended to gather data about the health of the German population.54 The ambition of figures like Emil Kraepelin to make psychiatric science handmaiden to social policy illustrates what Michel Foucault has described as the ascendance of psychiatric power in the modern era. In Germany, the fields of psychiatry and mental hygiene had close ties to racial hygiene, whose triumph under the Nazis is identified by Peter Fritzsche as marking a shift from conventional forms of policing focused on “law and order” to a demographic and biomedical approach dominated by a new class of “ethnocrats.”55 But as Edward Ross Dickinson has argued, the bio-­political obsessions and strategies of the interwar era encompassed many different tendencies, only some of which could be identified with National Socialism.56 Within the broad terrain staked out by the human sciences, eugenicists of many political persuasions coexisted, and prior to 1933 the field of mental hygiene included both Jewish sexologists and proto-­Nazi race hygienists. Alongside disciplines like psychotechnics and psychiatry, other new fields in the human sciences also gained prominence in the postwar era—​­some, like psychoanalysis and sexology, with the status of “outsider sciences.” These latter fields counted many Jewish members in their ranks. Social outsiders who were denied professional opportunities in more established fields, Jews gravitated to these emerging fields and played a key role in their development. They endorsed the mental hygienists’ emphasis on social enlightenment and

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embraced film’s emancipatory potential. “In the work of enlightenment that film performs so well, science has found a powerful ally in its fight for justice”: thus the Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld addressed his audience in the landmark film Different from the Others (1919), a plea to decriminalize homosexuality. Not surprisingly, this film generated intense controversy, much of it tinged with anti-­Semitism. The politically conservative Emil Kraepelin condemned the threat it posed to population policy as well as its scientific pretensions: “It is especially dangerous precisely because of its claims to scientificity.”57 The war also marked a moment of major breakthrough in the field of medical cinema. In the aftermath of the war, specialists in numerous fields enlisted the moving image in an ambitious effort to address a wide variety of public health problems, from the treatment of war neurosis to combating venereal disease, industrial accidents, alcoholism, and medical charlatanism. As we shall see, this enterprise interacted in complex ways with the cinema’s emergence as a mass medium. It is no accident that many popular films of the postwar period explore the implications of the advent of new forms of “psychiatric power.”58 In these films, the alliance between cinema and human science is often turned on its head.59

Cinematic Cures Almost in passing, Poppelreuter had mentioned another important aspect of medical cinema: its use in documenting methods of treatment. In this respect as well, the war served as a “natural experiment.” The scale of the demands placed on medicine by the physical and psychological injuries of war led to extensive investigation of new methods of treatment. In the field of neuropsychiatry, which was confronted by an outbreak of psychological disability on what many authorities perceived to be a virtually epidemic scale, doctors abandoned older treatment methods and turned to hypnosis, electrotherapy, and psychoanalysis. At the same time, physicians used scientific cinematography to document the remarkable successes they claimed with these methods. The handful of films that have been preserved offer important insights into the relationship between human science and the moving image, as well as into this relationship’s larger resonances in German society. Two films in particular have emerged as central to historical accounts of the cinematic representation of war neurosis and its treatment. The films, one made by Max Nonne, holder of the first German chair in neurology in Ham-

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Figure 4. Max Nonne, Funktionell-­motorische Reiz-­und Lähmungszustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern und deren Heilung durch Suggestion in Hypnose (1917). Patient with “clown-­like disturbances of movement caused by shock.”

burg, and the other by Ferdinand Kehrer (in collaboration with the German Hygiene Museum), both employ a before-­and-­after format that depicts patients prior to and then immediately following treatment.60 In both cases the treatment involves hypnosis, though Kehrer’s film also alludes to other methods, including work therapy and electrotherapy. Nonne’s patients include fourteen soldiers suffering from symptoms ranging from paralysis and other motor disturbances to violent trembling, mutism, and, in one case, “clown-­ like” spasms. Against a dark background, the nearly naked patients are first shown alongside Nonne, who moves his hands over their heads and bodies in a series of hypnotic passes (see Figure 4). In the after scene, the patients are depicted freed of their symptoms: walking normally, holding themselves erect, smiling—​­in a word, cured (see Figure 5).61 Though in content and format these films appear relatively straightforward, both are complex artifacts. They illustrate how wartime doctors developed new representational strategies and conventions in order to impose visual and conceptual clarity on the complaints of their soldier-­patients. In this sense, these films were not simply “positivist witnesses” and did not merely represent war neurosis and its treatment; as Julia Barbara Köhne has argued, by actively producing the disease picture surrounding this disorder, they contributed to the production of new psychiatric knowledge.62 They did

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Figure 5. Max Nonne, Funktionell-­motorische Reiz-­und Lähmungszustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern und deren Heilung durch Suggestion in Hypnose (1917). The hypnotic cure.

so in two important respects: diagnostically, by capturing and fixing the often bewildering play of symptoms—​­ mutism, paralysis, and trembling, for ­example—​­into a stable and legible picture; and, therapeutically, by asserting that the disorder was treatable, thus placing it within a clear prognostic and temporal (before-­and-­after) framework. In both respects, the films asserted a claim to medical knowledge of a disorder defined by its protean, shape-­ shifting qualities, qualities that had, in the war’s early stages, generated profound frustration on the part of military medical personnel. The cinematic construction of war neurosis as a knowable and treatable clinical entity exemplifies the scientific imperative toward what Foucault calls the “formation of objects.” In asserting his ability to reproduce the image of war neurosis with “photographic fidelity,” Nonne attested to the elevation of photography “to a special epistemic status” that was now also laid claim to by cinematography.63 For patients, the implications were twofold. On the one hand, film offered compelling evidence of the possibility of treatment and thus of reintegration into the war effort, whether at the front or, more often, in some capacity behind the lines. On the other, it offered military psychiatrists new means of adjudicating the highly complex issues that surrounded war neurosis, including those of disability compensation and the charge of malingering. Claims for the objectivity of visual media assumed particular importance in relation

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to a clinical entity whose highly visual, even theatrical qualities, posed significant challenges in pension cases. What Poppelreuter called its ability to capture “processes as they really are” conferred on the moving image a vital role in rendering judgment on the nature and authenticity of the soldier-­patient’s complaints. Wartime neuropsychiatry, argues Köhne, found in visual media a crucial aid in addressing the manifold issues surrounding war neurosis—​­its implications not just for morale and manpower but for medical authority itself. For as Doris Kaufmann writes, in turning over to psychiatrists the role of adjudicating the issue of malingering, German military authorities broke with long-­standing precedent.64 Standard practice treated soldiers suspected of faking injury highly punitively. Placing the problem of malingering in the hands of psychiatric experts turned it from a criminal into a medical matter, but in doing so placed a high premium on the diagnostic methods used by those experts. In effect, the simulation issue emerged as another instance of the problem of the “malice of objects.” The work performed by the camera’s lens consisted in making legible the enigmatic object confronting it in the disorder called war neurosis.65 Undoubtedly, these films may be seen as a series of variations on the theme of the power of the medical gaze to define and classify. Yet in considering their status we cannot ignore their relation to wider social and cultural determinants. Despite the efforts of medical authorities to quarantine scientific-­medical cinematography from popular film, the boundaries between the two remained permeable. As numerous scholars have noted, the theatricality of the disease picture surrounding war neurosis formed part of the genesis of Nonne’s and Kehrer’s films as well. Nonne’s film, for instance, constructs the figure of the doctor as charismatic magician-­healer, and—​­by editing out the transition from unwell to well—​­the cure itself as quasi-­ miraculous.66 It also rests on a central paradox: on the one hand, Nonne claimed the film’s complete fidelity to the image of war neurosis seen in the hospital; on the other, however, he conceded that, to ensure that the patient’s symptoms conformed to the camera’s needs, the patients were in a state of hypnosis in both the before and after scenes.67 In what amounted to a preemptive strike against the so-­called malice of objects, the demonstration was thus staged; patients performed scenes according to a script authored and directed by the physician. In this respect, the film’s mise-­en-­scène yokes the conventions of mechanical objectivity to what we might call, with Bruno Latour, the medium’s rhetorical capacities.68 This is also the case with Kehrer’s film, which was produced in a context in which the health ministry of the state of Baden

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was confronted by protests about the treatment patients had received in military hospitals. The film was thus partly an exercise in public relations: it addressed both a medical public and a wider public that, by this stage of the war, had become skeptical of, if not openly hostile to, the “miracle” cures being practiced on a mass scale in military psychiatric hospitals, and—​­in a more general sense—​­to the entire rationale for the war.69 Just as figures like Nonne conceived of the hypnotic cure as a means of influencing the patient’s will, so too their films endeavored to influence the will of the broader public. A similar connection between the suggestible psyche of the soldier and that of the populace was made by some medical authorities who argued that propaganda could be used to effect suggestive cures for a “mass civilian neurosis” that had contributed to a crisis of morale on the home front.70 The convergence of medium and medical public relations campaign noted here coincided with a significant development: official recognition by the German state of cinema’s tremendous powers as—​­to quote General Erich Ludendorff, joint head of the High Command—​­a “means of influencing the masses.” As part of an effort to counteract Entente propaganda, Ludendorff (who later claimed that the German public had succumbed to foreign propaganda like a “hypnotized rabbit”) helped authorize the creation of film conglomerate UFA, which would go on to play a major role in German film history (see Figure 6).71 Film helped produce and legitimize psychiatric science and knowledge,

Figure 6. Emil Skramlik, Animal Hypnosis (1920). Hypnotized rabbit.

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yet this knowledge did not remain under the control of the profession but circulated within the public realm, taking on different meanings from those originally intended. On the one hand, circumstantial evidence suggests that authorities withdrew some of these films from public venues because of mounting concern about the impact that motion picture imagery could have on soldiers who, in an effort to escape the front or claim disability benefits, would model their symptoms on those presented in films—​­thus, ironically, further exacerbating the problem of simulation.72 On the other hand, scholars have also suggested that by becoming part of a semipublic visual archive these films helped fuel a protest against the treatment of the war neurotic. As such, they may have inspired Expressionist filmmakers of the postwar era, when the image of the war neurotic and that of the military physician became central to debates about the memory of the war in Germany.73 Torn from their medical context, such films could acquire what Ramon Reichert calls a “many-­ sided referentiality.”74 It is notable that one of the first great achievements of Germany’s postwar film industry, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), was written by two war veterans, one of whom had endured mistreatment at the hands of military psychiatrists. Caligari—​­the story of a charlatan/doctor whose hypnotized medium Cesare carries out murders under his command—​­is but one example of a genre of postwar films that reflect back in complex ways on the wartime neurosis films. It does so by registering a protest against the figure of the authoritarian psychiatrist, but also, by virtue of an intricate narrative that is revealed at the end to be the hallucination of a madman, by reflecting on the truth claims surrounding the cinematic medium itself. At stake in this film is the unreliability both of psychiatric knowledge and of the visual media. Caligari thus participates in a wider exploration and interrogation of the relation between human science and the moving image.75 The postwar situation of the psychiatric profession was indeed an ambiguous one: it had been granted considerable new authority by political and military authorities, yet its public image had been badly damaged. Kehrer’s film, as earlier noted, was motivated partly by the need to respond to protests on the part of patients and their representatives, protests that called into question the humaneness of medical treatment and the lengths to which authorities were willing to go to address the increasingly drastic manpower shortages being felt both at the front and in key industrial sectors behind the lines. Max Nonne reportedly had to escape through the back door of his clinic when an angry mob descended on it, and by war’s end there were widespread protests,

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debates within the Reichstag, and a handful of trials involving allegations of abuse.76 Much criticism focused on the use of methods that involved overpowering and silencing war neurotics. In this context, another crucial feature of wartime medical cinematography should be noted, namely the tendency of practitioners to hold up the silence of the silent film as a virtue in its contribution to their observational paradigm: “The silent film isolates . . . ​out of the total symptom-­picture precisely those parts that we want to pay closest attention to; it permits us to study the motor behavior, the workings of the movement-­machinery, and to make judgments independently of the spoken word.”77 Here the moving image is linked overtly to an effort to reduce the patient to a mute automaton, a purely mechanical being akin to Caligari’s medium Cesare. In response to such efforts, the protests that arose at war’s end—​­which in some cases spilled over into violence directed at doctors and clinical staff—​­can be seen as part of an effort to undo this process of silencing and to reclaim the voice of patients. Referring to the revolutionary upheavals that followed the armistice, in which many former soldier-­patients played an active role, the psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel invoked the notion of a “mass talking cure.”78 Yet as Simmel himself would attest, the alliance between medicine and motion pictures did not rest on exclusively disciplinary imperatives. Faced with the alternative of court martial, some soldiers clearly benefited from the determination that their ailments were authentic and that they were entitled to treatment or a pension. Some experts, moreover, were prepared to make wider claims about the material agency of film. One of these concerned the possibility that the medium itself possessed therapeutic properties.79 This possibility is thematized in a handful of early French feature films, among them Amour et Science (1912), which tells the story of a patient who is cured by a screening of a film that documents the events that precipitated his psychological breakdown. Similarly, the film Le Mystère des Roches de Kador (1912) includes a remarkable scene in which a young woman afflicted with hysteria is cured through a film screening.80 Film also became a conceptual resource within new forms of treatment that emerged by war’s end. Ernst Simmel, who combined hypnosis and psychoanalysis in his treatment of soldiers, explicitly compared the therapeutic recovery of traumatic memory through hypnosis to the screening of a film: by means of hypnosis, he claimed, “the ‘film’ is made to roll once again.”81 Walther Poppelreuter had observed that one side effect of using film as a diagnostic aid was that it promoted a kind of “training” or recovery of lost

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function that might have therapeutic benefits, and he later explored the implications of this discovery for workplace science. In connection with popular film, contemporaries also discussed the possibility of a rather different kind of therapeutic effect. In the journal she kept during her time studying with Sigmund Freud in the years 1912–­13, Lou Andreas-­Salomé wrote about her pleasure in going to popular motion pictures and predicted an auspicious future for the new medium in a world in which modern workplace conditions left most individuals too fatigued to enjoy more demanding forms of art. Unlike many contemporary film reformers who connected film going to wider processes of psychosocial restructuring, Andreas-­Salomé did not stigmatise this development.82 It was in a similar spirit that a report submitted in 1916 to the Interior Ministry by one military doctor described film as a “means of treatment” for war neurotics.83 At the front, he related, the cinema represented a valuable tool for combating the anxiety and depression experienced by soldiers, temporarily transporting them away from the stresses of wartime and thus providing relief for their “agitated nerves.” Moreover, in bringing together soldiers and officers these gatherings performed an important social function: Class distinctions were forgotten and troop morale boosted amid the common enjoyment of the images on screen. This enjoyment expressed itself chiefly in the form of uncontrollable bursts of laughter that could shake the entire theater, persisting even in response to war footage: “The soldiers make fun of the images of their screen counterparts.” This was particularly true in the case of war films that engaged in obvious misrepresentations or displays of false sentimentality. By contrast, when offered more honestly constructed narratives, the doctor noted that the soldier-­spectator profited not simply from distraction and increased morale but from new knowledge, gaining what he called an enhanced form of “mental agility” through exposure to previously unknown points of view. Such arguments would be constitutive for postwar developments.

Curing the Social Body: Science, Film, and Mass Enlightenment While World War I greatly enhanced the authority and prestige of neuropsychiatry, and while cinematography aided that process, this process did not go unchallenged, as we have seen. By the war’s end, the need to repair the

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profession’s public standing had been identified as a vital task by many in the field. Martin Weiser was one such figure, noting in 1919 the war-­neurosis films’ importance for “enlightening the public about war neurosis and its curability.”84 This was especially advisable, Weiser wrote, given that Germany’s streets had become so crowded with war neurotics, a source of much unease in the populace. Beyond demonstrating that war-­related psychological disability was treatable, Weiser saw in such films a means of rehabilitating the profession’s public image. The success of the war-­neurosis films helped catalyze a major initiative undertaken at war’s end: the creation in 1918 of a Medical Film Archive within the Cultural Film Department of the newly established film corporation UFA.85 Under the auspices of this initiative, filmmakers went on to produce a large body of work on behalf of a campaign of popular scientific and hygienic instruction for the masses. These films covered a broad range of topics, from psychological disability and the process of demobilization to the problems of malnourishment, venereal disease, and other forms of epidemic illness left by the war. Made in a variety of formats, these films were seen by millions of Germans throughout the Weimar and—​­under very different ­auspices—​­Nazi periods. Two aspects of this undertaking should be stressed. On the one hand, psychiatry and related fields used film to widen their authority to define and propose cures or solutions for urgent social problems. Human science became vital to the task of understanding and molding what Kathleen Canning calls the new publics and subjectivities that emerged as the republic contended with the war’s aftermath and fought to anchor a democratic social order in the “governance of sexuality, body, and gender.”86 In the postwar world, as one psychiatrist put it, the doctor would assume a new role as “educator of the people.”87 Yet even as they laid claim to this role, physicians were repeatedly compelled to defend this claim, and—​­given the still-­nascent status of their respective fields—​­their position as authorities. In taking advantage of new forms of mass communication, they thus had to exercise considerable care. This meant not least negotiating the relation between scientific film and the popular cinema, which now emerged as a major social force in its own right.88 These by no means easily resolved issues form part of the complex history of the so-­called enlightenment film, a genre that addressed often-­scandalous topics of sexual, mental, and, eventually, racial hygiene—​­venereal disease, homosexuality, psychoanalysis, eugenic sterilization—​­and that, by virtue of its subject matter but also its chosen medium and its audience, became a

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lightning rod for controversy. As noted in the Introduction, a key figure in this development was Curt Thomalla, who was appointed head of UFA’s Medical Film Archive in 1918. Thomalla’s wartime service in a nerve station had exposed him to many of the issues discussed above. In the course of a prolific career in medical and popular scientific cinema that spanned the next twenty years, he oversaw the production of a large corpus of films for both specialist and lay audiences. Many of these films reflected Thomalla’s specific training and experience. Yet, as was true of many specialists in these fields, issues of psychological disability and its treatment hardly exhausted the range of Thomalla’s interests. He wrote scripts for or collaborated on the production of films on topics ranging from hypnosis to the effects of the wartime blockade on the health of German citizens to venereal disease and eugenic sterilization. Following a prolific Weimar career, he would in 1933 be appointed as expert on health and population politics within Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. The path followed by Thomalla was trod by numerous other figures who made films offering popular enlightenment and instruction on an endless array of topics in the field of Volkshygiene.89 These films addressed problems ranging from demobilization and contagious disease to the use of prosthetic devices, workplace rationalization, industrial accidents, and the dangers of alcohol and medical charlatans. Another figure who stressed the medium’s enormous contribution to the popularization of medical and hygienic themes was the physician Waldemar Schweisheimer. Combating what he called the “biological catastrophe” that had been visited on the German people by the war was a task that entailed mobilizing the entire populace. In this task the enlightenment film had an indispensable role to play. Yet Schweisheimer’s claims for the medium were accompanied by significant caveats; he devoted an entire chapter to what he saw as the dangers of “false” forms of enlightenment that, cloaked in the mantle of science, pandered to the public’s thirst for sensationalistic material.90 Such caveats underscore the central problem of the hygienic enlightenment film: its ambivalent place within a postwar moral economy marked by deep anxiety about the circulation of false or dangerous forms of knowledge in public life. As we shall see in Chapter 5, concerns like these were often framed around the disturbing figure of the medical charlatan, occultist, or “mad ­scientist”—​­a figure frequently coded as Jewish. Notwithstanding official backing for this movement, it remained plagued by anxieties associated both with the sensitive and often controversial topics

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it addressed and with the nature of the medium and its audience. Well before the war, the commercial film industry had emerged as a force that public authorities struggled, mostly in vain, to regulate and keep within narrowly defined channels of respectability. In the war’s aftermath, this problem reemerged with new intensity following the suspension of censorship (which lasted until 1920) by the fledgling republic. One result was a flourishing new genre of films devoted to topics like prostitution, venereal disease, and homosexuality. Indeed it was this genre that had originally laid claim to the term “enlightenment film,” a fact that proved highly awkward for figures like Thomalla, whose efforts continually aroused fierce conservative criticism that “enlightenment” served merely as a cloak for films trafficking in sexuality and moral corruption or, alternatively, that even in the case of well-­intentioned efforts, a given film’s ostensible purpose was undermined by its actual effects. These effects were all but inevitable, critics argued, given the extent to which makers of such films insisted on adopting the conventions of the narrative feature film in order to win the widest possible public. Hybridizing elements of the scientific-­medical film with elements of the popular cinema, it was frequently argued, would only produce misbegotten offspring, cinematic monstrosities.91 Thomalla, who experimented throughout his career with this hybridization of genres, addressed these concerns in a short, programmatic piece titled “Doctor and Film.” In reckoning with the enigmatic qualities of what he referred to as “the Sphinx film,” he wrote that motion picture production must be guided by a sense of idealism, without which “a true spiritual child will never be born of the marriage between doctor and film.”92 One strategy for dealing with the discrepancy between intentions and effects—​­and thus protecting enlightenment films against undue criticism and censorship, on the one hand, and “unintended readings” by the audience, on the other—​­was to solicit the consultation of medical-­hygienic societies, an approach he employed in many of his films. Yet Thomalla’s solution to this problem also went further: he recommended including scientific-­medical advisory personnel in all feature film production. Such a measure would ensure that even purely commercial films did not fail to take advantage of their latent possibilities for medical-­hygienic instruction.93 Given the extent to which enlightenment films strove to wed controversial thematic matter with the conventions of the commercial feature film, the inclusion of qualified medical specialists as advisers was essential to ensure the health of the resulting offspring. Thomalla thus sought to internalize the censor function within the film production process. Only by such means, he calculated, would filmmakers like himself be

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able to preserve a free hand in dealing with taboo subject matter, in advancing new—​­and often controversial—​­forms of scientific knowledge.

In Search of Homo Cinematicus A recurring theme of Thomalla’s writings throughout the 1920s was that of film’s ambivalent relation to its audience. On the one hand, Thomalla extolled the medium’s uses for “influencing the psyche of the masses”; on the other—​ ­even while his own films made greater concessions to the audiences’ need for “sensation”—​­he expressed repeated misgivings about the film audience and its tastes.94 Such misgivings echoed those of conservative opinion makers like Wilhelm Stapel, whose description of the film audience as a new clinical type, homo cinematicus, closely followed the writings of contemporary psychiatrists like Kraepelin and Karl Bonhoeffer in emphasizing the hysteric suggestibility of the crowd.95 Though he did not share Stapel’s unreserved hostility, Thomalla found himself repeatedly drawn into debates about the medium’s properties, both good and ill, and the need for stricter regulation. In many ways, this development flowed naturally from the early proprietary interest scientists had taken in the medium. From around 1910 onward, specialists in the human sciences had become active in the “film reform movement” that appeared shortly after the turn of the century. In addition to advocating, as did other figures within this broad social movement, for reform of the commercial film industry, they played a key role in the regulatory discourse surrounding popular cinema, analyzing audience response and linking this to new approaches to censorship. In doing so, they sought both to make the film public’s responses knowable and calculable and to link this to larger claims for making individuals and masses legible, with implications for many areas of social life, ranging from politics and work to demography and public health. In this respect, the history of the relation between the human sciences and cinema also forms part of the history of the self and its growing entanglement in the modern era within a variety of reformist and, sometimes, visionary discourses and practices. These sciences established themselves wherever traditional social relations were in a process of breaking down or transforming. As they assumed a greater role in analyzing and proposing solutions for the crisis phenomena associated with the modernizing process, they positioned patients and wider publics as objects of new kinds of knowledge.96 It was part of their self-­consciously modern professional habitus that these sciences

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seized upon the technological resources of the contemporary era, film among them. Film’s capacities as a tool of research, observation, and instruction became integral to the human sciences’ search for legitimacy and epistemic authority. Representatives of these new disciplines (“young sciences,” to once again paraphrase Freud) repeatedly turned to the medium to advance their professional project. Yet the moving image remained an ambivalent ally. Subject to rigorous control within scientific communities, once film escaped those communities their relation to it changed. Even as they exploited the moving image, scientists were forced to confront questions about the truth claims surrounding it, its place within an emerging mass entertainment industry, and the nature of its public. Intent on expanding their authority and on addressing wider audiences, yet cognizant of the challenges of this project, specialists were compelled to recognize that the relation between film’s dual aspects presented unavoidable issues. They thus became involved in the emerging development of the new medium at another level: that of audience response. In fashioning a science of reception, doctors became medical ­censors—​­in effect, hygienists of the cinematic public sphere. New techniques of governance needed to be anchored in normative viewing practices.97 Consider, for instance, the contribution of the psychologist Naldo Felke to the early twentieth-­century Kinodebatte.98 In the October 1913 issue of Die Umschau, a leading German periodical of science and technology, Felke reported on the results of an experiment in which he tested the reactions of a small group of subjects (three, to be exact) to prolonged film viewing. Measuring a variety of psychophysical indicators, including pulse, eye fatigue, and headaches, Felke claimed to find a threshold beyond which the average person could no longer endure the intense stimuli of the film image without suffering nervous damage. Felke’s report on his modest experiment illustrates in nascent form an emerging reformist discourse about film and its public. Built into it were several assumptions about the capacity of the ordinary person to assimilate the stimuli of the modern world. Felke’s three test subjects, all male, were chosen as representative of a cross section of German society: one was an “average person,” a worker of robust constitution; another, a member of the educated upper-­middle class; and the third, a bohemian type who suffered from a nervous condition. Felke treated the results of the experiment as surprising: the worker, ostensibly the sturdiest of the three, was the first to leave the theater, followed by the academic, and last by the neurotic aesthete. In fact, Felke’s report was deeply inscribed within contemporary notions concerning the denaturing qualities of the modern urban environment. At the

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same time, it marked an important intervention in the framing of the “social question” that surrounded the new medium. Unlike earlier reformers, who stressed the demoralizing effects of popular film, Felke was less interested in laxity of morals than in reframing the issue around an objective assessment of health risks. He used his findings to support his call for stricter regulation of the popular cinema and, in particular, for new measures to limit movie attendance by adolescents. His article was cited in press accounts and became part of an archive of documents collected by the Reich Health Office concerning the new medium’s social impact.99 In defining film spectatorship as a latent disease state or pathological condition, Felke’s report echoed numerous contemporary discourses on normality and deviance, gender, and childhood, and their relation to “modernity.” It breathed the spirit of a whole series of wider investigations that, as Annette Kuhn has written, made the early twentieth-­century film public something to be known and then reformed and “improved.”100 Yet this kind of reformist discourse did not go unchallenged. In a subsequent issue of Die Umschau, Felke’s arguments met with a sharp rebuttal from Guido Seeber, who offered a spirited defense of popular film. Seeber reported that he had conducted his own version of Felke’s experiment and had been unable to replicate Felke’s results. This was hardly surprising, he noted, given that technical improvements had eliminated much of the “flicker-­effect” that so agitated early opponents of the cinema. Seeber also related another piece of more anecdotal audience research data, reminding his readers that Berlin police censors watched 200,000 meters of footage a month without apparently suffering injuries to eyes or nerves. This exchange between Felke and Seeber, however modest, nevertheless illustrates a wider debate that spans the early history of cinema. It bears mentioning that Seeber, a leading cameraman, worked on the film The Student of Prague, whose appearance in 1913 is often cited as marking the beginning of the so-­called Autorenfilm in Germany.101 The emergence of this new “literary” form of popular cinema, some scholars have argued, represented the film industry’s response to the shrill criticism of reformers. What is also noteworthy in this context is that, in their bid for respectability, such films often made psychological and medical themes and figures central to their narratives; in so doing, they frequently highlighted themes of scientific transgression. The scientific response to this new development was, as we shall see, to condemn it.

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The Case of Dr. Münsterberg While film had initially developed as a tool of scientific experimentation, it was only a matter of time before figures like Felke made the film public itself an experimental object. This impulse was pursued more rigorously in the work of Hugo Münsterberg. A German psychologist who taught at Harvard University from the 1890s on, Münsterberg there established the first department of experimental psychology in the United States. He was an exemplary Progressive Era figure, driven by an energetic faith in the capacities of human science to resolve the problems of modern life. In addition to his pioneering contributions in the field of industrial psychology, he played a leading role in scientific psychology’s entry into other social arenas like the classroom, the courtroom, and the field of advertising. Shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, Münsterberg, who had been using quasi-­cinematic apparatus within experiments designed to test tram drivers’ reaction times, developed an intense interest in commercial motion pictures. The reasons for this have been the subject of some speculation, one theory being that he sought to escape some of the hostile public scrutiny that his pro-­German attitude had brought him in the war’s early years. Another is that his meeting and friendship with Heinz Heinrich Ewers, the scriptwriter for The Student of Prague, sparked a new respect for commercial film.102 In any event, this interest led in 1916 to the publication of Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, a text that, written by an internationally renowned authority, signaled that the relation between the new medium and its audience had become a central research object for psychological science. Münsterberg started from the premise that there were no grounds for regarding popular film as inferior to theater or denying it the status of an art form. In support of this position, he devoted much of his study to establishing the scientific basis for the elements that distinguished motion picture from theatrical drama.103 These he ascribed chiefly to the use of techniques like the close-­up and the flashback, both of which he defined as “objectifications” of specific mental functions (respectively, attention and memory).104 Through the increasing refinement of such techniques, he argued, cinema had developed its own distinctive visual and formal language. Münsterberg further argued that in its ability to convey and evoke emotion, film was at least the equal of, if not superior to theater. Here too, he identified the characteristic visual techniques by means of which the medium engaged the audience’s emotions:

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“If we see on screen a man hypnotized in the doctor’s office the patient may lie there with closed eyes, nothing in his features expressing his emotional setting. . . . ​But if now only the doctor and the patient remain unchanged and steady, while everything else in the room begins to move and change its form more and more rapidly so that a feeling of dizziness comes over us and an uncanny ghastly unnaturalness overcomes the surrounding of the hypnotized person, we ourselves become seized by the strange emotion.”105 Throughout his text, Münsterberg strove to clear away prejudices and naïve misconceptions concerning film-­reception processes and their effects. Calling on the recent findings of laboratory psychology, Münsterberg explained that the illusion of motion basic to film depended largely on the mind itself.106 In contrast to a naïve model in which perception depends entirely on external excitation, Münsterberg stressed the mind’s active role in “filling in” the data of sense perception. To explain this phenomenon, Münsterberg invoked the concept of suggestion: Are we not . . . ​familiar with the experience of supplying, by our fancy, the associative image of a movement when only the starting point and the end point are given if a skilled suggestion influences our mind? The prestidigitator stands on one side of the stage when he apparently throws the costly watch against the mirror on the other side of the stage; the audience sees his suggestive hand movement and the disappearance of the watch and sees twenty feet away the shattering of the mirror. The suggestible spectator cannot help but seeing the flight of the watch across the stage.107 Münsterberg did not disqualify this phenomenon by which the senses take as real events that are partly produced by mental processes but rather identified it as a normal feature of psychic life. Yet by linking the filmic illusion with the repertoire of the conjurer he nevertheless underlined—​­ even if only ­negatively—​­the persistent hold of naïve or esoteric perceptual models over efforts to decipher the enigmas of film spectatorship.108 Indeed, despite his faith in the ability of scientific analysis to render film-­ reception processes fully legible, at several places in his text Münsterberg’s prose became notably opaque. An example of this tendency occurs in his frequent allusions to the photoplay’s relation to the clinical phenomena of suggestion and hypnosis. He observed that depictions of hypnosis on-­screen seemed to carry with them the uncanny possibility of evoking hypnoid states

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in the audience: “The spellbound audience in a theater or in a picture house is certainly in a heightened state of suggestibility and is ready to receive suggestions.”109 While Münsterberg was at pains to stress that this represented a normal feature both of the means by which film cast its spell and of mental life more generally, he also acknowledged that this phenomenon played a large role in the arguments of those most critical of popular film. In a passage immediately following the line quoted above, he cited the warnings of police and other authorities concerning the depiction of crimes on-­screen. Here he invoked an abiding concern of reformers responding to the danger they associated with commercial film, namely the suggestive power by means of which it allegedly incited crime and sexual immorality. While a crucial part of his contribution to the debate about the medium’s social impact consisted of debunking the most exaggerated claims made against it—​­claims he ascribed to a naïve, unscientific perspective—​­Münsterberg himself nevertheless seemed to remain of two minds regarding the basis for some of these claims. Despite his carefully cultivated claim of impartiality, Münsterberg’s own relation to the medium was marked by ambivalence. Characteristic of his initial attitude toward popular film is the following statement, written in 1914: “By what wholesome appeals to the desire for amusement can the masses be diverted from the unhealthy influence of the motion pictures, which too often make crime and vice seductive and create a hysteric attitude by their thrills and horrors?”110 Immediately before and after the publication of The Photoplay, in interviews and articles written for newspapers, Münsterberg related how, following his initial coolness toward the medium, he had gradually become intrigued by motion pictures, his “earlier prejudice” giving way to “deep interest.”111 Becoming “converted” from a “snob” to a movie lover, the self-­ described “Harvard Professor” was transformed into an avid consumer of popular films, even devouring manuals on how to write scenarios: “Surely,” he confessed, “I am now under the spell of the ‘movies,’ and while my case may be worse than the average, all the world is somewhat under this spell.”112 Having gone in search of homo cinematicus, Münsterberg had found himself —​ ­albeit a self strangely altered. Under the medium’s “spell,” himself now a “case,” Münsterberg betrayed signs of the inner tension this attitude cost him in his repeated vacillation on the question of film’s moral impact. In an essay titled “The Peril to Childhood in Movies,” he both sought to distance himself from the exaggerated fears of many reformers and admitted to his own misgivings concerning the medium’s “perils.” Evidence of this conflicted attitude runs through his writings on the

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subject. Though he persisted in affirming the medium’s positive, even redemptive qualities, he nevertheless also continued to struggle against remnants of his earlier “prejudice,” citing the dangers of “flicker” and of exaggerated emotions for children with “excitable nerves.”113 The medium’s allure proved difficult to resist, however. Having read about the art of writing scenarios, Münsterberg related that “finally I began to experiment myself.”114 From critic of the medium to scientific analyst and ultimately to scenario writer, Münsterberg turned to the possibility of carrying out psychological experiments on-­screen. Motion pictures, he now realized, could be used to interest “wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests and . . . ​to spread the knowledge of their importance for vocational guidance and the practical affairs of life.”115 Among these experiments was the short film Testing the Mind, produced by Münsterberg for Paramount Pictographs, which introduced audiences to a series of rudimentary psychological tests.116 At a speech accompanying the release of that film, Münsterberg expressed his hope that “psychology might become a vast and far-­reaching influence through its presentation on the screen.”117 Given such statements, it is not surprising that rumors circulated that Münsterberg’s book had been sponsored by an embattled industry anxious to receive the imprimatur of the scientific community.118 Such rumors may in turn have been fueled by others that had called into question his stance as an impartial man of science, according to which he was helping orchestrate Germany’s wartime propaganda campaign in the United States. Well before the end of his life, Münsterberg’s forays into the public arena had earned him the sobriquet “Professor Monster-­work.”119 His work became hugely influential in several fields that emerged from the wartime mobilization of human science, including industrial psychology and accident prevention, and it made a significant contribution to what Corey Ross calls a new approach to social engineering through the “scientific management of political communication.”120 Yet Münsterberg’s own professional image, released into the public realm, had taken on decidedly ambivalent qualities.

Scientific Cinema and Its Doubles The manifest ambivalence in the attitude of scientists like Münsterberg toward popular cinema was fully reciprocated. In an article that appeared in the periodical Die Umschau in April 1918, Kurt Boas, who earlier that year had

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published a paper on cinematography’s forensic uses, pivoted to a rather different topic: the treatment of psychiatry in popular films.121 Citing a handful of recent examples, Boas expressed deep unease at the portrayal of his profession in such films, where psychiatrists were frequently depicted as figures with hidden agendas, as criminal types, or as examples of the clinical syndrome of split personality. Lamenting the fact that this type of “psychiatric trash film” seemed to have become a genre in its own right, Boas called for an enlightenment campaign to counter these stereotypes. The phenomenon of the scientist afflicted with a split consciousness has been an essential modernist trope at least since Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and it was extensively thematized in early German cinema.122 One film Boas had in mind was The Other (1913), an early example of the Autorenfilm in which an eminent prosecutor who rejects the psychiatric theory of split personality suffers an accident, and then turns into an exemplar of that theory, becoming by night the criminal type that he fights by day. In referencing the ambivalent nature of cinematic imagery, Boas underscored the simultaneously productive and uncanny possibilities that had marked the alliance between medicine and cinema ever since Doyen, confronted with footage of himself performing surgery, announced: “I did not know myself.” Released into the public realm, cinematic imagery and the new forms of knowledge associated with it could take on a strange life of its own. As Friedrich Kittler notes, the prosecutor in The Other reacts to this problem by trying to “take out of circulation” terms like hysteria and split personality, which, having been introduced into popular usage by the writings of authors like Hippolyte Taine, had acquired a dangerous power.123 Yet the film shows only too plainly the futility of this gesture. Complaints about the misrepresentation of psychiatrists on-­screen intensified in the war’s aftermath. As earlier noted, the call for psychiatric enlightenment films had been motivated not simply by a desire to awaken understanding and sympathy for veterans suffering from psychological disabilities but also by a desire to counteract criticism of the profession that, by war’s end, had inflicted considerable damage on psychiatry’s public image.124 Popular unease about the figure of the psychiatrist became pronounced in the war’s aftermath. Among the gallery of mad scientists that populated the Weimar screen, doctors of the mind loomed especially large. Most iconically, such portrayals included Caligari and the eponymous protagonist of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, as well as a host of similar figures in lesser-­known films. In the thematization of scientific and medical transgression, Weimar cinema found one of its defining motifs.125

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We noted earlier the possibility that Max Nonne’s wartime film became part of a cultural archive that made the figure of the war neurotic central to how the war was remembered. What should also be noted is the role such films played in similarly helping fix the image of the scientist of the mind, as ambivalent magician-­healer, in the postwar public imagination. Nonne had first observed hypnosis being practiced by Charcot during a short visit to the Salpêtrière in the 1880s, and, given the distinctly Charcot-­like features with which Dr. Caligari is endowed, it is possible to trace a lineage connecting Charcot, via Nonne, to Caligari.126 But this is by no means the terminus of this set of exchanges; nor did the exchanges between science and popular culture flow in simply one direction. If we wish to move beyond the conventional divide between scientific and popular film—​­to make this divide itself a cultural space that can be analyzed historically—​­then we need also to look at the ways in which this flow was reversed. A further link in this network of exchanges concerns the connections between Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and G. W. Pabst’s psychoanalytic film Secrets of a Soul (1926). The hypnotist, psychoanalyst, and criminal mastermind Mabuse is a kindred spirit of Caligari in the sense that both operate at the boundary where psychiatry—​­the science of madness—​ ­becomes “mad science.” As in the case of Caligari, Mabuse’s hypnotic powers tapped into public fascination with this method that had intensified in the war’s aftermath. In the Introduction, we noted the efforts of Curt Thomalla to neutralize the challenge that a film like Lang’s seemed to pose to the public image of men of medicine. His A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul (1923), a popular scientific film devoted to the uses of hypnosis in probing the unconscious, was produced as part of a strategy to re-­appropriate and bring under professional control the public image and methods of the doctor.127 The film showed that the dangers of hypnosis—​­which are central to the plot of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler—​­though real enough, remained negligible in the hands of qualified physicians. In defending the practice of hypnosis, Thomalla’s film also positioned itself within wider debates concerning the nature of popular cinema as a social institution. In scenes that evoked and condemned the forms of mass suggestion practiced by demagogues and conjurers, the film intervened in a public discussion in which the medium’s power over audiences was often construed in medical accounts and censorship decisions as an uncanny form of mass hypnosis. Yet if the figure of Mabuse was symptomatic of the profession’s image problem, it was also productive for the psychoanalytic community. The

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anxiety that it generated within that community produced a response that became a significant milestone in the histories of both psychoanalysis and cinema.128 Under the auspices of its Kulturfilm department, the UFA contracted with the noted director G. W. Pabst to make Secrets of a Soul, with the assistance of two members of the Berlin branch of the psychoanalytic movement, Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham; the latter justified his participation to the skeptical Freud with the argument that failure to do so would leave the door open to “wild analysts” to create their own film projects, thereby bringing further discredit to Freud’s ideas.129 The film that resulted from this collaboration is a complex hybrid: its portrayal of a scientist who goes mad but is restored to himself through the talking cure employs the format of a feature drama, with a murder subplot, to introduce audiences to those ideas. For our purposes, it will suffice to highlight a few key aspects of this film, which has been extensively analyzed. One such aspect concerns its relation to the history and conventions of popular cinema. This relation is evoked most obviously in the form of the generic murder subplot, which functions to strengthen the film’s contact with an audience conditioned to expect such plot devices. But it is also made manifest in the way that it self-­consciously draws on the stylistic repertoire available to filmmakers of this era, oscillating between the sober, quasi-­documentary register of New Objectivity and, in the innovative dream sequences that form the heart of the film, Expressionism. It is also worth noting the presence of a further stylistic element that emerges in a fantasy recalled by the patient while in analysis, in which—​­as if watching a movie—​­he sees his wife in a harem scene that evokes the lurid Schund scenarios that so haunted the imaginations of moral guardians and censors. In presenting its claims for the “science” of psychoanalysis, Pabst’s film thus seems to work its way through layers of film history in a fashion that mirrors its working through of the patient’s life history. What makes this film, by contrast with Lang’s and Thomalla’s, “scientific”? If in those films it is hypnosis that provides access to the unconscious (although both also self-­reflexively link hypnosis with cinema), Secrets of a Soul dispenses with hypnosis and makes cinema itself—​­as both means of representation of and analog for the dream—​­the key technology of the unconscious. It is in its extended dream sequences that this film becomes most self-­ consciously cinematic, mobilizing a range of filmic techniques (stop-­action, superimposition, and montage) to convey the highly layered, associative qualities of the dreamwork. Prompted by the analyst not to yield to his resistance, the patient disables his psychic censor and descends into his unconscious. The

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Figure 7. G. W. Pabst, Secrets of a Soul (1925). The photographer’s studio

sequence finally resolves itself in the recovery of the charged memory that holds the key to the patient’s illness: a childhood scene in which he suffered a significant emotional trauma. Crucially, this scene is set in a photographer’s studio and its recovery reveals the full meaning of a photograph we have seen earlier in the film. In this final scene, however, we do not see the photograph itself, but rather the portrait session that produced it, and in the cinematic re-­creation of this scene, motion becomes inextricably linked to the release of emotion (see Figure 7).130 This intermedial moment both anchors Pabst’s film in a wider discourse of objectivity, in which the photograph served as exemplary form of evidence, and affirms the evidently superior truth value of cinema. To quote Ernst Simmel, “[T]the ‘film’ is made to roll once again; the patient dreams the whole thing one more time, the sensitized subconscious releases the affect, which in turn discharges an adequate emotional expression, and the patient is cured.”131 The making of Secrets of a Soul—​­an enlightenment film that appropriates the conventions of popular cinema to strengthen its rapport with the audience, the better to educate them—​­is illustrative of several larger points central to the argument of this chapter. If, thirty years after their invention, movies still sought respectability, films like Pabst’s demonstrated the medium’s claim to serious moral, scientific, and aesthetic purpose. At the same time, the

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“outsider science” of psychoanalysis here sought to stake its own claim to legitimacy, in part by offering a rebuttal to its ambivalent portrayal in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. As Anne Friedberg has noted, in Secrets of a Soul, the recourse to new and still-­controversial media became closely linked to the challenges surrounding the claims of this would-­be science: “Coincident with the legitimation crusade by cinematic enthusiasts, psychoanalysis also campaigned for the legitimacy of the ‘science’ of the unconscious.”132 As we shall see in subsequent chapters, debates surrounding such claims formed a recurring element within the history not just of psychoanalysis but in a range of other emerging sciences and practices—​­sexology, hypnosis, parapsychology, eugenics, and racial hygiene—​­all of which became part of film history during this period. Using film to advance their professional project, or intervening in debates about popular cinema, human scientists claimed new authority to regulate social affairs but were repeatedly compelled to defend that claim, along with their very status as scientists. In this respect, the moving image proved an invaluable yet ambivalent ally. That the figure of the doctor is so often represented in popular films of this period as afflicted with a divided c­ onsciousness—​ ­as both scientific authority and charlatan or criminal—​­is evidence of this deep ambivalence that runs through the history of the relations between cinema and the human sciences. On the one hand, in these films the doctor scientist appears as the educator of the people, curing, advising, chastising, prohibiting, enlightening, and creating new blueprints for behavior; on the other, he also embodies the possibilities of esoteric, mad, or illicit knowledge.

Cinema, Science, and the Jews The ambivalence that marks the alliance between cinema and human science is closely bound up with another central problematic: that of the history of the “German-­Jewish Symbiosis,” the web of exchanges between Jews and Germans that was so formative of Central European modernity.133 As social outsiders whose professional horizons remained highly circumscribed, German Jews had long found opportunities in fields like the theater and the press. By the 1920s, the Jewish presence within the nascent German film industry had added a new dimension to this cultural symbiosis, as well as to the anxieties it fueled.134 By virtue of the medium’s mass audience this presence became a source of intense alarm on the part of those who feared its social impact and

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its dangers as a vehicle of alien influence. Much of the moral panic that surrounded both the popular and the enlightenment film was laden with anti-­ Semitism. The apparent elective affinity between Jews and the cinematic medium forms part of the story of a crucial example of early Weimar cinema: Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). An updating of medieval legend, this film suggests in a pivotal scene that the Jewish people have a proprietary claim over the medium. In it, the central protagonist Rabbi Löw, who has earlier called up the Golem figure, summons another creation: the cinematic medium itself. For the benefit of the emperor’s court, Rabbi Löw uses his magical arts to conjure a hallucinatory scene of the biblical Exodus story and of Ahasverus, the mythical Wandering, or Eternal, Jew. The rabbi here stands as “master of power over the spectacle” as well as over the occult powers allowing him to call his creations into existence.135 He is an exemplar of a tradition of esoteric science, the precursor (along with Caligari) of a gallery of similar types populating the Weimar screen. At the same time, this metacinematic scene of a film within a film anticipates many similar moments in Weimar film: notably, a key scene in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler in which the hypnotist Mabuse conjures a mass hallucination of a desert scene that evokes the scene in The Golem. The Jewish aspects of the shape shifter Mabuse—​­who in addition to the role of psychoanalyst also assumes the guise of financier, beggar, and revolutionary agitator—​­were not lost on radical nationalist commentators: a reviewer in the Völkische Beobachter in 1925 stridently condemned Mabuse as a version of the “Eternal Jew.”136 During the 1920s, the dark specter of Jewish influence over the film medium became a staple of right-­wing commentary. Writers like Hans Buchner devoted entire chapters to the Jewish Finanzdiktatur that allegedly controlled the international film industry and that poisoned the German Volk with filmic “trash” (Schund) and pornography dressed up in the guise of “sexual enlightenment.” René Fülop-­Miller likewise invoked the dangers of Jewish influence in his analysis of the new medium. Both of these authors drew on elements of the discourse of modern psychology in their analyses: operating within the framework of a popular version of crowd psychology, Buchner frequently invoked the medium’s hypnotic powers over its audience; Fülop-­Miller repeatedly cited the findings of scientific psychology, invoking statistical investigations, experiments, intelligence tests, and the works of Freud, Giese, and Le Bon.137 As is well known, these expressions of nationalist paranoia regarding the medium and Jewish control over it culminated in the Nazis’

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purging of Jews from the industry in early 1933.138 Well beyond this event, however, the regime continued to expend considerable energy on calculating the scale and effects of Jewish “influence” over UFA.139 A typical expression of this obsession with the specter of “Jewish influence” dating from the immediate postwar era can be found in an article titled “The Cinema as Weapon of Jewry” that appeared in 1919 in the right-­wing Völkische Blätter. It described a plot by Jewish organizations to take advantage of Jewish ownership of theaters on behalf of a project to promote “enlightenment” in order to combat anti-­Semitism. The article cited this “Beeinflussung der Massen” as an example of the “public menace of Jewry in the realm of theater and cinema.” A slightly later article titled “An Eastern-­Jewish Propaganda Film” (possibly referring to The Golem) criticized this film in similar terms and lamented the German people’s continued naïveté concerning basic questions of mass psychology: “We leave the soul of the Volk to the cunning Jews.”140 A central element of the stab-­in-­the-­back legend that circulated in postwar Germany concerned German Jews’ alleged collaboration with the enemy’s propaganda campaign, which, as noted earlier, Ludendorff blamed for having transformed the German public into a collection of “hypnotized rabbits.” In film historical terms, 1919 represented not simply the year following the Kaiser’s abdication, Germany’s military defeat, and the birth of the Weimar Republic but also the moment of the suspension of censorship and of the emergence of the sexual enlightenment film. These latter developments were often depicted as symptomatic of the moral and social pathologies unleashed by the former events.141 In the eighteen-­month period prior to the reinstatement of censorship in 1920, a wave of films appeared exploring issues like venereal disease, prostitution, and homosexuality. The most notorious was Richard Oswald and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Different from the Others, a film that coupled a melodramatic narrative to a plea for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Such films evoked deep horror among social conservatives, who criticized them as a form of trash (Schund) dressed up in the guise of scientific enlightenment. Emil Kraepelin, who provided an expert opinion endorsing the ban on Hirschfeld’s film, stressed the need to combat such sources of “mass psychic infection” and their threat to population politics through rigorous censorship and other medical-­psychiatric preventive measures.142 Such views were often laden with anti-­Semitic undertones and warned darkly of the consequences for Germany’s youth of allowing them to be exposed to alien and corrupting influences.143 Social conservatives projected the “mastery over

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the power of the spectacle” associated with cinematic inventions like Rabbi Löw and Mabuse onto Jewish filmmakers, sexologists, and psychoanalysts like Hirschfeld, the Viennese physiologist and endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, or the followers of Freud—​­figures who had turned to film to present the taboo-­ breaking claims of their young, outsider sciences to the public. In right-­wing discourse they were often treated as purveyors of a “Jewish” or “materialist” medicine and psychology.144 The enduring power of such tropes is illustrated in the inclusion of Hirschfeld within the anti-­Semitic tableau included in the notorious Nazi film The Eternal Jew (1940), according to which he had “promoted homosexuality and perversion under the guise of science.”

Weimar Film Between Hypnosis and Enlightenment Yet the boundaries between science and nonscience were not so easily maintained. Moreover, the relations between different film genres remained highly fluid during this era; it was only later that the conventions separating scientific from feature film stabilized.145 The sense of what Detlev Peukert calls Machbarkeitswahn, the “heady sense of the possible” that pervaded this era, produced cross-­fertilizations whose complexities remain to be fully explored.146 To cite just one example, scholars have recently begun to document the surprising mixture of sexological, psychoanalytic, parascientific, eugenic, and even racialized thought that surfaced in the work of Hirschfeld’s as well as some of Freud’s followers.147 Similar hybridization marked the history of filmmaking across the entire interwar period. A particularly striking instance of this can be found in the writings of left-­wing film critic Bela Balazs, whose 1924 study The Visible Human provided a visionary counterpart to Stapel’s nationalist screed against the homo cinematicus. In it Balazs celebrated the cinema’s power to create a new anthropological type defined by what he called the normative psychology of the white race and, going further, the cinema’s role as a “machine” that would create through “selective breeding” a “uniform type of the white race.”148 This image of a Golem-­like creation echoed wider discourses of the “New Man” that marked much of the interwar era. With its eugenic resonances, Balazs’s text partially anticipates Curt Thomalla’s film Curse of Heredity (1927), which envisioned a campaign of selective breeding predicated on compulsory sterilization of criminals and the incurably ill. Among those who staked out a position within the new terrain

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defined by the alliance between film and human science, few proved more inventive than Thomalla. As noted earlier, the sheer breadth of topics he addressed in his films is remarkable, ranging from tuberculosis and hypnosis to industrial accidents, sexual rejuvenation, and compulsory sterilization. Thomalla embodied the heady sense of crisis and possibility, the Machbarkeitswahn of the interwar period, which engendered a willingness to experiment with bold projects of social and human engineering. And though in classic “reactionary modernist” fashion he eventually cast his lot with the racist bio-­politics of the Nazis, early in his career Thomalla proved highly ecumenical in the alliances he formed.149 One of these was with Magnus Hirschfeld’s collaborator Arthur Kronfeld, who prior to fleeing Germany in 1933 gained prominence as an expert in psychiatry, sexology, and parascience (as noted earlier, this alliance resulted in the film A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul). Thomalla also played a key role in bringing to the screen The Steinach Film (1923), which presented the Viennese physiologist Eugen Steinach’s controversial views on sexual rejuvenation to the public.150 In the winter of 1923 Thomalla and Kronfeld joined forces to lead a screening and discussion of Hirschfeld’s Different from the Others and The Steinach Film at a meeting of the Berlin chapter of the Society for Sexual Science. The meeting featured a lively discussion about the relative scientific merits of the two films, with the participants veering between expressions of faith in the public’s discrimination, on the one hand, and concerns about the dangers of “psychic contagion” (in relation to their frank treatment of sexual themes), on the other. As head of UFA’s Medical Film Archive, Thomalla felt compelled to remind the more skeptical members of his audience of the impossible position in which the so-­called cultural film was continually placed by its opponents: on the one hand, it was charged with the responsibility of combating the popular “trash film” by offering the public scientific and instructional films; on the other, its efforts to do so were invariably met with fierce criticism. “We must,” he pleaded in conclusion, “grant the most modern, effective, and vivid means of publicity, film, the same rights as the written word.”151 This meant, among other things, making concessions to the medium’s popular character. To an unusual degree, Thomalla experimented with borrowing elements of the popular cinema to advance his message. He has been credited with forging a synthesis of scientific and dramatic elements that proved influential well into the Nazi era.152 Over the course of the 1920s, he moved into increasingly controversial terrain, collaborating on films that

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explored taboo subjects like eugenic sterilization. These films—​­Dark Forces (1924), False Shame (1925), and The Curse of Heredity (1927)—​­are all notable for adopting the “indirect” approach of narrative cinema at the expense of the direct, didactic approach: using the conventions of the feature drama (melodrama, sensationalism, and crime-­film scenarios) to naturalize novel forms of scientific knowledge. In them, the “marriage between doctor and film” that he advocated was put in the service of ambitious modes of social engineering. Casting the doctor in the role of “educator of the people,” charismatic medical adviser, and guardian of the people’s health, these films illustrate the process whereby new sciences and practices endeavor to legitimate themselves through interventions in the public realm. The cinematic monstrosities of the Nazi era, during which Thomalla occupied a key position within Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, were thus in many respects anticipated by the history of scientific and medical film during the Weimar era. Yet despite the evident continuities that exist between these two eras, we cannot simply read the origins of Nazi cinema back into the films of the 1920s. The heterogeneous character of Weimar cinema needs to be considered on its own terms.153 Hybridizing different genres, representational practices, and strategies of public address, Thomalla helped engender a new kind of cinema. Granting film its “rights” meant also taking seriously the need for an understanding of correct (or, to use Balazs’s terminology, “normative”) viewing practices. The nexus between science, media, and social policy that emerged during this era also encompassed the newly constituted field of study associated with audience response. In a postwar context marked by the breakdown of established institutions and of traditional social controls, as Kraepelin argued, new regulatory and preventive measures, among them that of censorship, became crucial. Republican modes of governance required new techniques of administration as well as new knowledge of the subjects to whom those techniques were addressed. For, as one critic argued, it was not always the film itself that was to blame when unintended effects or readings arose; often these were determined by the basic psychological and physiological constitution of the given audience member.154 Such considerations formed an essential part of the human sciences’ engagement with popular cinema, and it is to this topic that we turn in the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Film Reform, Mental Hygiene, and the Campaign Against “Trash,” 1912–­3 4

Writing in the late fall of 1916 in the pages of the conservative newspaper Die Kreuzzeitung, a certain Pastor Schneider of Elberfeld struck an apocalyptic note. What agitated the pastor was not the war against the Entente—​­though that clearly enough formed the backdrop to his remarks—​­but rather another war fought against an enemy closer to home. In terms calculated to play on many of his readership’s deepest anxieties, he identified this internal enemy as the Kino-­Seuche (“film-­epidemic”) and went on to describe it as a form of “spiritual bacillus,” whose spread through Germany’s cities threatened “systematically to poison the Volksseele [national soul].” The writer proceeded to cite the views of Dr. Adolf Sellmann, a figure eminent on the national level as a particularly fierce opponent of popular film. Cinema, lamented Sellmann, had become “the spiritual nourishment for our Volk in war-­year 1916”: “Everything in film is . . . ​without soul, without thought, so incoherent and crass. I am amazed that the cinema has not sent more people to the insane asylum. It certainly sends many to prison. It will ruin our youth. Their sexual urges will be stimulated; our young girls will be robbed of their feelings of shame. If a savior does not emerge, our Volk will be infected and corrupted.” Pastor Schneider concluded his screed by calling into question the claims of the Interior Minister of North-­Rhine Westphalia that the censor was doing everything in its power to combat this problem.1 Schneider’s article linked Kino with a cluster of themes—​­crime, madness, and the sexual and moral corruption of German youth—​­that had long been

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central to reformers’ concerns regarding the new mass medium. From the turn of the century onward, members of Germany’s so-­called film-­reform movement engaged in a decades-­long pitched battle with the film industry, with its audience, and with public officials, which at times—​­such as during the war years—​­reached a fevered level. From many sides during these years came condemnations of so-­called Schund (“trash”) along with heated criticism of existing regulatory bodies. Calls to impose stricter censorship rhetorically coupled the military campaign with a campaign to cleanse Germany of various toxins that had infiltrated the nation and weakened it from within. Accordingly, the war years saw passage of numerous measures to protect youth especially against such dangers, including tobacco, alcohol, and literary and cinematic Schund.2 Yet reformers continually pressed for further and more comprehensive regulation, repeatedly demanding that public authorities intensify their efforts to counteract the threat “trash” posed to the moral and psychological well-­being of Germany and its youth. A Reichstag representative from the city of Cologne urged this point in an interpellation to the government: “Is the Reich Chancellor prepared to issue to all the regional military commanders general guidelines covering the entire German Reich, which will properly protect youth against the heightened dangers of wartime, particularly with regard to the battle against Schund-­literature and the film-­menace (Kinounwesens)?”3 As the tone of this interpellation hints, the wartime campaign against trash was conducted in a climate of both heightened expectation and anxiety. Reformers greeted war as a chance to inflict a decisive blow in what they saw as a battle for the soul of German youth: a moment to impose strict forms of censorship paralleling police measures in other spheres of wartime society, a form of “Schund-­diktatur” patterned after the military dictatorship that ruled Germany from 1916 onward.4 Yet despite considerable support for such an approach, these expectations were only partly met, and those measures that did pass proved, in the event, to be short lived. At the war’s end, the Kaiser­ reich’s collapse and the revolutionary upheavals that followed were accompanied by a major reversal: the abolition of censorship and a renewed flood of Schund on a vast scale. Although a new censorship law was passed in 1920 by the republican government in response to reformers’ pleas, it soon came to be seen as inadequate, thereby continuing a pattern that marked the entire history of the film-­reform movement. Reformers were able to claim several major ­victories—​­the law of 1920, which singled film out as the only medium subject to preemptive censorship; a new law of 1926 explicitly targeting

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Schund; and, arguably, the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933—​­but in the end these victories did little to appease their concerns. Writing in 1933, one author lamented that several decades of Kinoreform seemed to have had little impact.5 Even the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, though at first raising hopes that he might be the savior envisioned by Sellmann, proved a bitter disappointment. Despite their own noisy attacks against Schund, including their 1933 book burnings, the Nazis were no more successful than previous regimes in rooting out this scourge; indeed, in certain respects their cultural values and policies served only to worsen the problem. Although historians have acknowledged the significance of the Kinoreformbewegung, a consensus about its varied and often contradictory motives, strategies, and impact has remained elusive. Some scholars have emphasized reformers’ successes, crediting them with helping to shape the cultural-­ political configurations that brought the Nazis to power; this view, however, overlooks the very real divisions between party and reformers.6 Others have focused more on the movement’s apparent failures. The continuing proliferation of Kinoschund across this entire period has contributed to the view that the movement was fighting a losing, indeed hopeless battle (a view shared by most reformers themselves).7 The hyperbolic excess of their discourse has encouraged many to write them off as hopelessly rearguard. But this ignores both the tremendous energies mobilized by the problem of trash and the extent to which reformers were able to define the contours of a broad regulatory space within German society.8 It also ignores the degree to which the very excesses of their discourse fueled an escalating spiral that made reformers, in a sense, victims of their own success. The inflationary value of trash turned it into a moving target that persistently eluded the grasp of regulatory bodies. Last, it ignores significant changes in the language and tactics of the reformers. In what follows, I focus on one particular voice in the so-­called film debate—​­that of the medical and scientific reformers—​­and the crucial role they played in recasting the discourse about popular film. They accomplished this by tying the problem of Schund to a set of broad concerns articulated around the themes of national health, hygiene, and youth welfare. If the film-­ reform movement has often been written into the narrative of German history as part of the nation’s Sonderweg—​­its excessive reverence for Kultur, on the one hand, and its visceral fear of modernity, on the other—​­the immoderate rhetoric of much anti-­Schund discourse lends support to this view. Yet it may make more sense to stress the movement’s links to broader currents of reform activism and pragmatic change.9 Looked at in this light, it becomes clear that

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the movement to reform Kino had close ties to similarly reformist initiatives that flourished in Germany from the end of the nineteenth century onward.10 Common to these initiatives was a desire to respond to the challenges of the modernizing process by fashioning new social norms and rules for living. A key role in this was played by scientists and physicians, many of whom had embraced the moving image as a powerful new tool of observation, research, and teaching, and for this very reason also saw it as a medium requiring special controls. Crediting film with a remarkable capacity to conjure a new social type, homo cinematicus, these specialists felt called upon to come to grips with this phenomenon: to analyze and regulate the medium’s effects on its public and thus to direct it toward socially productive uses. Vesting great hopes in film’s potential as a vehicle of social reform, they recognized that harnessing this potential meant reforming the medium itself. Their search for a new regulatory paradigm was constructed around newly ascendant notions of national health and welfare. While concerns about morality and purity remained central to this paradigm, they were recast in a hygienic idiom that became constitutive for the discourse of Kinoreform. To consider once again the citation from Die Kreuzzeitung: while the perspective voiced in this article is that of a deeply conservative Protestant worldview, what is striking is the degree to which this voice has—​­in characterizing film as a form of “spiritual bacillus”—​­adopted this language of national hygiene. Eminent reformer Adolf Sellmann likewise invoked the notion of a psychological epidemic in connection with popular Kino, affirming the extent to which this had become a leitmotif of the discourse about the medium and its regulation. As the psychiatrist Robert Gaupp, another key figure in the movement, put it in 1912: “We have laws in place to deal with epidemics; why then not for this epidemic?”11 The story of the film reformers’ early twentieth-­century encounter with trash has deeper reverberations in German history. It may be seen, on the one hand, as part of a longer history of mentalités concerning the dangers of pornography and kitsch and the need for state censorship and, on the other, as part of the history of bourgeois identity formation since the Enlightenment.12 But these long-­term developments collided with new realities at the dawn of the twentieth century: in particular, the resurgence of Social Democracy following repeal of the ban against the party, and the advent of the modern mass media. Whereas early reformers confronted these developments by adopting a language of moral, religious, and aesthetic crisis, and accordingly fashioned their calls for reform in terms of the defense of morality and taste, physicians

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reframed the debate around an alternative paradigm of improvement, crafting a powerful language linking film, its audience, and the health of the social body. Their success in medicalizing the problem of the trash film and its effects is borne out not simply in the realm of discourse but in that of social policy: the passage in 1920 of the Reich Motion Picture Law, which centralized and rationalized censorship in Germany, reflected the influence of scientific experts in shifting the focus of censorship away from content to effects, defined primarily in psychological terms. Psychiatrists and specialists from allied disciplines became key consultants to the censor boards, and censorship became closely allied with the mental hygiene movement.13 It bears emphasizing that this was by no means a natural development: at the dawn of the cinematic age, pedagogues and clergy had claimed this as their proper domain, but by the 1920s doctors had asserted a defining role in the regulation of the new medium. A list of physicians who participated in censor proceedings includes some of the most venerable names in German psychiatry, among them Emil Kraepelin, Karl Bonhoeffer, and Julius Wagner-­Jauregg.14 But efforts to move beyond what was seen as the old, repressive “police-­ style” censorship were not without their own contradictions and unanticipated effects. Physicians were only partially successful at defining the problems of trash and of audience reception in scientific terms. Indeed, their larger project complicated this endeavor by engendering controversial new kinds of films—​­above all, on topics of sexual hygiene—​­that contributed to the further expansion of the elastic category of Schund. Efforts to stabilize trash as an object of hygienic discourse, and thus of social policy, were frustrated in part by the dynamics of that very discourse. Moreover, once released into the public realm this discourse took on unintended forms, exposing it to the mockery of the popular cinema, which transformed the reformer into the stock figure of a hypocrite fighting off secret desires. Schund, in short, refused to remain a stationary target.

The Long Campaign Against Trash Early twentieth-­century commentators responding to the transformation of film into a medium of mass popular entertainment were almost universally dismayed by this development. They saw it as a direct challenge to long-­held standards of taste, morality, and traditional authority. Even more sympathetically inclined observers could not help reacting in tones that mingled

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fascination with barely veiled disgust. In the following passage, Alfred Döblin describes a typical Berlin film audience of 1913: There, in the pitch-­dark, low room, a square screen as tall as a man shimmers over a giant audience, over a mass that this white eye spellbinds with its vacant stare. In corners, couples embrace and then, enraptured by what they see, stop pawing at each other’s bodies. Consumptive children breathe shallowly and shake quietly in their evening fever; the eyes of foul-­smelling workers nearly pop out of their sockets; the women with musty clothes, the painted street whores lean forward oblivious to the fact that their headscarves have loosened and are sliding down their necks. One sees bread and circuses . . . ​criminal cases with a dozen bodies and grim hunts for perpetrators cascade over one another; then sentimental tales piled high: the blind, dying beggar and the dog that lies on his grave. . . .15 In this passage, the psychiatrist and celebrated author captured many of the themes that preoccupied early twentieth-­century reformers responding to the cinema and the new social, moral, and psychological space it had created in German society: a space of vulgar emotions, disease, sex, and crime. With his image of the screen as a “white eye” casting a spell over the audience, Döblin also captures a key motif of early medical commentary on film spectatorship, namely that of hypnosis (see Chapter 3). German commentators writing about motion picture spectatorship and its dangers tended to stress some combination of the following factors: • The physical experience of the cinema itself: the darkened space, which screened out impressions of the outer world; the flickering images on the screen; poor air circulation and generally unhygienic conditions; the danger of fire or mass panics. • The gathering of large numbers of people together in the cinema, their transformation into a collectivity usually understood to be governed by the laws of crowd psychology. Surveys indicated that audiences were dominated by women and proletarian youth; psychologically speaking, these audiences represented the “other” of middle-­class male consciousness. • The tremendous “suggestive” power of the film image; the almost hypnoid narrowing of the field of vision and consciousness to the images on

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screen; the dangerously immersive character of the film-­going experience. • The unhealthy mixture of sentimentality, sexuality, violence, and sensationalism typical of popular films. Stressing problems of impulse control and suggestibility, such accounts defined film and the liminal social space it occupied as a threshold to a psychically liminal state that elites perceived as a threat to established social norms.16 Well before the war, such concerns coalesced in the creation of a movement to reform popular film, an important strain of the broader reform activism that swept early twentieth-­century Germany. In the view of the church officials, educators, physicians, and others who made up this movement, popular film represented one of those scourges that, like alcohol and venereal disease, threatened the health of the social body. Rapid expansion of the film industry elicited from reformers demands for enhanced regulatory powers on the part of the state. The explosive growth of an audience for popular film, coupled with the proliferation of films of questionable subject matter, brought down charges on filmmakers that they were destroying the moral character and health of Germany’s future generations. If popular film was generally regarded with distaste, then this was all the more true in the case of those genres that fell into the category of “trash,” sometimes more broadly known as Schmutz und Schund (filth and trash). The discourse about trash served as a flashpoint for broader concerns about mass culture and the public sphere, the fate of German youth, and moral and national decline. Given its place in these different narratives, it is worth trying to unpack the significance attached to this term by reformers. What was Schund? Though it represented a central analytic category of German elites’ responses to mass culture, it was a highly elastic construct. Many agreed that they knew it when they saw it, yet a stable definition remained elusive. When middle-­class reformers invoked the term, they usually referred to films containing what they deemed to be morally objectionable subject matter: narratives depicting broken marriages and adulterous relations, the glorification of crime, or sensational accidents or disasters. Such films “speculated on the audience’s basest instincts” by trafficking in themes lacking redeeming social value. Trash was generally defined in terms of what it was not: in place of art, education, morality, religion, culture, taste, and contemplation, it offered sensation, brutalization, and coarseness; in sum, it represented the negation of bourgeois values. Implicit in such condemnation

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was the belief that those who were its chief victims remained oblivious to its perils. According to one Düsseldorf school inspector, “The broad mass of people is not yet ready to recognize and judge the dangers of the criminal and sexual trash-­film”; nor, he added, was it amenable to “enlightenment and education” concerning these dangers. The “poison of the trash-­film” must be prevented from reaching the public; this “national enemy” (Volksfeind) must be fought and replaced either with harmlessly entertaining or with educational films.17 This much at least was agreed on by most participants in the film debate. But how was this goal to be achieved? Film reformers did not all speak with one voice; indeed, the crowd working the terrain of Schund was a highly heterogeneous one. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between two major camps, both in general agreement about what was at stake but differing on means and ends. Many conservatives remained irreconcilable to popular film and wanted total bans on any films not explicitly educational. Others were of two minds about the medium, stressing its potential for both good and ill. As some commentators recognized, blanket condemnation had its limits. Not all depictions of sexuality were ipso facto pornographic; moreover, throwing the term Schund around indiscriminately risked disqualifying many representational practices that had gained at least partial legitimacy in early twentieth-­ century Germany.18 To social hygienists or sex reformers, for instance, proper treatment of the perils of “white slavery” could enlighten suitable audiences about the problem of prostitution. The difficulty in drawing the line between “trash” and “enlightenment” brought home to sober-­minded observers the need for a reliable, objective definition of Schund and the dangers it posed to German society. These issues were debated at a series of meetings convened by the Interior Ministry in late 1911 to agree on the language of a new bill for combating the problem of trash.19 The difficulty of defining Schund dominated the discussion. Mindful of previous instances of police overreach and the sharp reactions this had elicited in the press, the participants sought to ensure maximum flexibility to censors while avoiding any infringement on freedom of press, art, and science. The commentary accompanying the proposed bill began with a brief history of the Schund phenomenon, an “old problem” that had reemerged in a more virulent form with the first appearance of Nick Carter, Wild West, and Buffalo Bill pulp serials in Germany around 1905.20 Attributing to such narratives nearly unlimited power over young minds, it spelled out several areas of concern: crime (see Chapter 3); sex (see Chapter 4); and tales of

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superstition, magic, or esoteric knowledge (see Chapter 5). The effects of the mass dissemination of such serials could be measured in the increased number of criminal proceedings and adolescent suicides. Yet even while citing such evidence, the bill’s authors conceded that statistical data for Schund’s impact on juvenile crime remained weak. Another issue concerned that of overreach: given that medical literature as well as literary texts and works of art contained material unsuitable for certain audiences and that questions of morality and taste were contested, the boundaries between aesthetic and scientific representations and those images likely to endanger morals remained fluid.21 Confronted with these problems of definition, the decision was made to adopt two strategies. The first was to focus explicitly on the “protection of youth”: framing the problem around the welfare of adolescents, it was argued, would facilitate the bill’s passage by minimizing the appearance of a new form of censorship. The second was to cloak the bill in the guise of an amendment to existing trade law and industrial codes regulating public order and decency. Banning shop-­window or kiosk displays of trashy material, as well as promotional posters for films appearing on advertising columns, would cleanse the public realm of images and texts that would otherwise exercise a “tempting or stimulating” effect on youth. For the time being, more ambitious proposals were rejected as impractical or were shelved.22

The Medical Discourse on Trash By acknowledging that morality and taste were not suitable criteria on which to base censorship practice, the language of the bill pointed to the need for alternative criteria. In what follows, I stress the medical and psychiatric thematization of Schund and efforts to provide a basis for these criteria. The claim that film censorship was principally a matter to be addressed by physicians and psychologists first emerged around 1912. This development was driven by a combination of factors: the acknowledged defects of existing approaches; officials’ desire for more consistent, uniform, and reliable standards of evaluation; and, not least, the professional interests of the newly emerging field of scientific psychology. By 1912 the Reich Health Office had begun collecting files on film-­related matters; public officials began to follow debates in specialist literature; and experts in several fields were routinely submitting materials to this office. Into a debate often conducted in hysterical tones of moral

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outrage, they sought to introduce a more sober, objective set of standards—​­to shift the debate from the problem of defining Schund (in terms of content, taste, or morality) to the question of its “effects”—​­that is, to criteria defined in medical-­scientific terms. This effort to claim the new medium of film, its reception, and its regulation as an object of scientific expertise reflected the professional interests of several newly emerging disciplines that existed at the intersection of law, medicine, and the human sciences. This in turn reflected the wider discovery of film as a part of the social question, and the use of surveys, questionnaires, and other means to bring it within the scope of social scientific analysis.23 The views of Robert Gaupp, professor of psychiatry in Tübingen, illustrate this tendency. In a series of talks and publications that appeared in 1912, Gaupp outlined what could be called a declensionist version of the history of motion pictures.24 A medium that owed its origins to the scientific researches of Etienne-­Jules Marey had, according to Gaupp, been corrupted by its movement out of the “hush” of the laboratory into the hectic “market of public life” and of “profit-­oriented capitalism.”25 The rise of popular film reflected the transformation of everyday life in the modern era: “a time of nervous haste and business, in which a multitude of stimuli bombard the young soul from all sides.”26 While paying due attention to the insalubrious conditions of the early cinematograph so often stressed by reformers, Gaupp took pains to maintain an air of impartiality by noting improvements in this regard. It was less the physical experience of going to the cinema (though he did not entirely discount this) than it was what he called the “psychological dimension” of the experience that made it a site of particular danger: “This milieu exercises a deep suggestive effect: the dark room, the monotonous noises, the rush of images, paralyze the critical faculties; in this way the drama’s content becomes fatefully suggestive for the will-­less psyche of the simple person.”27 The profound psychological effects associated with going to films, he argued, demanded the scrutiny of qualified experts: “It falls to me, the doctor and the psychologist, to perform the task of explaining . . . ​how and to what extent the cinema has become a danger to the physical and mental health of our people, and above all our youth.”28 And in a similar vein: “We nerve doctors know how fateful, even decisive for the nervous health of young people a strong, affect-­laden experience may be. There can be no doubt that the mental constitution of an imaginative child, who in the darkness of the Kino experiences all the shocks of the drama with a feverish pulse, is highly susceptible to a deep and enduring suggestive effect.”29 Among the effects he singled out were

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headaches, nervous anxiety, and overexertion of attention. Again invoking his expertise in psychology, Gaupp wrote that the process of integrating new stimuli into consciousness and memory required a certain passage of time, precisely what film, with its constant flood of onrushing images, did not allow. The barrage of visual impressions associated with Kino thus constituted a paradigmatic form of the “bad stimulus” (böse Reiz) that had long been central to hygienic discourse.30 Gaupp’s conclusion was categorical: “Away with the Schundfilm!” Trash would remain a scourge as long as the film industry stayed in private hands concerned only with profit and with “speculating” on the audience’s lowest instincts. Only a Reichs-­censor could eliminate the problem by attacking it at its roots, and thus, not incidentally, redeeming film’s original cultural mission: “From the standpoint of public hygiene there is no other solution except to urge that the state eliminate a poison that undermines the health of our youth. We already have many laws for combating epidemics, why not also a state law to combat an epidemic that afflicts our people, and above all our youth, through its formidable powers of circulation?”31 Such views underscore the degree to which Gaupp’s account of the dangers of Schund was grounded in a claim to scientific authority. Earlier psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt had argued that, to gain status as empirical science, their field should resist entanglement in the public arena, but by the turn of the century specialists like Gaupp increasingly sought to expand their professional opportunities by intervening in debates about how to define and resolve social problems.32 Claims to psychiatric expertise became a recurring refrain of the profession’s move into new areas of social discourse and policy. Film censorship was one such area. Regulatory discourse took shape as a branch of the field of mental health, as Gaupp and other specialists argued, in effect, for a form of hygiene of the cinematic public sphere, linking this with the welfare and vitality of the nation and its future generations. A crucial aspect of this claim to expanded authority concerned the fate of urban youth, itself a newly identified object of medical and social-­scientific interest. As noted earlier, discussions about censorship revolved around a specific conception of the audience believed to be the Schundfilm’s primary addressee. This audience was seen as dominated by working-­class adolescents, a group discovered by social reformers around 1900 and constructed from the outset as an “at risk” population.33 By 1910, statistics suggested that many adolescents spent a disturbingly high percentage of their time in the cinematographs that began appearing in German cities after 1905.34 There they

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were exposed to the sensationalist fare of an industry rapidly expanding to meet the demands of its audience. Many reformers responded by demanding the closing of theaters or bans on youth attendance.35 Others, by contrast, coupled their demands for tighter regulation of Kino with calls for films with a message of moral uplift or educational content. Cinema, writes Ann Friedberg, thus became both “the site of and the vehicle for fantasies of social reform.”36 These differences were mirrored in heated debates within the field of child-­welfare reform. While traditionalists sought to defend the prerogatives of church and family, progressives advocated for greater medical and state intervention. The turn-­of-­the-­century emergence of the “youth question” set off what Edward Ross Dickinson describes as a virtual “war of psychiatrists against the pedagogues.”37 At stake was the question of how to deal with delinquents or at-­risk youths. In the writings of Gaupp and other medical reformers, we encounter the first references to the juvenile psychopath, a clinical type who would figure prominently in the anti-­Schund campaign. The category of psychopathy emerged at the turn of the century as part of an effort to reorganize and streamline psychiatric diagnosis and practice. It served as a catchall term, linking abnormality, sexual deviance, and criminality. As defined by Helenefriedericke Stelzner, psychopathic constitution was a classification sharply distinct from the normal, on the one hand, and the mentally ill, on the other.38 A student of Theodor Ziehen’s at Berlin’s Charité psychiatric clinic, Stelzner served as a school doctor and an expert witness for Berlin’s juvenile delinquent court. Her work brought her into contact with many at-­ risk individuals, whom she characterized as inhabitants of the boundary area between mental health and illness. She evaluated them in terms of their future dangerousness and their propensity for delinquency, and coupled these evaluations with arguments for lowering the threshold of medical and state intervention. The psychiatric discourse on Schund took shape against the backdrop of these developments in adolescent welfare. The figure of the juvenile psychopath haunted the imaginations of medical specialists, who wove elaborate variations around the theme of trash’s danger for youth. If popular culture in general posed risks for unformed and suggestible minds, this was all the more true of film genres trafficking in themes of gangsterism and sex, precisely those held to be most beloved by youth burdened by the stigma of psychopathic constitution. Gaupp repeatedly stressed film’s highly “suggestive” properties and its power to arouse or incite youthful audiences: “Juvenile courts,”

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he wrote, “document Kino’s power as corrupter of youth.”39 These courts unfolded an endless tale of suicide, sexual error, and crime carried out under the spell of cinematic images and narratives that glamorized the urban underworld. Such content, he warned, was likely to produce “sexual perversions” among psychopaths. Well into the interwar era, this clinical picture formed a key element of the anti-­trash campaign, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of wider political rhetoric. Invoking the specter of the juvenile psychopath helped to justify calls for intervention and regulation against the residual concerns of both conservatives and liberals. Where clergy and pedagogues sought to maintain their traditional claims over morality and identity formation, physicians introduced a new conception, at once more modern and more expansive, of the risks (both environmental and constitutional) to which the juvenile audience was exposed. These competing bids for jurisdiction, according to Annette Kuhn, formed part of a larger conflict over claims to “epistemic ascendancy.”40 The views of figures like Gaupp helped provide the scientific underpinnings for a campaign of preventive intervention. Yet while these views aligned with modernizing tendencies in certain respects, in others they remained deeply conservative. Stelzner, for instance, echoed Gaupp’s warnings concerning the inciting effects of cinematic imagery, while also arguing that early exposure to any sexual content, even for educational purposes, led adolescents astray. Condemning the work of sexologists like Freud and Moll, she argued that “naïve” reformist initiatives invariably backfired: the sexual enlightenment movement, with its ostensible purpose of promoting self-­control, only encouraged fantasy, masturbation, and worse. These views would be formative for postwar developments, when, as we shall see, cinema became harnessed to campaigns for sexual enlightenment and hygiene in ways that significantly complicated the debates surrounding film reform.41 If dangers existed even in the case of well-­intentioned reformist efforts, such concerns were only magnified in the case of explicitly trashy material. Stelzner’s patients’ appetite for detective stories as well as for pornography and erotic tales had seemingly no limit. Psychopathic youth, she observed, were deeply agitated by the cinema, and easily provoked into trying to imitate what they saw on screen.42 Such adolescents needed protection against themselves before society found it necessary to take steps to protect itself by confining them. The broadly preventive aims of Stelzner, Gaupp, and others fueled calls for the centralization of film censorship throughout Germany. It would require

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the destructive effects of war to clear away resistance to such proposals, but in the meantime they found immediate resonance in the rulings of the Berlin police censor. In the case of the 1911 film A Glimpse into the Future, which included a Wellsian war of the future with a scenario of an airship bombing a large city before being shot out of the sky, the censor banned the film to those under fourteen, ruling that such scenes would be “likely to cause extreme mental agitation and serious nervous disorders” among psychologically abnormal children. In response to an appeal filed by the film distributor, the Charité’s Theodor Ziehen submitted an opinion supporting the prohibition, stating categorically that the aggressive scenes would have harmful effects on the fantasy life of psychopathic children.43 Such rulings were frequently echoed during the Weimar era, when the youthful representative of the genus homo cinematicus became a stock figure within the gallery of clinical types that psychiatrists like Gaupp held responsible for revolution and other social pathologies.44

Albert Hellwig and the Criminal Schundfilm If sex represented one pole of reformers’ discourse about Schund and its dangers, the other was crime. Commentators circled obsessively around the supposed nexus between trash and youth criminality. No figure pursued this theme more tirelessly than Albert Hellwig, a lawyer and criminologist whose career spanned the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods and who devoted his efforts to establishing a solid foundation for a belief that, as he himself recognized, remained more an article of faith than an established fact. Operating at the juncture of jurisprudence, medicine, and criminal psychology, and relying on a combination of empirical data, medical doctrine, and speculation, Hellwig was an advocate of strict regulation who scoured court cases, psychiatric files, and literature on forensic psychology to bolster his case against trash and its threat to future generations. He believed that film operated suggestively on all levels of the child’s fantasy life, posing a profound danger to the child’s mental and nervous constitution and moral development. Unlike many reformers who drew no distinction between literary and filmic Schund, Hellwig argued that film’s distinctive formal properties, particularly its immersive, hypnotic qualities, greatly heightened the dangers of trashy content for young audiences. Yet while he took for granted the fact that filmic representations of vice

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incited audiences to misdeeds, Hellwig also recognized that the empirical basis for this causal connection remained weak: “I regret nothing more,” he lamented, “than that it remains so extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to obtain exact proofs of the bad effects of the criminal Schundfilm.” Seemingly in direct contradiction to such statements, however, Hellwig asserted that there could be no doubt that crime films had a “decided effect on juvenile criminality.” “Although,” he concluded, “it is not possible to demonstrate this link with any certainty in even a single specific case, the correctness of this view can undoubtedly be deduced from general psychological principles.”45 Posed in this way, the problem Hellwig sought to resolve was a scientific, and specifically a psychological, one. Two years after writing these lines, Hellwig returned to the issue in a lengthy article, having in the meantime collected a mass of data in the form of surveys he sent to one hundred district courts across Germany. Here Hellwig made clear his determination to put the question on a solid empirical footing, aligning his efforts with the newly emergent fields of criminal and forensic psychology and with new interest in the factors influencing crime statistics, in short with a whole series of broader investigations into the causes of crime.46 Stressing the need for exact observation, he wrote: “In these investigations it is not a question of an experiment that can be performed in the laboratory, but rather of research that, depending on the care taken by the observer, can lead to more or less probable results but can never be established with mathematical certainty.”47 With regard to the question he wished to pose—​­namely, that of the relation between the Schundfilm and crime—​­he argued that most evidence hitherto assembled remained purely anecdotal, the bulk of it consisting of newspaper articles (“not always reliable sources,” as Hellwig put it).48 The dangers in assuming what he called a “naïve understanding” of the nexus between film and audience behavior were manifold: it undermined reformers’ and censors’ credibility and exposed them to ridicule; moreover, in its popular or vulgar form it handed youthful perpetrators a ready-­made pretext. Indeed, he claimed that many such youths had already learned to exploit this pretext: in the same way that criminals now commonly invoked the insanity defense, delinquents could now claim the influence of the cinema as a mitigating factor in their misconduct.49 What did Hellwig’s own investigations find? The thirty responses he received to his survey contained little more than a string of unproven assertions from judges and public prosecutors, who continually fell back on the claim that, based on their own experience, such a connection was simply

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self-­evident. As Hellwig was forced to concede, responses like these tended to raise as many questions as they answered. Was a given youth’s behavior directly influenced by visits to the Kino, or did juvenile delinquents like him simply visit Kino more often? Faced with such enigmas, Hellwig turned to sources in the expert literature to help support the scientific validity of his conclusions.50 In an article that appeared in 1914, Hellwig discussed at length a handful of case histories from the annals of adolescent psychiatry and criminology.51 One in particular, the case of the so-­called Bobecker Knabenmord (boy-­ murder), would become paradigmatic in the subsequent literature. It involved a young menial worker who had brutally murdered the infant son of his employer under inexplicable circumstances. Police investigation into the crime revealed that the perpetrator was a longtime habitué (“addict”) of the local Kino and had seen two films on the evening immediately preceding the murder. Trial proceedings included a courtroom screening of the films in order to observe their effect on the defendant and determine whether the films could influence him in the way prosecutors alleged.52 As Hellwig realized, accepting the prosecution’s conclusions required a model of the psychological mechanism involved in the causal chain linking filmic narrative with audience response. This, he argued, lay in the powerful phenomenon of suggestion, which clinical investigation had shown to be capable of producing hallucinations and other such dangerous effects. In contrast to the views of Gaupp, who stressed the concept of “shock” in explaining the effects of crime drama on the viewer, Hellwig found it more plausible to assume a model of “gradual influence.” At the same time, Hellwig shared Gaupp’s conclusion that the risks involved presupposed another factor: the presence of hereditary predisposition. The defendant in the Bobecker case, he wrote, was clearly mentally defective, in all likelihood a psychopath. Most trash films, however worthless, posed little risk for a “normal person with healthy nerves.”53 Yet, although he insisted on the need to strengthen and centralize film censorship throughout Germany, Hellwig also cautioned against going too far: a form of censorship explicitly intended to protect those with “weak nerves,” he recognized, would find no legal support.54 Hellwig’s reliance on psychiatric patterns of explanation in his attacks on Schund illustrates an emerging paradigm that found repeated echo in subsequent debates about the regulation of popular film. As we shall see, this recasting of the discourse about film in a scientific idiom eventually became codified in the regulatory measures adopted by postwar authorities. The

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significance of Hellwig’s contribution lay in his transformation of the “causal nexus” between film and crime into a construct that was granted epistemic validity. In a manner that conforms to Ian Hacking’s observations concerning the role of scientific claims makers in creating social facts, sheer force of repetition helped figures like Hellwig turn this nexus from a matter of speculation into a version of reality outweighing all arguments to the contrary.55 This nexus became firmly fixed in public discourse as a central myth of the cinematic age, a myth that produced powerful discursive effects: throughout the 1920s, conservatives blamed popular film for a host of social problems, attributing to the medium a near limitless capacity to cast a dangerous spell over audiences.56 Woven into this discourse about film was a cluster of fears and dangers, some real enough—​­the problem of poor ventilation, the risk of fire associated with the flammable properties of celluloid, the eyestrain caused by flickering of images—​­some more phantasmal, the product of nebulous anxieties, social prejudices, and half-­speculative processes of scientific reasoning. How this process occurred is a question that offers insights into the interplay between science and social policy that the scholar Lutz Raphael has dubbed the “scientization of the social”: the transfer of social conflict from the realm of politics to the ostensibly nonpartisan terrain of expert discourse.57 While it is easy to overdraw the extent of this process, it remains a useful way of conceptualizing the divergent tactics adopted by German elites in their search for responses to the modernizing process. Notably, it emphasizes the ascendancy of new elites at the expense of older forms of authority. This is not to argue that the voice of traditional authority was silenced. What is striking, however, is the degree to which this voice increasingly spoke in a new language, invoking medical tropes of disease, addiction, infection, and contagion. It is doubtless true that this language extends back to the Enlightenment, when hygiene first became central to ideas of improvement and perfectibility, and when concerns over “Lesewut” (“reading mania”), and its connection to masturbation and suicide, were first articulated. At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, with the repeal of the anti-­Socialist laws and the emergence of the modern mass media, concerns about the mass public, and especially youth, became particularly acute among German elites: “In the early 20th century, we find a new discourse of the ‘mass’ . . . ​in which the dangerousness of the people becomes pathologized via a new repertoire of ideologies—​­crowd theories, theories of degeneration, claims about popular intelligence, programs of eugenics and social engineering, theories of race,

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and so on—​­where the national health turns into a kind of permanent emergency.”58 Under these circumstances it was not surprising that film discourse became permeated by the hygienic paradigm that was steadily gaining ascendancy in many realms of social policy. In contrast with the visceral hostility marking early reformers’ attitudes, scientists sought to craft a strategy of constructive engagement, making film reform part of a larger process of social reform fashioned on “modern” lines.59 As with earlier efforts to fashion reading norms, the construction of standards governing viewing norms became tied to behavioral standards that were defined in hygienic terms.60 To be sure, this process, and the authority claimed by those who drove it, did not go unchallenged. Pedagogues and clergy continued to claim a central place in the war against Schund, mobilizing in highly effective ways during the Weimar era. Yet just as reformers’ tactics changed, the object of those tactics assumed new guises. Filmmakers learned to operate in the new space created by the reformers’ discourse, engaging with that discourse in creative ways that became constitutive for the medium’s subsequent development. An example of this is the 1912 film How the Cinema Takes Revenge (Wie sich das Kino rächt), which documents a gathering of film reformers at a seaside resort and the humiliation of its sanctimonious leader when his flirtation with a young lady is captured on camera and then screened as part of the program. Such scenarios, Schlüpmann suggests, attest to the silent film’s “internalization of the censor.”61 As we shall see, the genre of the film-­within-­a-­film became part of a well-­honed response to reformist discourse. The reformers’ influence is also manifest in the emergence around 1913 of the so-­called Autorenfilm (“literary film”). As we saw in the case of Hugo Münsterberg, the industry’s engagement with more complex themes succeeded in winning over some of its critics. Yet it also sowed the seeds for fresh outrage, for, in some of these films, “the reformer” appears—​­as in How the Cinema Takes Revenge—​­as a protagonist whose image is turned against him. In this respect, as Stefan Andriopoulos has written, film reform became bound up with anxieties concerning the “rights to one’s image”; indeed, Hellwig later identified the violation of this right as one of the Schundfilm’s chief offenses against public morality and made it a special focus of censorship.62 Reformers often became stock figures of middle-­class hypocrisy in the silent-­ film drama, fending off secret desires, consuming trash and its associated vices while simultaneously denouncing it. Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat (Professor Filth, 1905), later made into the classic The Blue Angel (1930), offers the best-­known portrait of this type of middle-­class hypocrite, who in

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the name of policing morality succumbs to the very behavior he condemns in his students. Variations on this theme, in which a form of revenge is acted out against the censorious figure, became a common feature of the silent film’s repertoire. In a 1934 study on the dangers of trash for adolescent audiences, especially for juvenile delinquents and psychopaths, the psychologist Alois Funk highlighted The Blue Angel as a particularly egregious example of this tendency.63 That such fictional scenarios pointed to deeper contradictions in the reformers’ position is further illustrated by one particularly stinging critique of that position. It came from one of its own members, Hermann Häfker, who, writing in early 1914, identified film reform as a partial manifestation of what he called a larger Tohuwabohu (chaos) stemming from the impulse “to reform the entire world” (Allerweltsreformerei). Häfker noted that this impulse had, under the banner of “life reform,” and driven by a desire to awaken insight and self-­control in individuals, now extended itself into the most intimate spheres of private life—​­alcohol consumption, dress, bodily comportment, and sexuality. Yet, admonished Häfker, this impulse could not simply be extended without modification to Kino. The regulation of viewing practices entailed entering into a “conflict of opinions” touching on fundamental questions of intellectual freedom and social policy. If concerns about the psychic health of audiences had provided the original impetus for the reformist impulse, he warned, this impulse had now become a kind of madness itself. Seeming to cite directly from the scenario of How the Cinema Takes Revenge, he singled out for special criticism certain Kino reformers whom he likened to Don Quixote, and warned that in their self-­righteousness these figures might become tomorrow what they fought today: defenders, consumers, or purveyors of trash.64

The Wartime Mobilization Against Trash The outbreak of war was greeted by the members of Germany’s cinema-­ reform movement as a long-­awaited opportunity to realize their aims: “May it [the war],” wrote one reformer, “purify our public life as a thunderstorm does the atmosphere.”65 Reformers hoped that putting the nation on a wartime footing would give authorities the means for pushing through strict new controls covering a broad range of vices.66 Measures against tobacco, alcohol, pornography, and cabarets were passed and an expanded list of Schund titles

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published.67 These initiatives reflected the sharpening of earlier concerns amid wartime conditions. Along with questions of manpower and national defense, the fate of Germany’s youth and future generations was now elevated to a matter of first importance, rendered all the more urgent by the absence of so many fathers at the front. The void left by this absence, wrote one author, left adolescents more than ever vulnerable to the temptations of “running wild” and to the risk of infection by the “Kino-­epidemic.”68 In the minds of reformers, the war thus assumed a highly ambivalent aspect: it represented both a moment of high national purpose that promised to wipe away decades of moral rot at a stroke and a moment of deepening national crisis—​­of manpower, paternal authority, and the moral and social tutelage of youth. In fact, far from abating, the problem of trash worsened during the war. A June 1916 communiqué stressed that wartime offered new opportunities for controlling Schund, citing recent success at organizing a coalition for this purpose.69 Yet a report submitted by Karl Brunner, head censor within Berlin police headquarters, based on a survey he had conducted in Charlottenburg the previous year, painted a dire picture of conditions in this affluent enclave of the capital.70 Other reports described similar conditions elsewhere. Measured by this standard, the war did little to justify reformers’ hopes; not only did the public’s appetite for trash show no signs of diminishing, but existing control measures remained only weakly enforced. While the war witnessed unprecedented efforts to strengthen censorship throughout the Reich, it also greatly complicated reformers’ efforts. Along several fronts, their hopes collided with new realities: belated recognition by the state of the medium’s uses as an instrument of national mobilization and integration; official sanction for sensationalist dramas celebrating the war and its heroes (targeted by the left as a form of war Schund); and, most disturbing, toward war’s end, the emergence of a new genre of so-­called enlightenment films on topics of sexual hygiene. Freed from the burden of international competition, the German film industry positioned itself for its postwar emergence as a leader of world cinema. This development was directly aided by the wartime state, which abandoned its initial attitude of suspicion toward the medium for a new appreciation of the cinema’s power as means of arousing and directing the nation’s collective energies.71 It was a sign of this shift that some officials began to rethink their earlier hostility toward popular film. “The German state has completely underestimated the political influence that film exercises by means of mass suggestion,” wrote one such figure in 1916: “Publicistic weaponry is an essential part of

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modern war and this includes the influencing of broad masses by means of film.”72 While this memo included an obligatory disavowal of Schund, other officials argued that effective film propaganda had much to learn from even the most corrupt popular genres, the popularity of which reflected their ability to tap into the “latent instincts” that “slumber in the audience’s subconscious.” Success, wrote one such official, “depends on the same cooperation of fantasy and logic that detective films rely on. . . . ​The filmmaker must have exact insight into the audience’s psychological state. This depends on lasting and close engagement with its changing moods. To grasp and influence these moods and to realize this knowledge of fantasy in an exciting form is the psychological task of the propaganda film.”73 Such views formed part of the genesis of the government-­created film company UFA, which was tasked with the production of films with patriotic themes. In a reflection of this new pragmatic spirit, some military authorities also embraced film as a therapeutic diversion for soldiers, granting conditional recognition of the audience’s right to entertainment.74 These developments exposed several weaknesses in the reformers’ position, not least their continued difficulty in defining the problem of Schund. Disagreements also arose over questions of strategy, amid a dawning (and only ever partial) recognition of the counterproductive nature of the repressive response: banning certain images risked only making them both more attractive and more virulent.75 By the end of the war, this realization had become commonplace; one report submitted by an expert in youth welfare noted that prewar efforts to use film to draw attention to welfare reform had been thwarted by concerns that the medium was “too unreliable.” Not only had publicity efforts been deprived of “the use of a highly important means of enlightenment”; worse still, “precisely this limiting of programming possibilities has led to the present situation in which the cinema’s effects have become so inimical to education and destructive of taste.”76 Film reform, as one commentator wrote in 1916, would remain a hopeless enterprise unless accompanied by a constructive program: “Kinoreform with police force . . . ​is an absurdity. Censorship is negative, it only forbids. Reformers must achieve positive work!”77 This same point was echoed by one reformers organization that identified film as an indispensable tool of modern statecraft, stating that the purely “negative influence of censorship” must not define the limit of official interest in film: “The positive use of this tremendous means of action (Einwirkungsmittel) on the Volksseele can no longer be neglected.”78 Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that, following the

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gradual erosion of the hopes that marked the war’s beginning, prewar divisions came into the open, producing defections and surprising reversals. The key figure here was Karl Brunner, whose position with Berlin police headquarters made him the highest censor in the land, and who authored a wartime list of banned titles in effect throughout Germany.79 Yet Brunner was increasingly forced to defend a pragmatic line against the pedagogues and clergy who dominated the movement in the provinces. Facing criticism from “radical” reformers that his list did not go far enough, Brunner responded in a report submitted to the Interior Ministry in September 1916. Noting that his erstwhile allies had produced their own list, he accused them of fanaticism, of aspiring to create a literary papacy with an exhaustive index of prescribed titles. In their blindness to the conflict of opinions that existed in a complex, modern society and in their efforts to legislate morality, some of these “professional Schund-­kämpfer” had gone so far as to reject freedom of the press. Brunner’s rebuttal to his critics rested on several points: the object of their loathing had in certain respects been reformed; the continuing difficulty of establishing a clear, legally tenable definition of trash; the fact that extreme methods often backfired, either awakening resistance or provoking fresh interest in Schund among youth; and the need for tolerance concerning the psychological needs of the less-­educated classes, in particular, their legitimate need for distraction.80 The state, he advised, could not interfere in matters of personal taste as long as public order itself was not threatened. Brunner concluded by warning against concessions to the decentralizing tendency of the radicals, who sought to restore control to the local level and tried to take advantage of the conservatism of the regional military commanders to drive a wedge between province and capital. Against the danger of excessive measures, he stressed the need for uniformity and consistency and thus the centralization of censorship under the control of Berlin. Was Häfker’s warning that some reformers might become converted into defenders of trash borne out in Brunner’s case? While to some of his former allies it appeared he had gone over to the enemy, Brunner’s memorandum simply revealed him to have become, at least temporarily, more pragmatic on questions of censorship.81 Among other things, he now expressed concern that, carried too far, the regulatory impulse might have significant unintended effects: it might backfire by driving trash underground, where it would only thrive in a more dangerous form. The mere publication of lists of banned titles, he warned, could perversely arouse more interest in those titles.82 Moreover, the constant refrain that trash eluded the regulatory grasp attested as

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much as anything to the inflationary expansion of the category of Schund, a development that generated fresh problems by threatening to outstrip the resources on hand for combating it. Either way, the banning of new forms of trash created a situation in which the inability of authorities to enforce regulations might lead to a loss of standing in the public’s eyes.83 This too argued for a more pragmatic approach. Yet if Brunner’s critique of the traditional reformers’ position carried the day, his own position was far from unassailable. Indeed, while strengthening the role of the Berlin police, Brunner inadvertently pointed to the moment, not far off, when censorship was taken out of police hands altogether and placed in the hands of a central committee made up of expert panels. The failure of the “police-­state” approach reflected the consolidation of a view rooted in criticism of the inconsistency and arbitrariness marking prewar censorship.84 It had become manifestly clear that the challenges posed by mass culture required regulatory mechanisms other than those at the disposal of local police forces.85 In the war’s aftermath, the moral panic of the clergy and pedagogues was recast in wholly different terms as several developments converged to put the problems bound up in the debate about film on a new footing. Above all, the war’s transformative effect on concerns about population and youth placed a bio-­political paradigm squarely at the center of public life.86 At the same time, the emergence of morale as a key feature of modern warfare focused attention on film’s uses as an instrument of molding public opinion. The medium’s dangerously suggestive properties were now recognized as the reverse side of its socially integrative and transformative possibilities. The war gave birth to new scientific techniques for managing political communication, which, according to Peter Holquist, assumed ever greater importance as population rather than territory became the central focus of postwar governance.87 It was not by chance that the first systematic scientific investigation of film-­reception processes emerged during the war. By the beginning of the 1920s, reformers could point to a growing number of experimental studies, surveys, and case histories documenting the effects of film going. While these remained far from conclusive, they nevertheless strengthened the case for the claim that these effects were susceptible to measurement and analysis.88 This development signaled the reorientation of the entire question on a new basis and a whole series of efforts to come to grips with audience response. The traditional reformers’ approach was now recognized as not merely legally untenable but simply incommensurate with the new realities of German society. Complaints about the burdensome nature of the old style of “bureaucratic

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police censorship” reflected this new recognition.89 To be sure, Schund remained a problem, in many ways a greater one than ever before; for a nation consumed with the consequences of defeat, trash and its purveyors quickly became written into a medical version of the stab-­in-­the-­back legend, one that took on distinctly anti-­Semitic overtones. Yet the scale of the crisis confronting Germany clearly necessitated new control mechanisms beyond those offered by the traditional approach. At the same time, it also entailed a willingness to treat as valid new kinds of representational practices abhorrent to traditional reformers. What was shocking, from the reformers’ standpoint, was the discovery that the medium’s role as destroyer of taboos here received, at least provisionally, the sanction of Germany’s highest authorities.90

Republic of Trash It is one of the paradoxes of the Weimar Republic that the experiment in democracy on which this new state embarked, determined to undo its predecessor’s repressive policies, resulted in an ever more centralized, activist, and expansive form of governance.91 This development was reflected not least in an ambitious range of policies and programs concerned with the welfare, hygiene, and regulation of the social body.92 Yet this was an ambivalent process: as the parameters of the hygienic program continually widened in response to recurring crises, so too did the identification of new dangers threatening the people’s welfare, along with the need for new controls. Responses to the problem of Schund became caught up in this dynamic. As a representative of the Dortmund workers’ council put it in 1919, expressing deep concern over popular film’s dangers for “the young soul”: “Despite our deep aversion to the methods of the old system of government and despite particular aversion to censorship, we must acknowledge that youth must somehow be protected from filth.”93 Hellwig noted with satisfaction that despite its rejection of the “police state” the Social Democratic Party (SPD) shared conservatives’ views about the dangers of trash.94 The question remained: How could this concern be reconciled with popular aspirations for democracy? Finding a solution to this problem was complicated by the fact that many postwar reformers, unlike their predecessors who had largely sought to ban film, now endeavored to harness it for socially productive purposes. Doing so, however, presupposed two things: a reliable form of censorship and a functional model of viewing practices that could provide a basis for defining norms of audience response.

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Though the collapse of the Kaiserreich was immediately followed by the suspension of censorship—​­a key symbol and institution of the discredited empire—​­within two years censorship was reinstated by the passage of the Reich Motion Picture Law (RLG) in 1920, which made film the sole medium subject to preemptive controls. This was not simply a sign of the increasingly conservative direction Weimar politics was already taking.95 In fact, there was nothing surprising in this development: while Article 118 of the new constitution had abolished censorship, it also included a proviso that spelled out the exceptional status both of film and of Schund. As paraphrased by the later head of the censor board, Ernst Seeger, the RLG’s key clause held that “all films are absolutely prohibited that may endanger the public order and the safety of the state, offend religious feeling, have a brutal or demoralizing influence, or compromise the prestige and the relations of Germany with foreign states.”96 The eighteen months separating the suspension of censorship (and with it, the police-­state approach) and its reinstatement on a new basis had been marked by a perceived explosion of trash and of many of the social ills associated with it, particularly those affecting youth: delinquency, crime, and sexual and moral degeneration. In keeping with prewar developments, the Schund phenomenon was routinely linked to the specter of psychopathy, a category that featured prominently in psychiatrists’ analyses of the postwar social upheaval; leading psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer took to referring to Germany’s new government as a “dictatorship of the psychopaths.”97 As earlier, this development called forth responses at all levels of society, one measure of which was the proliferation of morality leagues and local reform organizations mobilizing against the problem of trash.98 In one report submitted to the Reichstag, concerned citizens of the city of Cologne catalogued the dire conditions prevailing in the city’s movie theaters and among its youth. The report described Kino as a site of extreme moral hazard, a space of prostitution and delinquency, smoking, and generally unhygienic conditions.99 This and other reports also make abundantly clear that the problem of trash was now cast in explicitly political terms, being implicated not merely in crime and sexual transgression, suicide, madness, and venereal disease but also in incitement of class resentment, racial hatred, and revolution. Postwar attacks on Schund and its purveyors became increasingly laden with Völkisch themes. Radicalized by events at the end of the war, Brunner began making openly anti-­ Semitic references in public tirades against trash and inciting violence against theaters that showed “smutty” films.100 Discussions about the reinstatement of censorship took place at a series of

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meetings convened by the Interior Ministry in late 1919. Attending were representatives of the major ministries and the Länder; two key participants were Hellwig, representing Justice, and Brunner, now representing Public Welfare rather than Police. These meetings drove home the extent to which the war had strengthened the “Berlin line” at the expense of the provinces. The defense of regional particularities (in religious and moral terms) was rejected; the only issue remaining was whether Munich would keep its own office (the answer was affirmative). As the representative of Saxony stated, uniformity in the law was essential to ensure that “the Volk would no longer be infected by film.” The main theme of the discussions concerned the need to rationalize film censorship throughout the nation: to simplify, streamline, and bring uniformity into an area where contradiction and arbitrariness had ruled. The transformation of censorship practice thus bears the imprint of wider processes of rationalization that became a hallmark of Weimar social policy.101 Oversight of this new system would be entrusted to expert panels made up of specialists from several fields (i.e., there would be no “purely official censorship”). It fell to Hellwig and Brunner to reconcile the provincial representatives to the new state of affairs. Hellwig commended the censorship law passed in Württemberg in 1914 (whose drafting had been influenced by the psychiatrist Robert Gaupp) for its emphasis on youth protection and suggested that it could serve as a model at the national level. Brunner, meanwhile, spoke reassuringly of the need to reconcile the moral sensitivities of the Länder with centralization in Berlin—​­the so-­called Berlin Geist that for many was synonymous with moral relativism and decay. What Brunner had in mind was the recent rash of so-­called enlightenment films, most of them produced in Berlin following the repeal of censorship: “The Public Welfare Ministry attaches great weight to the need to separate the valuable from the offensive Aufklärungs-­films.”102 These films had sparked a firestorm of controversy. Hellwig singled out the film Different from the Others (1919), a plea to overturn the law criminalizing homosexuality, as an example of the worst kind of Schund.103 This film, more than any other, came to stand for the difficulties of policing the boundary between “valuable” and “offensive” films and the need to enlist medical experts in doing so. Following reinstatement of censorship, screenings of the film were limited to select audiences; a team of psychiatrists, including the eminent figures Emil Kraepelin and Karl Bonhoeffer, backed the ban on public screenings—​­a fact that places Germany’s two leading psychiatrists at the

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scene of what is in many ways the inaugural act of Weimar censorship.104 In an article symptomatically titled “How can we promote a healthy population politics?” an official of the right-­wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) condemned the mass delinquency that had set in among German youth since November 9, 1918, and with specific reference to the “Kino-­ epidemic,” noted sarcastically that it was one of the revolution’s “achievements” to have abolished censorship. “Let us not even speak” (here clearly referring to Different from the Others) “of the so-­called enlightenment film!”105 Yet Schund was not only a rallying cry of the right but rather a consensus element of Weimar politics. Following the Reichstag debate over the law (including a session in the Committee on Population Politics), the RLG passed, following the recommendations of the committee assembled by Interior, with only the far-­left Independent Social Democrats (USPD) voting against.106 Centralization and rationalization had their counterpart in a consequential reformulation of the figure—​­the audience member—​­that was the focus of these protective measures. Censorship practice, as one participant in the fall 1919 meetings had stressed, was no longer to be guided by the distinction between the views of an audience member from Berlin and one from southwestern Germany: rather, it was simply “a question of the manner in which an educated German responds to a film.”107 This formulation anticipated a key concept that provided one of the RLG’s underpinnings, that of the normale Durchsschnittsbeschauer (the “normal viewer”). Around this normative definition of the type homo cinematicus was constructed a consequential definition of normative reception processes. In contrast to traditional forms of “Inhalts-­” or “Geschmackszensur” (censorship of content or taste), Weimar censorship practice was predicated on the concept of “Wirkungszensur” (censorship of effects).108 As Ursula von Keitz has argued, by grounding censorship practice in this concept of the “normal viewer,” the RLG implicitly opened the door to analysis of film’s psychological effects and of audience response.109 Censorship practice became reliant on a medical epistemology and on psychiatric modes of reasoning, a development that allowed the law’s principal architects to extend the application of the law in new and potentially far-­reaching ways. Hellwig was instrumental in elaborating a conception of Wirkungszensur that included both direct and indirect effects and in so doing widened the “range of potential victims who was to be preventively protected.” The frequently echoed postulation that trash speculated on “mass instincts” and could arouse “slumbering impulses” and “latent tendencies” among

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adolescent viewers exemplifies the hygienic concern with the regulation of impulses and with the connection between viewing norms and behavioral norms.110 Defining the task of censorship in these terms meant, among other things, institutionalizing the role of experts in appropriate fields within the process of evaluating films. With regard specifically to the need to differentiate between valuable enlightenment films and those that endangered the Volksgesundheit, the specialist Waldemar Schweisheimer stressed the need for a central censorship office; judgments made by this office would be based on the evaluation of qualified experts: “Whereas in the production of the film itself the doctor must take a back seat to the director, in the evaluation of the finished product the opinion of social hygienists and physicians takes precedence.”111 Laying claim to censorship as a branch of mental hygiene, medical experts elaborated a form of regulation fashioned along self-­consciously “modern” lines, in contrast to the traditional police-­state approach and to conservatives’ preoccupation with morality and taste.112 Pragmatic and calibrated rather than simply repressive, this approach reflected the imperatives of social hygiene and youth welfare. To be sure, these remained battlegrounds between traditional and modern; yet, to the extent that the discourse about “trash and filth” became a consensus element of Weimar public life, this development reflected the success of medical reformers and experts at recasting it as a matter of preventive social welfare.113 Despite concerns that Wirkungszensur would serve as a fig leaf for political censorship, the moderate left largely supported passage of the RLG. Many on the left were dedicated Schund fighters, and they accepted at face value the medical consensus about Schund’s dangers, especially when this view incorporated, in however limited a fashion, recognition of the legitimacy of the audience’s right to distraction and entertainment.114 The implications of the RLG as it related to one particular form of Schund (the film of “hypnotic crime”) that embodied many of the worst fears of reformers will be examined in Chapter 3. For now, what the new approach looked like in practice can be seen by examining briefly in more detail the notorious case of Different from the Others, which was frequently blamed—​ ­then and later—​­for almost singlehandedly bringing censorship back into force. In critics’ minds, this film became paradigmatic of a type of trash that masqueraded as science, cleverly employing a variety of stratagems to disarm critics while “propagandizing” for its cause (in this case, repealing the laws against homosexuality). The film resulted from a collaboration between

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director Richard Oswald and the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, a passionate advocate for the rights of homosexuals. In an effort to win a respectful hearing, the film’s makers took pains to stress the objective basis of its content: its opening credits identified it as a “social-­hygienic film” and emphasized the medical credentials of Hirschfeld, who appeared in the film as an unnamed sexual scientist lecturing on the biological basis of homosexuality. Yet in the eyes of many social hygienists such forms of homosexual “propaganda” served only to cast disrepute on authentic forms of cinematic Aufklärung. Mass enlightenment, wrote one, here descended into the realm of pornography and trash.115 This view was strongly endorsed by the psychiatrists assembled to evaluate the film following passage of the RLG.116 Led by Emil Kraepelin, these experts submitted a lengthy report testifying to the dangers the film posed to its audience, particularly to that category inhabiting the psychiatric borderland between “the healthy majority and the sick minority,” in whom homosexual proclivities “slumbered” and who could therefore “potentially go in either direction.”117 Reichstag representative Hedwig Dransfeld of the Catholic Center Party held up the film as an example of the dangers that such forms of mass enlightenment, parading their own “scientificity,” posed for the so-­called at-­risk or “anormale.”118 In underscoring trash’s particular dangers for psychopaths, Dransfeld aligned her views on this problem with the prewar writings of figures like Stelzner and Ziehen. It is worth noting the difference between such calls and the more blanket condemnation typical of the prewar era. Different from the Others evoked such reactions precisely because it threw into relief the need to defend the legitimacy of authentic forms of hygienic enlightenment against debased or corrupt forms. As we shall see in Chapter 4 the regulation of film had became linked to increasingly bold and, from the perspective of traditional morality, even scandalous social policy initiatives. This tendency was grounded in a conception of the film audience as something that could be known and then “improved.”119 Film reform became as such overtly tied to ventures in human reform. As the case of Different from the Others demonstrates, while the passage of the RLG marked the triumph of the “Berlin line”—​­the modern, rationalized approach to censorship that had eluded prewar authorities—​­it also sowed the seeds for continued conflicts within this realm of social policy. As was to be expected, these were often defined along regional lines and around the defense of local interests in religious or moral terms. At the same time, the law itself had significant unintended effects, complicating the realization of its

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aims. In seeking to resolve the problems stemming from the Wilhelmine “censorship of content,” the RLG created an entirely new set around the vaguely defined notion of “effects.” Despite the claims of specialists and despite innumerable studies, the evaluation of these effects remained far from an exact science. Indeed, the RLG unleashed significant conflicts over the claims and status of medical authority itself, whether these concerned the “expertise” of expert witnesses or the alleged “enlightening” content of given films, especially in cases when they transgressed against established standards of decency. Disputes also clouded the question of how broadly to extend the concept of the “normal viewer”—​­whether, for instance, it entailed consideration of the special risks film posed to the category of the “nervously over-­ stimulated.”120 Given these endless wrangles over definition and expertise, the system’s legitimacy remained in question from the very outset. Though reaction in the press was mostly favorable, some commentators who welcomed the new direction taken in the RLG nevertheless felt it did not go far enough in breaking the grip of the old approach. In an article titled “Public Health and Film Legislation” that appeared in a Munich weekly shortly after passage of the RLG, one commentator complained that the new law still barely addressed the “medical dimension” of censorship and insisted on the importance of letting trained experts rather than pedagogues take the lead in the matter. Censorship was, in this author’s eyes, first and foremost a form of social hygiene practiced in the name of the health of the Volk.121 Yet this article also pointed to some of the paradoxical difficulties inherent in such an approach. On the one hand, its author asserted that, in the wake of the war and its aftermath, the improvement of the “shattered health of the people” was the decisive problem for Germany’s future, and that the physician and the social hygienist must recognize that without the participation of the entire Volk “energetic combat against major public health problems was impossible.” Given this state of affairs, it was imperative that all available means of enlightening the Volk on general questions of health be exploited, especially that of film, for “no other medium works so directly on the feelings and intellect of the people, for good and ill.” Yet the medium’s positive qualities were circumscribed by its equally considerable harmful properties, as the recent history of those “sexual Animierfilm [pornographic films] unjustifiably called ‘enlightenment-­films,’ ” attested: “What was here offered up under the smokescreen of false scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit), equipped with pseudo-­ hygienic tendencies, was in reality merely a form of speculation on the lowest

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instincts.” The dire consequences (promiscuity, venereal disease, etc.) only underscored the need to accompany hygienic imperatives with proper ­guidance—​­that is, hygienic counseling. Here again was the inescapable conclusion that the task of censorship was essentially prophylactic: “In connection with deliberations over film legislation, with censorship, and with educational films, the participation of experts in social medicine is essential.” As we have seen, the implementation of the RLG reflected the author’s views in a number of ways. Beyond the fact that medical experts assumed a key role in evaluating films, many sexually themed enlightenment films adopted what was in effect a strategy of precensorship, consulting with advisory panels made up of physicians or organizations dedicated, for instance, to the fight against venereal disease.122 The transformation of the censor into what Annette Kuhn calls a “productive force” is also illustrated by the emergence of the figure of the doctor as a central protagonist in many films, where he functioned both as enunciator of the film’s message and—​­by exhorting the audience to exercise self-­restraint and to avoid practices contrary to the precepts of social hygiene—​­as personification of what Schlüpmann calls the “internalization of the censor.” Though such measures fell well short of the self-­ regulation sought by industry representatives, they did increase chances of a respectful hearing by the censor board.123 Yet this author’s faith in the authority of experts in medicine and hygiene remained in uneasy tension with his own repeatedly expressed concerns regarding the dangers of “false science,” “pseudo-­hygiene,” and bogus enlightenment. Such concerns underscore the persistently contested status of science as authoritative discourse in this period. In numerous censor proceedings, as in the case of Different from the Others, it was precisely this claim to special authority that remained at issue (Kraepelin saw the false “scientificity” of the views presented in Different from the Others as the worst of its many offenses). Enlightenment, qua sexual hygiene, all too easily became identified with the category of Schund. Moreover, the cinematic doctor remained a deeply ambivalent figure: depending on the issue or cause, he could be a man of enlightenment, a charlatan, even a criminal; a disseminator of knowledge or a corrupter of virtue all in the name of “science.” Popular films of this era often mock the rectitude of the doctor or, alternatively, portray him as “mad scientist,” in ways that Hellwig had already identified as a problem before the war.124 Meanwhile, the scientific credentials of expert witnesses in censorship proceedings were often challenged on grounds that they were unqualified to

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assess the virtues of a particular film, especially when its subject matter was novel or controversial. In its efforts to navigate the new landscape created by the RLG, the film industry resorted to creative strategies. One approach adopted by filmmakers was to incorporate the reform agenda as a thematic e­ lement—​­whether for purposes of education or of mockery or both. A variant on this approach served as the premise for the (now lost) social drama The Path to Ruin (1921), which casts its warning in the form of a story of a young woman whose downward social trajectory is determined by her consumption of trash literature. As if a Schund scenario has come to life from the pages of the novels that the protagonist Lulu addictively consumes, the film dramatizes many of the perils (prostitution, crime, suicide) long associated with this genre by critics like Adolf Sellmann. A scene in which Lulu is portrayed as a nude model links her story to some of the earliest examples of cinema that had found their way to Germany from France at the turn of the century. In thus framing its content as a story of trash and its “fateful consequences,” The Path to Ruin “internalizes the censor.” At the same time, by soliciting the spectator’s initial identification with and then distancing from Lulu’s Schund-­laden fantasies, the narrative enacts the normalization of the spectator implicit within the RLG. Yet the filmmakers’ strategy ultimately proved unsuccessful: the board remained unconvinced that projecting this version of the reform agenda onto the screen could have any socially redeeming value, banning it on grounds that explicitly invoked the medium’s special properties, while also drawing a revealing parallel: “The film does not achieve its alleged purpose of warning against Schund-­ literature; on the contrary it has the opposite effect because the portrayal of the story is so much more vivid in film than in a book. This style of representing things that are injurious to the general public under the banner of promoting health and regeneration cannot be too strongly condemned. This film resembles the so-­called enlightenment films, which under the guise of education speculate on the audience’s lowest instincts.” 125 A more playful narrative provides the basis for director O. F. Mauer’s Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat (When the Film Splicer Day-­Dreamed, 1925). This film includes both a representation of the act of censorship and—​ l­ ike How Cinema Takes Revenge (1912)—​­an elaborate revenge scenario against that act. The young Filmkleberin (film splicer) of the title is an archetypal Weimar New Woman, whose rather monotonous work is punctuated by extended romantic daydreams that, in seeming to cite directly from Weimar

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Figure 8. O. F. Mauer, Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat (1925). The censor’s cut.

nightlife films, have a distinctly Schund-­like quality. A fantasy that culminates with her kissing a handsome young man is interrupted when she finds that the act has been captured on camera. The next scene positions the audience as censor, scrutinizing (through a magnifying glass) a strip of film depicting the couple locked in embrace. We then see a pair of scissors cutting through the strip along a diagonal defined by the meeting of the couples’ lips (see Figure 8). The word “Censorship!!” then flashes across the screen along a diagonal that mimics the scissor’s cut (see Figure 9). That awakening from her fantasy is equated with an act of censorship suggests that this act must be understood as an instrument for patrolling the boundaries between civilized society and the realm of unconscious or instinctual life. This is borne out in what follows next: having again drifted into a dream-­like state, the young woman accidentally splices together bits of a newsreel with a Lil Dagover film (of the sort that her daydream had mimicked). The resulting screening is a pure eruption of cinema’s anarchic potential: images of African tribespeople and hippopotamuses are mixed up with scenes from Dagover’s boudoir, while a censorious figure frantically blows a police whistle in a futile effort to bring the proceedings to a halt. The

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Figure 9. O. F. Mauer, Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat (1925). The censor’s cut (text).

connection between the anxieties here evoked and the seeming breakdown of gender norms is made clear in further scenes that depict the Vermännlichung (masculinization) of women. At the end, the screen is pelted by the audience with eggs and finally left in tatters.

Censorship and the End of Weimar While liberals took issue with some aspects of the RLG censorship, it was conservative reformers who expressed most hostility. Far from being mollified by the reinstatement of censorship, reformers only stepped up their efforts to mobilize their constituencies against the scourge of trash. Throughout the first half of the 1920s, regional reform organizations deluged the Interior Ministry with petitions calling for strengthening the RLG’s provisions and complaints about the decisions of the Berlin board. The persistent theme of these communications was the inadequacy of existing censorship to deal with the “Schundfilm-­invasion” and the injustice of inflicting the views of the overly tolerant “Berlin Moderns” on the rest of the nation.126 Throughout the Weimar

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period, Berlin continued to stand for the perceived moral failings of a republic awash in trash and overrun by juvenile delinquents and budding psychopaths. At the same time, calls for modifying the RLG were strenuously opposed by those who saw the panic surrounding Schund as a Trojan horse for reinstating an older paradigm of moral surveillance under conservative religious auspices, led by the Catholic Central Party and the Protestant DNVP—​­a means of reintroducing a censorship of taste and of restoring regional control at the expense of centralization.127 Amid renewed concerns, fueled by the period of hyperinflation, about the threat posed to social order and morality by wayward youth and the corrupting influences of trash, the Berlin line came under intense assault. Schund burnings and attacks on movie theaters were reported. The passage in 1926 of a new law explicitly targeting Schmutz und Schund represented a triumph for advocates of a harder line.128 Yet, like previous efforts, this too proved to be a hollow victory. As the perpetually dissatisfied reformers soon recognized, even this law contained no clear definition of Schund. The difficulty of enforcing a ban on something that could not be defined with any precision plagued reformers throughout the late 1920s. An assessment by the Interior Ministry in 1929 of the implementation of the 1926 law conceded the existence of continuing confusion over the boundaries between trash and “more well-­ intentioned endeavors” and beyond that the fundamental elusiveness of the “Schund-­concept.”129 By 1933, the movement’s ambivalent legacy was reflected on by one longtime Schundkämpfer who lamented that, despite the considerable forces mobilized on its behalf, twenty-­five years of film reform appeared to have borne little fruit.130 In part, however, reformers seemed to struggle with the consequences of their own success: the continual expansion of the category of trash and hence of their mandate, combined with inadequate resources, left them constantly struggling to keep up. Practical questions, like not overwhelming regulatory bodies with new responsibilities, also plagued reformers.131 By the end of the 1920s, there were complaints that Schundkämpfer were suffering nervous breakdowns as a result of overwork.132 Here indeed the cinema seemed to “revenge itself,” in the discovery that sheer excess of vigilance made the war against trash itself damaging to health. Reformers could be forgiven for feeling, as had Adolf Sellmann in 1916, that their movement needed a savior.133 Though opponents of the 1926 law countermobilized in defense of freedom of expression, their voice was largely drowned out by continuing concerns over youth welfare. What was at stake in this law was perhaps most

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clearly spelled out in an article by Werner Mahrholz, editor of the liberal weekly Vossische Zeitung. Mahrholz began by reminding his reader of the founding principle of classic liberalism—​­freedom of expression—​­before acknowledging that under the protection of this principle, certain forms of “mental production” were allowed to circulate that “speculated on the lowest instincts of the broad masses” and especially of youth. Though he favored exempting the products of “mental work” from censorship, Mahrholz conceded that the need to protect youth from such products overrode such principles. The issue, as he saw it, was one of definition: with consideration to the fiction of a “Normalmensch”—​­an imagined entity—​­serious works in which “new ways of life” and “forms of moral regeneration or renewal” were represented could be indicted as easily as could obvious forms of trash. What was needed, therefore, was a clear definition of Schund—​­precisely what the new law lacked—​­so as to differentiate it from the category of the “normal” products of mental labor. Such a definition should remain in the hands of experts. Censorship should not be set up as a “guardian of virtue”; in place of an approach based on worldview (aesthetic, moral, or political), it should be based on the requirements of what Mahrholz called “public mental hygiene (geistige Volks-­hygiene).” By contrast, he detected in the new law an attempt to revert to a highly conservative form of censorship: one not only lacking a clear definition of the object it sought to prohibit but also that devolved responsibility from the central censorship office to regional offices, and thus implicitly to the churches. He concluded by issuing a rhetorical challenge to his reader: “Censorship of the old style, or popular mental hygiene?”134

Conclusion As in so many other respects, the Great War proved a watershed in the long campaign against Kino-­Schund. The war strengthened the forces of centralization at the expense of regional prerogatives. The reinstatement of censorship in 1920 reflected this, as it did the influence of a self-­consciously enlightened approach grounded in the claims of science to redefine the problem in a modern, objective fashion. Recasting the issue in terms of a medical paradigm of the dangers of Schund for the health of the social body, this approach held out the promise of a social consensus that had eluded prewar reformers. Paradoxically, however, this occurred at a moment when the always unstable category of trash had become more unstable than ever as a result of other wartime

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developments: new state interest in the propaganda potential of film along with the emergence of a genre of sexual enlightenment films that also received partial official sanction. While the passage of the RLG reflected the new salience of a hygienic paradigm, its implementation and reception were complicated by the “unstable discursive relations” that Sarasin identifies as inherent to this paradigm.135 With the transition from empire to democracy and the emergence of progressive, taboo-­violating initiatives in many areas of social policy, the boundaries of the category Schund became ever harder to police. Controversies surrounding homosexual rights, abortion, and a variety of other highly charged issues were also battles over the representation of these topics in the public realm. Despite the faith of progressives in the virtues of the new approach, the RLG’s effort to rationalize censorship was hampered by the ever-­ shifting dynamics of filmmaking during this period—​­a period marked, as Mahrholz had noted, by continual exploration of “new ways of life” and “forms of moral regeneration.” Nor did the centrifugal tendencies in the fight against Schund abate, as the passage of the 1926 law demonstrates. Persistent identification of the failings of the RLG with Berlin—​­a stronghold of Socialism, cultural modernism, sex reform, and trash—​­and with the republic only strengthened the hostility of conservative reformers, as well as members of the radical right. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler defined the problem of Schund, which he linked closely to that of Jewish cultural influence, in terms resonant of the language of mental and racial hygiene, calling it a form of “spiritual (geistige) pestilence” and a “carrier of bacilli” that “poisons souls.”136 Such formulations support Kaspar Maase’s argument that the demonization of trash played a significant role in the wider delegitimization of the Weimar Republic. Many of the texts consigned to flames in the 1933 book burnings (including the writings of Magnus Hirschfeld) were condemned as forms of Schund.137 Although hygienic doctrine could supply a new approach and a new epistemology on which to ground censorship practice, it could not alone provide the authority required to resolve ongoing debates in this realm of social policy; this could only take place through an assertion of political will.138 Adolf Sellmann, who in 1916 had called for a “savior,” observed with satisfaction in 1933, “Overnight things got different in Germany. All smut and trash disappeared from public view. The streets of our cities became clean again.”139 The passage of a new version of the RLG in 1934 that completed the process of centralization begun in the Weimar period and introduced the Führer principle into film censorship was a cause of particular rejoicing among reformers,

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who welcomed what they saw as the clearest possible signal of the regime’s recognition of the continuities between film reform and the reform and remaking of the German body politic. The text of the new law included a special clause that provided for bans on films that would have “an injurious effect on either the moral, spiritual, or hygienic development or the civic education and national consciousness of youth,” as well as in cases where an “over-­stimulation of their fantasies is to be feared.” As the psychologist Alois Funk noted, this language provided a sound legal basis for banning nearly all so-­called trash films.140 The fusion of aesthetic and hygienic criteria spelled out here would become central to social policy under the Nazis, as figures like the architect Paul Schultze-­Naumburg made Schund central to the links between the regime’s cultural politics and its bio-­politics.141 Funk described his own extensive investigations into the “cinema’s impact on the adolescent psyche” as a contribution to the new political dispensation and to the long-­hoped-­for “advent of a new völkische Dasein.”142 Yet in many ways the joy of Sellmann and his allies proved short lived. Even with the Nazis in power, conservative reformers found it difficult to eliminate the specter of trash from German society. On the one hand, the work of German avant-­garde artists like Otto Dix became central to the discourse of racial hygiene, frequently being held up as evidence of the influence of trash by party ideologues like Schultze-­Naumburg, who defined cultural modernism as the product of diseased minds. On the other hand, the Nazis themselves were hardly free from its spell. Indeed, with his well-­known predilection for lowbrow tales of adventure and his efforts to cultivate the “allure of a pulp-­book savior,” Hitler himself, as Robin Lenman has argued, could be seen as a pure product of Schund.143 More problematically, from the perspective of traditional conservatives, the regime proved quite tolerant of unconventional forms of morality when it came, for instance, to depictions of the naked human body or to sexual mores.144 Above all, as we shall later see, the radicalization of hygienic ideology precipitated a crisis for conservatives. Under the Nazis, as so often before, reformers found fresh grounds for disappointment and outrage, in the form of new categories of officially approved trash and the sanctioning of policies deeply transgressive of traditional value systems.145

Chapter 3

Hypnosis, Cinema, and Censorship in Germany, 1895–­1 933

The film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) first introduces us to the figure of Caligari as he makes his way to the office of the town clerk to obtain a permit that will allow him and his somnambulist medium Cesare to stage experiments in hypnotic clairvoyance at the local fair. This scene, which evokes the fairground setting in which itinerant showmen first exhibited the short one-­ reelers of the early days of popular cinema, places the film’s subsequent proceedings in the same relationship to bureaucratic officialdom as commercial motion pictures more generally following passage of the Motion Picture Law (RLG) that same year of 1920. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, often seen as the inaugural film of Weimar cinema, here alludes to the constitutive relation between film history and censorship. In the events that follow, it also suggests that this relation is closely bound up with the uncanny subject matter that forms the film’s theme. Hypnosis represented not just a central motif of this and other Weimar films but an important motif of official and expert discourse about cinema as well. In their efforts to gauge the medium’s impact on German society, censors and medical specialists often stressed the hypnotic basis of the relation between medium and audience, a basis that took on particularly disturbing qualities in the case of the “hypnosis-­film.” Officials went so far as to endorse a ban on such films in the mid-­1920s.1 Though the ban was never formally enacted, the mere possibility attests to the fears evoked by the hypnosis film, and to the tendency of officials to conflate the treatment of

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hypnosis as a topic within film with the public health risks such films seemed to pose for audiences and for the wider social body. This concern and the regulatory impulse associated with it have a lengthy history. It extends back to the year of cinema’s birth, 1895, when the Imperial Health Office first banned public demonstrations of hypnosis on medical grounds. It later appears in the decision in 1933 by Germany’s newly Nazified film censor board to ban Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, sequel to Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, on grounds that the film’s depiction of its protagonist’s hypnotic powers posed such a threat to public order that, “even if there were no film censorship in Germany, this film would be enough to make it a necessity.”2 Like Caligari, Lang’s Mabuse cycle represents the embodiment of a specter that haunted the official imagination from the advent of film as a mass entertainment medium: simply put, that film exercised a terrifying spell over its public. But these films, along with a host of other lesser-­known films in which the protagonists are scientists of the mind, also point to a paradoxical feature of the relation between Weimar film and the institutions of censorship: while much of the regulatory discourse about popular film based its claims on psychiatric modes of reasoning concerning the medium’s dangers, the content of these films itself appropriates psychiatric knowledge, while at the same time commenting on the ambiguous and transgressive aspects of such knowledge. In this regard, these films both confirm and complicate Doris Kaufmann’s thesis concerning the significant degree to which psychiatric patterns of thought permeated German society after World War I.3 At the same time, this phantasm of the official imagination had its counterpart in widespread popular interest in demonstrations of hypnotic and mediumistic phenomena, whether in films, in lecture halls, or in other public settings such as the fairgrounds frequented by itinerant showmen like Caligari. This interest combined elements of curiosity, fascination, anxiety, and fear; in addition to the lure of the spectacle itself, audiences were drawn by the ambiguous mixture of scientific and esoteric knowledge that is thematized in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It is not incidental that the supercilious town clerk from whom Caligari seeks his permit becomes the first victim of the murder spree that Caligari and his medium Cesare embark on (see Figure 10). Killing the censor—​­rather than, say, killing the father—​­represented a kind of popular fantasy that deserves recognition as a significant motif of Weimar film history.4 In this instance, the death of the clerk becomes the event that sets in motion the “hypnosis epidemic” that follows, both within the film itself and within Weimar cinema and culture more generally.5

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Figure 10. Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Visit to the town clerk’s office.

Film and Hypnosis Around 1900 The histories of cinema and hypnosis, as many scholars have noted, are closely related at many levels: Sharing similarly complex pedigrees, the two phenomena emerged from the scientific and medical cultures of the late nineteenth century but then escaped the control of those expert communities and became part of mass popular culture. In their popular form, however, both retained strong links to the experimental and scientific milieus from which they emerged.6 An important aspect of the ambivalent reception of popular film in Germany lay in the fact that the medium’s origins, together with the resurgence of scientific interest in hypnosis, were associated with France. As noted in Chapter 1, the German scientific community was quick to embrace the moving image, but a commercial film industry developed only gradually in Germany and until World War I the German market remained dominated by foreign products, with France the major source. This gave a nationalist cast to much of the reformist debate about the new medium, which was heavily colored by anxieties about the “foreignness” of most popular cinema.7 A characteristic expression of this anxiety is to be found in a text published in 1912 by the pedagogue Hermann Duenschmann. Duenschmann

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held the view that the absence of an authentic national cinema in Germany left the nation vulnerable to the corrupting influence of foreign cinema, particularly, he implied, from that nation—​­France—​­where “the possibility of demagogic influence” had developed to its most advanced form.8 Against this, the scientific and educational films that represented Germany’s only real contribution to cinema stood no chance in the competition for audiences. This was all the more true, Duenschmann argued, given the modern public’s intense hunger for sensation and novelty. Drawing on the writings of French crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon, Duenschmann turned film into a research medium for mass behavior. “Psychologists and psychiatrists,” he wrote, “have shown how small the role of conscious processes is in our mental life”—​­a fact that assumed great significance in analyzing the psychic life of the crowd.9 In addition to hereditary and racial influences, crowd psychology was dominated to an inordinate degree by the influence of powerful images, often triggered by certain “magic words and formulas.” Under the spell of these images, the internal censor was disabled and a primitive state of consciousness took over: “As in a hypnotic state, higher consciousness was paralyzed.” The result was a high degree of suggestibility and mental contagion. Duenschmann accordingly identified film with unprecedented new possibilities for the “suggestive influencing of the masses” and with a new kind of “experimental mass psychology.” Though he rejected the “naïve” idea that these possibilities were being exploited in deliberate fashion, by means of “innumerable cinematographs,” from some “central post” in France, he nevertheless warned that without intervention by the German state, cinema could easily become an instrument of “vulgar demagoguery . . . ​controlled from abroad.” For Duenschmann, ultimately, the solution lay in rigorous censorship: it was a question of the need for the state to nationalize “taste” just as it had the distribution of gas.10 It was not by chance that Duenschmann’s commentary relied so heavily on a popular understanding of hypnosis. The fantasy he evoked and then partially disavowed—​­that of a systematic form of “suggestive mass influencing” controlled from a “central station” located abroad—​­had already been anticipated by Le Bon, whose landmark study The Crowd, published in the same year as the birth of cinema, articulated many of the themes that became central to the discourse about the medium and its social and psychological significance. Though he was far from the first to import the concepts of the psychiatric clinic into the social sciences, Le Bon did so in a way that shaped crowd discourse well into the twentieth century.

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As it had at previous moments of history—​­prerevolutionary France or Victorian England—​­and as it would in Weimar Germany, hypnosis and related phenomena became topics of intense scientific and popular interest in fin de siècle France.11 A major impetus for this came from the clinical work on hysteria carried out by the French physicians Jean-­Martin Charcot and Hyppolite Bernheim. At his Salpêtrière clinic, Charcot made hypnosis part of an ambitious research program dedicated to capturing and recording all facets of the disease picture associated with hysteria: paralyses, spasms, contractures, and fugues and other states of automatism or dissociation. In this context, hypnosis functioned as a tool of experimentation, treatment, and—​­in Charcot’s famous Tuesday lectures—​­public spectacle. Meticulous recording of this research by means of sequential photography ensured that his patients’ poses became part of a wider cultural archive.12 Together with his rival Bernheim—​ ­who, unlike Charcot, argued that anyone could be hypnotized, not just ­hysterics—​­Charcot made hypnosis central to the modernist exploration of divided consciousness. It became an enduring source of fascination not just to the medical and scientific mind but also to the wider public, attested to by publishing events such as George du Maurier’s Trilby (1895), one of the best-­ selling novels of the time and the subject of innumerable film adaptations.13 For Le Bon, the crowd became the hysteric’s double, in the sense that its psychic life was governed by the same laws that Charcot and Bernheim had found in their patients. Le Bon argued that the crowd shared many traits with female hysterics, particularly their susceptibility to suggestion and mental contagion. In its typical state of “expectant attention” and “suggestibility,” wrote Le Bon, the crowd was an essentially “feminine subject,” prone to outbreaks of collective hysteria and even violence. The writings of Le Bon and other figures like Gabriel Tarde made the hypnotic state a powerful spectre of crowd psychology and of early twentieth-­century theories on mass society. Given their tendency to “think in images,” nothing, wrote Le Bon, has a “greater effect on the imagination of crowds than theatrical representations.”14 By some accounts, Le Bon saw the cinema as a particularly dangerous tool of mass suggestion and called for the French state to assume control of the new medium.15 In Germany as well, hypnosis became a topic of scientific and popular interest, and suggestion a major cultural trope of the fin de siècle. While professional clinicians explored the therapeutic and experimental uses of hypnosis in controlled settings, showmen staged their own experiments for the benefit of enthusiastic crowds. Public hypnosis gained considerable notoriety

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around the turn of the century. Caligari-­like practitioners drew sizable crowds to their fairground performances, performances often blamed for outbreaks of crime, madness, and suicide.16 This phenomenon led to efforts to completely ban such performances.17 In May 1895, the year of the cinema’s invention, the Imperial Health Office (KGA) submitted to the Interior Ministry a lengthy report by one of its medical experts that surveyed the current state of knowledge on hypnosis and suggestion from a public health standpoint.18 The inquiry was likely prompted by the so-­called Czynski affair, a trial held in Munich that same year involving accusations that a man had hypnotized his wife and compelled her to turn over all her assets to him. Despite the voluminous literature on the topic, the KGA’s expert, a Dr. Engelmann, noted that wide disagreement still existed over basic questions, especially those surrounding the therapeutic benefits and dangers associated with suggestive influence. Among these dangers, Engelmann singled out two in particular: the use of hypnosis for therapeutic or experimental purposes by unlicensed doctors and the use of hypnosis for criminal purposes. In the first category, he stressed the possibility that public demonstrations of hypnosis could produce a nervous shock in the experimental subject, whose symptoms might then be transmitted to the audience via a form of mental contagion. In the second category, Engelmann presented an equally disturbing scenario: that the victim of an unscrupulous hypnotist might be induced to commit crimes either in a hypnotic state or in a posthypnotic trance. The report ended with the following recommendations: “that the application of experimental hypnosis should only be practiced by scientifically trained and morally irreproachable researchers; that the use of suggestion for therapeutic purposes should be reserved for licensed doctors (despite the clear contradiction with the laws on freedom of trade); and lastly, that public hypnotic performances should be banned.”19 As this report indicates, hypnosis became a flashpoint within several debates of that era: over medical and experimental ethics, over freedom of trade and the regulation of unlicensed healers, and over notions of free will and legal responsibility and of the forensic significance of “criminal suggestion.”20 All would become elements within the debate about popular cinema. At the same time, they became part of the content of that cinema. Film scholars have shown that hypnosis was thematized in popular film from the beginning, featuring in narratives of sexual control and of crime and murder. Jörg Schweinitz has noted that the appropriation of hypnosis as a film motif dates from Thomas Edison’s exhibition of a short film titled Trilby Hypnotic Scene on his

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Kinetoscope several months before the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph premiered at the end of the year 1895. Such films, he writes, contributed to an emerging “hypnosis myth” centered on the ambiguously charismatic figure, half-­charlatan and half-­doctor, of the hypnotist.21 Central to this myth was the concept of “criminal suggestion,” namely the idea that an individual can be compelled to commit crimes under the influence of another person’s will. A recurring figure in the plot of many films during the silent-­film era was that of the hypnotist who uses his powers to turn unwitting subjects into instruments of crime. These filmic scenarios drew on an already well-­established cultural and scientific trope of the fin-­de-­ siècle. As Stefan Andriopoulos has shown in great detail, the notion of criminal suggestion had preoccupied members of the international scientific community since the mid-­1880s, when French psychologists first investigated this scenario experimentally, compelling subjects in a state of hypnotic trance to act out staged crimes using guns loaded with blanks, paper daggers, and fake arsenic.22 Prominent psychiatrists were drawn into the controversies and debates surrounding the validity and meaning of these experiments, with two opposing camps forming around Bernheim’s Nancy school and Charcot’s Salpêtrière; the latter rejected the possibility of criminal suggestion, while the former accepted its validity. Simultaneously, this scenario found its way into modernist fictions and theatrical dramas, and, after 1895, into the rapidly expanding repertoire of early cinema. Yet as Andriopoulos shows, these fantastical narratives did not simply represent imaginative reworkings of already existing scientific-­medical theories. Rather, they were elements of a larger discourse network that informed the ideas and practices of scientists, doctors, and legal experts, as well as modernist authors and film directors, government officials, and itinerant showmen. Experiments in hypnotic crime thus played a formative role in the early histories of both scientific psychology and the cinema. Moreover, fictional narratives, including those of the popular cinema, became part of the medical, scientific, and juridical debates surrounding “criminal suggestion.”23 Even as such scenarios were adopted as a favorite motif of early cinema, their treatment in early films helped address the basic knowledge problem plaguing these debates, offering “pseudo-­empirical” validation of the very scenario that they enacted. Given that, as one German official conceded, “few cases of crime as a result of post-­hypnotic suggestion” had ever been recorded, it became necessary to support claims about the dangers of criminal suggestion through recourse to works of the imagination.24

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As we shall see, censor proceedings became one site within this larger cultural debate concerning hypnosis and its dangers. Censors, reformers, and medical experts grappled for decades with the possibility that popular film could implant dangerous ideas in its viewers’ minds. The fantasy of “criminal suggestion” became in this way a motif both of silent film and of the scientific discourse about film and its public. Officials frequently warned that especially suggestible audience members could be induced to commit the crimes they witnessed on-­screen. Yet investigation into this problem failed to yield reliable evidence of such a causal relation. The discussion about film’s suggestive powers was thus plagued by uncertainty and hyperbole. A notion distilling powerful fears, criminal suggestion remained a nebulous construct, occupying an epistemological terrain of experimentation, anecdotal evidence, and paranoid fiction. Yet sheer force of repetition helped to turn this notion from a matter of speculation into an account of reality that acquired the status of a powerful cultural myth. What explains the hold of this myth over turn-­of-­the-­century society? The European fin de siècle is commonly understood to have been a moment of major shifts and realignments in state, society, and thought. Historians have explained the ruptures of this period as a function of the crisis of the economic, political, and epistemological foundations of the nineteenth-­century liberal order. This order, which endured little more than a generation in central Europe and was deeply contested from the outset, was almost completely overturned by 1900. What replaced it was a wholly new constellation of political, bureaucratic, and corporate power, together with new patterns of mass mobilization that reflected the deepening impact of long-­term processes of urban, technological, and cultural change.25 This process of social transformation generated much intellectual ferment. One expression of this was the birth of the modern social and human sciences, which became crucial actors in the emergence of a post-­liberal order and the new forms of governmentality that accompanied it.26 Stripped of the bonds that once held traditional communities together, society and its members now became objects of analysis in their own right. Scientists invoked statistical findings and hereditarian doctrines to explain social phenomena like rising suicide and crime rates; others, like Le Bon in his writings on mass psychology or the Italian Scipio Sighele in his theory of the “criminal crowd,” borrowed from the language of the clinic and the laboratory to analyze crowd behavior.27 New discourses of the psyche and sexuality probed aspects of selfhood previously ignored by positivist doctrines. Many of these discourses

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were highly deterministic, classifying individuals according to theories that greatly constrained possibilities for personal freedom. Yet among these “young sciences” (Freud) were a handful—​­sexology, psychoanalysis, mental hygiene—​­that, even while sharing common ground with their more deterministic counterparts also held out real, if circumscribed, possibilities for personal agency. In part they did so by contesting the epistemological constraints placed on this terrain by scientific positivism, in part by exploiting new methods of investigation, among them hypnosis.28 The intensive thematization of hypnosis around 1900 is emblematic of the crisis of the liberal order. Hypnosis was taken up by many of the nascent sciences of this era, both at the level of everyday practice, where it was used to treat conditions like hysteria, addiction, and homosexuality, and at the level of discourse, where it became part of an attempt to account for the unconscious or supra-­individual forces that shaped human destinies. It thus acquired a central place within a cluster of sciences that endeavored to make individual and collective subjects the focus of new forms of knowledge, control, and reform.29 The “hypnosis myth” may accordingly be seen as an index of deep anxieties about individual autonomy amid the consolidation of new social and political forces at the turn of the century.30 Yet hypnosis also became associated with the possibility of new forms of self-­knowledge, agency, and emancipation central to the claims of the emerging human sciences. As such, it embodied the contradiction and strangeness surrounding many of those nascent disciplines. As Freud later wrote in noting the eerie feeling evoked by conditions like epilepsy and madness (the “ordinary person sees in them the workings of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow man”), those sciences that tried to lay bare these hidden forces were themselves uncanny to many people for that very reason.31 Official archives document some of the many forms taken by these contradictory ideas about hypnosis. In 1898, the Saxon Ministry of Justice sent out a circular to local authorities notifying them of its intent to assemble files on all criminal proceedings involving charges of “hypnotic influence” (Beeinflussung) over the ideas or will of a person.32 Numerous reports followed, many of them documenting defendants’ tendency to seek exoneration by alleging hypnotic control. Legal proceedings of the era contended repeatedly with the forensic questions surrounding the phenomenon of “influence” as well as their implications for ideas of free will and legal responsibility. Psychiatrists often remained unable to decide whether to emphasize hypnosis or

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other factors like heredity.33 In cases where the evidence did not substantiate the defendant’s claims of being under the influence of another’s will, officials generally fell back on a diagnosis of autosuggestion or defective personality. In one such case that came to the attention of authorities in Alsace-­Lorraine the defendant described being hypnotized and placed in a clairvoyant state, in which he gained an insight into “the science of the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses of which he had no knowledge in a waking state”; the expert reviewing the case stated that these claims contradicted the scientific understanding of hypnosis and that the defendant’s “trance” was entirely fictitious. Clairvoyance in this sense, argued the expert—​­“an allegedly innate yet slumbering knowledge, gained in a hypnotic state, of previously unknown things in the field of medicine and other sciences”—​­was quite simply impossible.34 In an effort to address these issues, the Prussian state convened a Hypnosis Commission in 1903. Though it succeeded in passing a new ban on lay hypnosis, many aspects of the commission’s findings remained disputed by experts.35 The uncertainties surrounding hypnosis persisted, often becoming laden with racial and paranoid overtones. At their most extreme, anxieties about new forms of institutional and technological power, and the fantasies of hidden agencies to which such anxieties gave rise, produced elaborate delusional systems. In the same year that the Hypnosis Commission convened, an especially vivid version of such a fantasy found its way into the hands of the Prussian police. The documentary evidence consisted of a pamphlet written by an American doctor that offered lessons on “the secrets of power” and “the science of health,” the “scientific laws” of “personal influence” and “magnetism,” and their role in successful business transactions and in medicine (i.e., treating alcoholism and smoking). The pamphlet was accompanied by a series of marginal notes and letters scrawled in cramped handwriting, by a writer identifying himself only as “Anonymous (a German),” who warned the Justice Ministry that behind this innocent-­sounding pamphlet stood a diabolic Jewish cabal (with branches in the United States and the United Kingdom) that used technical apparatus to influence the population by means of mass hypnosis, telepathy, and thought transference. The writer accused this organization of monstrous crimes, ranging from the murder of members of the German aristocracy to a scheme to use “electro-­magnetic currents” to transmit bacteria and other disease vectors to the broader population. The entire scheme rested on a system of hypnotic control that, according to “Anonymous,” conditioned individuals so that they could be hypnotized at a distance. He claimed to have himself been experimented on repeatedly in this fashion.36

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This delusional system illustrates the role of the hypnosis myth in making legible the hidden forces operating behind the opaque forms of modern social life. As such, it conforms to a type of melodrama of uncertain agency that found widespread expression at the fin de siècle.37 To be sure, persecutory systems like this were by no means unique to the modern era, as Max Nordau pointed out in his best-­selling Degeneration (1892), yet they nevertheless gained new salience at this moment through their association with new techniques and possibilities of mass influence. Hypnosis, we might say, here entered the age of technological reproducibility, and in so doing it inevitably became part of the anxious public debate about the new medium of cinema.38 By the early 1900s, film had become associated with an array of methods of control and influence, in a form that often took on a distinctly nationalist or racist cast. The prominent reformer Hermann Duenschmann, as noted earlier, made this association central to his account of the film audience, identifying a basic equivalence between the determinative influences (technical, racial, or hypnotic) acting on individuals and crowds. It became a central analytic concept of the scientific discourse on the relation between film and its public. These issues are illustrated in the censorship proceedings for the now lost film Unter fremdem Willen in 1912, the same year that Duenschmann published his article. The film tells the story of a young woman who is hypnotized by her debt-­ridden husband and ordered to rob her own father’s safe. In the course of the theft, she accidentally kills her father. Through the intervention of a doctor who uses a form of “counter-­hypnosis” on her, the woman is then released from the spell and, on the basis of memories she recalls under hypnosis, her husband arrested. The film thematizes the duality of hypnosis as an instrument of crime, on the one hand, and as a means of treatment, on the other. The film’s producers invoked this duality in their response to the censor’s objections, claiming that the film performed its own form of “counter-­ hypnosis” on the audience by conveying knowledge about the dangers and the benefits of hypnosis. To no avail, however; the censor upheld its original decision to ban the film.39 This ruling was cited by Albert Hellwig, a key ally of Duenschmann’s in the film-­reform movement and a later architect of the Motion Picture Law passed in 1920. In his article “Hypnotism and Cinematograph” (1916), Hellwig stated categorically that, “purely objectively, the possibility of hypnotic influence being put to criminal ends has been recognized by science.”40 In his very next sentence, however, Hellwig referred dismissively to the “exaggerated

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scenarios” that had so exercised turn-­of-­the-­century psychologists. What really concerned him was that this scientific problem had become part of “general public knowledge”: the scenarios that first surfaced in scientific literature now circulated, in the form of Schund, as part of the general cultural property of the masses.41 With reference to the case of Unter fremdem Willen, Hellwig echoed the censor in rejecting the possibility of any value in the depiction of the woman’s cure, and the unmasking of the criminal, through “counter-­ hypnosis,” arguing that this merely served to demonstrate further the dangerous “power of hypnosis.” Hellwig prefaced his article with a warning about the false ideas and prejudices, which he blamed partly on films, held by much of the public toward psychiatrists and their institutions. In the observations that followed, Hellwig invoked psychiatric authority in condemning the depiction of hypnosis in films (which contributed to many “erroneous ideas amongst the public about hypnosis”) and in articulating a theory of the effects such films could have on members of the audience who were at risk, psychologically and morally. Moreover, he continued, the fact that such films could be seen as posing a risk for “normal spectators” as well made it all the more imperative for the state to intervene by widening the parameters of existing censorship laws. Quite explicitly Hellwig here made the case that censorship represented a public health measure, a preventive control on the “suggestive Beeinflussung” that film exercised over its audience. In what way, according to figures like Hellwig, did film exercise “hypnotic” control over its public? What formal properties of the medium contributed to beliefs about its suggestive power? As noted in the previous chapter, cinema and its audience were seen from the outset as occupying a liminal social space: the darkness of the theater, the luminescence of the screen, the rapidity of images that cascaded across it, all contributed, experts believed, to an intensely immersive experience, one in which the audience’s field of vision and of consciousness became progressively narrowed in a manner akin to that experienced in hypnosis.42 Such effects were heightened by the techniques, such as close-­ups and rapid editing, that were part of the medium’s formal repertoire, which further reinforced what Münsterberg called the moving image’s “incomparable intensity.” Effects like these, moreover, were held to be all the more powerful in the case of the women and adolescents believed to make up the majority of the audience, whose supposedly underdeveloped critical faculties rendered them highly suggestible. Commentators writing on film’s spectators also frequently stressed the state of fatigue created in them by the

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hectic demands of the modern workplace and of modern city life.43 Their resistance accordingly lowered, already in a half-­conscious state, it was all the easier for “trash” films to work their spell on them: to “speculate on the audience’s lowest instincts” or to arouse “slumbering impulses” and “latent tendencies.” To these claims about the medium’s formal attributes and the audience’s social makeup we must add another set of claims having to do with cinema’s contribution to new “ways of seeing.” Such claims often stressed the manner in which moving images opened up perceptual registers beyond those available to the naked eye, and they became central, as we saw in Chapter 1, to the emerging epistemology of scientific observation at the turn of the century. But the new analytic insights afforded by the moving image—​­of movement, of “life,” of disease—​­hardly exhausted its range of possibilities. Just as film expanded the register of perception to the level of the supersensory, so too it addressed the spectator at this level in a way that invited analogy to that other great technology of the unconscious, hypnosis. As Walter Benjamin would famously observe, film opened up an entire field of “unconscious optics,” granting access to a spectrum of both outer and inner experience far wider than that of other media or cultural forms. Drawing partly on Freud, Benjamin accorded film with a unique, almost revelatory capacity to penetrate the everyday continuum of experience and thereby to expose a world of subliminal experience, of emotion, of hidden structures.44 Looked at in this light, indeed, cinema offered a kind of counterhypnosis: Benjamin stressed its potential to transform the film public from a mass of “hypnotized test subjects” into politically aware citizens. But the emancipatory possibilities he identified with film took on darker qualities in the imagination of reformers, who saw in the medium’s powers of mass influence an ominous social force. Albert Hellwig’s commentary on the RLG passed in 1920 stressed precisely this element of the medium’s “tremendous suggestive power” in justifying the reinstatement of censorship.45

Cinema and Hypnosis Around 1920 As we have seen, attributions of hypnotic power to the moving image date almost from the advent of cinema. Throughout the medium’s early history, the social ramifications of this power remained a matter of abiding concern to authorities. One of these concerned its impact in the courtroom. By 1920, the

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year of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the phrase “I was hypnotized” had seemingly entered the everyday lexicon of the criminal defendant, a development that officials took to be symptomatic of a widespread crisis of moral character that was endemic in postwar Germany. This assertion formed the basis of a ruling by the Berlin Censor Board to ban the film Augen (Eyes), a remake of the Trilby story, in November 1920. In its decision, the board, newly constituted following the reinstatement of film censorship that summer, voiced concerns identical to those raised by Hellwig—​­namely, that such a film could awaken false ideas in the public concerning both hypnosis and concepts of right and wrong. In order to determine more precisely the relation between the film’s depiction of criminal hypnosis and its negative “Beeinflussung der Mentalität” of the audience, the board invited Karl Bonhoeffer, director of the Charité Psychiatric Clinic, to assist in its deliberations. In his place, Bonhoeffer sent his assistant Edmund Forster, who, after screening the film, criticized its “unscientific” depiction of hypnosis and warned that it posed a danger to public order by implanting in the minds of morally weak or “at risk” individuals the belief that such “influences” could exonerate them from responsibility for their crimes.46 While Forster’s views reinforced the decision to ban the film, the matter did not rest there, for the film’s producer, Citograph Film, appealed the decision. On appeal, the Appellate Board overturned the ban on the grounds that, since the film’s purpose was not instruction but simply entertainment, the truth or falsity of its depiction of hypnosis remained irrelevant, parenthetically noting that the concept of hypnosis was never explicitly invoked in the film.47 This position was affirmed in a handful of subsequent censor proceedings. In one, the Berlin professor of philosophy Max Dessoir rejected the theory of criminal suggestion as a purely literary invention with no basis in science or in case history, citing the absence of a single proven instance in the previous twenty years.48 This opinion would be cited as precedent in subsequent censor proceedings. At the same time, however, the republic’s new institutions of censorship continued to cite the diametrically opposed views of other experts. Two years later, as we shall see, Forster’s superior Bonhoeffer echoed his assistant’s opinion almost verbatim as part of a wider effort to canvass medical views on this topic. These regulatory efforts and the scientific debates surrounding them mirrored parallel efforts relating to public performances of mediumistic practices. Two weeks prior to the initial ruling on Augen, on October 20, the Interior Ministry had taken up a related matter in reissuing the turn-­of-­the-­century ban on public demonstrations of hypnosis, suggestion, and magnetism and on

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their use in experiments on audience volunteers. The war’s aftermath, as many authorities noted, had been marked by an alarming resurgence of public interest in telepathy, clairvoyance, and other esoteric phenomena, fueled by itinerant showmen who crisscrossed the country offering demonstrations of the power of hypnosis to sizable crowds. These figures evoked wide condemnation by public authorities. Indeed, by the time the Interior Ministry initiated its crackdown, official concerns surrounding hypnotic showmen and their popularity among the German public had become pronounced. Toward the end of the previous year, in October 1919, the Munich psychiatrist and expert in parapsychology Albert von Freiherr Schrenck-­Notzing submitted a lengthy report to the Interior Ministry, in which he painted the problem in the darkest possible colors: “The mass-­psychosis of war and revolution demonstrates its epidemic effects in the general spread of the addiction to strong spiritual feelings.” War and the disorder that followed, Schrenck-­Notzing theorized, had loosened normal social controls, fueling a hunger on the public’s part for new forms of entertainment but also healing, esoteric knowledge, and spiritual guidance. The German public had become “exceptionally receptive” to all sensations of an occult, secretive character. As a result of political upheaval and the prevailing “feeling of freedom,” any unemployed person endowed with even minimal charisma could excite the public’s interest with his techniques of “soul vivisection”; traveling around the country, such “artists of will-­influencing” persuaded others of their own powers and thus unleashed a veritable “hypnosis-­epidemic.”49 Highly symptomatic of the problems this exaggerated “feeling of freedom” had caused, in Schrenck-­Notzing’s eyes, was the breakdown of most forms of censorship, and ensuing repeated clashes between authorities and these Caligariesque showmen over licenses. Public interest—​­measurable in attendance and participation in performances, volunteering to be used as experimental subjects—​­ran high. In its extension of the language of the clinic to society, Schrenck-­Notzing’s report represents a variation on a frequently reiterated theme of the war’s aftermath. It reflected the emergence of a medical narrative of wartime and postwar collapse, according to which the German nation had succumbed to a collective nervous and moral breakdown, the symptoms of which were now propagated throughout society in episodes of mass “psychic contagion” (dancing, gambling, occultism, and other manias). The often-­invoked “hypnosis epidemic” was a central theme of this narrative. In medical journals and in articles in the daily press, physicians condemned this development in terms

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that hearkened back to an earlier, turn-­of-­the-­century skepticism, when most German doctors consigned hypnotism to the province of charlatanism. What in the meantime had altered medical views toward hypnosis, and now complicated the official reaction to its popular manifestation, was its widespread use during the war as a means of treating soldiers afflicted with shellshock. As Paul Lerner has shown, the official sanctioning of what had once been associated with the fairground and with medical frauds opened a Pandora’s box that caused postwar authorities no end of trouble.50 Here it is worth noting, apropos of the carnival setting of Caligari’s first scenes, Freud’s observation in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) that such settings are marked by a general suspension of prohibitions.51 In this sense, Caligari’s opening scenes provide a metonym for the perceived moral license of this period. A report sent by one regional official to the Interior Ministry traced the trouble to the war, when hypnosis had first proven its value as a means of treatment but also the dangers associated with its use by unlicensed practitioners. The report cited the case of a soldier who was hypnotized by his comrade and who then abandoned the front in a “trance-­like state.” Further, such instances had multiplied since the war, as lay hypnotists performed public experiments in hypnotism that they had themselves first experienced as wartime patients.52 In one official circular, local police were warned of a hypnotist who traveled about treating members of the public onstage by means of a form of Überrumpelungs-­Hypnose, a term invoking the notorious wartime method of aggressive electrotherapy known as Kaufmannization, and carrying connotations of overpowering and surprise attack. This method, according to the circular, had been practiced successfully on war neurotics, but, it was stressed—​­in a likely allusion to a handful of postwar trials that had received much coverage in the popular press—​­carried grave risks.53 The most high profile of these trials involved the eminent Viennese physician Julius Wagner-­Jauregg, who was compelled to defend himself against charges of medical malpractice relating to the abusive forms of electrotherapy used during the war in the hospital where he served as director. Though acquitted of the charges, Wagner-­Jauregg briefly became the public face of a system widely seen as synonymous with medical brutality.54 The fact that this trial took place at the exact moment that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered has led Anton Kaes to suggest that the figure of Caligari may well have become linked in the public mind with Wagner-­Jauregg. Notwithstanding the charges against him, Wagner-­Jauregg was that same year asked by the German

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Psychiatric Association, acting on a request from Munich police headquarters, to submit an opinion on the abuses associated with lay hypnosis. He was also asked to comment on Schrenck-­Notzing’s views on the advisability of banning hypnotic performances. Though he does not mention Caligari in his report, Wagner-­Jauregg seems to refer to it obliquely in writing of “the hypnotic epidemic that has once again, as so often before, infested the world.” Large segments of the populace, he went on, “have a craving to attend hypnotic and similar performances and to participate in hypnotic and similar psychological experiments.”55 Dismissing any possibility that such performances might serve to spread genuine “knowledge and enlightenment concerning psychological processes,” Wagner-­ Jauregg seconded Schrenck-­Notzing’s view that they corresponded purely to a desire for entertainment and the satisfaction of a morbid “addiction to intense emotions.” In assessing the dangers of such performances and the need for controls, the physician distinguished between two basic forms. The first concerned so-­called experiments in telepathy, which he dismissed as a harmless form of muscle reading. The second form concerned experiments in psychological Beeinflussung and usually involved compelling volunteers to perform acts against their will for the public.56 The dangers of these were not limited simply to those who volunteered to serve as experimental subjects (most of them belonging “to the ranks of the neuro-­and psychopaths”) but to the public as well. The aura surrounding the charlatans who performed these experiments encouraged members of the public to seek them out for help with their ailments. Moreover, “[p]ublic performances of hypnotic experiments are also harmful insofar as they convey to large masses of people the knowledge that hypnotic procedures . . . ​could be used to place others in a condition of mental dependency, a state of bondage.” Wagner-­Jauregg warned that this knowledge could be easily abused for both sexual and criminal purposes. On these grounds, he strongly advocated a “ban on public performances of hypnotic and suggestive experiments,” referring as precedent to a ban passed in Austria in 1896 on the basis of a medical opinion by Richard von Krafft-­ Ebing. Given his own implication in charges of medical abuse, it is tempting to see in Wagner-­Jauregg’s treatment of the theme of transgressive knowledge a form of splitting, a disavowal and transformation of the ethical critique of wartime psychiatry into charges of sexual or criminal abuse projected onto the ambiguous Doppelgänger figure of the charlatan.57 The expert opinions by Schrenck-­Notzing, Wagner-­Jauregg, and others concerning the dangers of lay hypnosis and public performances of

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mediumistic experiments would in turn feed back into official efforts to regulate the depiction of hypnosis in popular cinema. Here too wartime events, as noted in Chapter 1, influenced postwar developments by lending official sanction to the cinematic representation of hypnosis and by introducing such representations into the public sphere. The key example was Max Nonne’s 1917 film documenting the hypnotic treatment of war neurotics. Thirty years previously, Nonne had echoed many German physicians in condemning the theatrical mise-­en-­scène of Charcot’s Tuesday lectures, at which he subjected hysteric women to hypnotic experimentation before enthralled audiences that included members of the general public. Yet, as Paul Lerner has shown, in his own hypnotic treatment of so-­called war hysterics, Nonne himself resorted to highly theatrical measures.58 Quite apart from the filmic representation of the cure itself, the therapeutic setting at Nonne’s Hamburg hospital acquired quasi-­cinematographic features. His account of the mass cures he practiced there—​­in which the powerful “suggestions” emanating from his own person were reinforced by the “mutual auto-­suggestions” of the patients—​­bore a distinct resemblance to contemporary accounts of the atmosphere in a film theater. Nonne described performing hypnotic cures in the presence of as many as forty patients (im Lichte der Öffentlichkeit), and acknowledged that “[t]his spirit of the clinic counts among the chapters in the history of mass-­ suggestion.”59 In turning the hypnotic treatment into a kind of spectacle, Nonne also allied it strongly with a system of military discipline and order that stressed overpowering the patient’s “will to sickness” and implanting in its place a new “will to health.” This approach was criticized by, among others, Ernst Simmel, a disciple of Freud’s who strongly objected to the instrumentalization of wartime psychiatry. At the same time, Simmel himself used hypnosis to treat soldiers, practicing a cathartic method based on psychoanalytic principles (whose recovery of memory he likened to the unreeling of a film), yet one that in its emphasis on efficiency and speed nevertheless resembled the more overtly “assembly line” processing associated with Wagner-­Jauregg’s hospital.60 Medical practitioners of all persuasions experimented intensively with suggestive treatment, while also participating in ongoing disputes surrounding its scientific status and its dangers. These disputes continued throughout the Weimar period as part of a wider public debate over the war’s legacy and its representation. One way of reading The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is precisely in terms of these demarcation battles. While the “unlimited power over the will of

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another” that hypnotism placed in the hands of the authoritarian doctor forms the basis for the tale related in the film, Caligari also, as Anton Kaes suggests, appropriates medical knowledge at another level. The story unfolds as a flashback told by one of its protagonists who is a patient in an asylum, thus inscribing a version of the talking cure into its narrative. The figure of Caligari thus “oscillates between two kinds of psychiatry.”61 If, as Doris Kaufmann has argued, Weimar society was marked by a general acceptance of “psychiatric patterns of interpretation,” these nevertheless remained deeply contested, both within the psychiatric community itself (which was hardly monolithic), and within the larger public realm. Even as popular film continued to serve scientists as a research medium into mass behavior, it also functioned as a medium in which to register both the powerful hold that psychiatric modes of thought had gained within the public realm and a critique of this development. Caligari itself, and the postwar “hypnotic epidemic” that it emblematized, became a central reference point within a medicalized narrative embraced by many in the war’s aftermath as part of an effort to make sense of the crises facing Germany. Even as they confronted challenges to their authority in the form of trials, bad press, and popular films, psychiatrists strove to stake out and lay claim to new forms of moral and cultural authority and to extend this to a wider social terrain. Leading figures in the field—​­Gaupp, Kraepelin, Bonhoeffer, and Wagner-­Jauregg—​­lent their voices to this project, addressing not simply issues surrounding malingering, war neurosis, and mental health but also the numerous “panics,” “manias,” and “psychoses” of the postwar era (gambling, pornography, drugs, mediumism, dancing, and crime). In this they largely succeeded: as Kaufmann shows, even when their authority or their narratives were contested, this was often in terms that tended to affirm them. In certain respects, indeed, they succeeded in ways they scarcely intended. To return to the censor proceedings for Augen: if the phrase “I was hypnotized” could be taken as a sign of a lowering of “mental fitness”—​­a development linked to a multitude of social ills associated with revolution and the moral collapse of the postwar period—​­then it could also be taken as evidence of the degree to which psychiatric modes of reasoning had gained wide circulation in German society and equally of the strange consequences of this process. In a version of the feedback between scientist and subject that Ian Hacking dubs the “looping effect,” the migration of “exaggerated scenarios” from scientific literature to Schund literature described by

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Hellwig had resulted in a situation in which the cultural fantasy of criminal suggestion had taken on a life of its own. Claims of diminished responsibility now circulated in a cultural space in which the “known about” appropriated their own version of the “knowers” discourse.62 It accordingly became possible for defendants to claim in court, as did one young thief, that he carried out his crime under the hypnotic influence of an “unknown person”; his knowledge of hypnosis, which was good enough to deceive at least one psychiatrist, was apparently derived from public demonstrations, films, and cheap pamphlets.63 In such instances, as in films like Caligari, psychiatric knowledge appeared to itself in a strange or alienated form. It was hardly surprising that psychiatrists like Robert Gaupp began cautioning against the dangers stemming from the inflationary overuse of medical tropes in public discourse.64 The paradoxes in evidence here are illustrated by a case that occupied the attention of German censors over a period of several years at the outset of the Weimar era. In late November 1920, seventeen-­year-­old Willi Rieding, a ward of a welfare institution, murdered an elderly widow. Investigation revealed that the crime had been committed shortly after Rieding had seen the film The Hand of the Strangler. Under the film’s influence, the idea had apparently been awakened in the defendant’s mind that it was much easier to strangle a person than he had believed and, after watching the film twice more in order to “learn precisely” how to carry out such an act, he then proceeded to commit the terrible deed.65 Two years later, in August 1922, the Film Appellate Board sent a memo to the Reich Interior Ministry regarding the question of “the causal connection between cinematic representations of hypnosis and criminal acts”: In light of laboratory experiments, the possibility of the misuse of hypnotized individuals to carry out crimes can, in the judgment of the eminent Viennese psychiatrist von Wagner-­Jauregg and other leading representatives of psychiatry, no longer be disputed. Whether and to what extent the public representation of hypnosis in film is capable of strengthening or triggering criminal tendencies in certain audience members is a question that has not yet been clarified adequately to allow for a definitive judgment. However, based on the cases assembled by the police forces of major cities, it can be said that the tendency of many individuals of a weak-­willed nature to commit criminal acts is nourished or even incited by crimes in films.66

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The memo proceeded to illustrate this claim by citing the Rieding case. Its author took for granted that the murderer had acted under the film’s direct influence, noting in a telling formulation that, “although hypnotic demonstrations played no role in this case, it nevertheless provides proof of the effects of film per se.” The depiction of hypnosis in many films, the memo continued, “gives those with criminal natures the occasion to test their own abilities in the art of hypnosis, and in case of success to obtain a medium who will allow himself to be easily controlled. From there to the commission of a crime with the aid of such a medium is but a step.” In this case, given the absence of any mention of an accomplice, the unstated presumption seems to have been that Rieding acted as his own medium—​­or that the film itself had transformed him into a medium. Doubtless aware of the conjectural nature of these claims, the Appellate Board then introduced into consideration another case, this one not relating to any actual crime at all but rather to a film about hypnotic crime, namely the prewar Unter fremdem Willen (discussed above, 113–14). It noted that similar concerns had, well before the passage of the RLG in 1920, led the Berlin police in 1912 to ban that film on grounds similar to those invoked in connection with the Rieding affair. The relevant files on this earlier film were included in the report, as further proof in support of assertions that, as in the case of The Hand of the Strangler, rested on a chain of reasoning that emphasized the dangerous effects, both direct and indirect, of popular cinema.67 What is also clear in this set of documents is that, unlike the rather equivocal rulings on hypnosis films at the outset of the 1920s, official views regarding the issue in 1922, when the Rieding case resurfaced, had hardened. At least in part, this seems to have reflected the amplification of the themes of hypnosis and suggestion in popular motion pictures. The key example here was Fritz Lang’s newly released Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), a dark fable that portrayed postwar Germany as a society in the grip of a series of monstrous plots orchestrated by the master criminal and hypnotist Mabuse. After noting the “great interest” the Berlin public had shown in Lang’s film, the board went on to state that, by comparison with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, “[h]ypnosis and suggestion played a much more significant role in the film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler.” Indeed, the film’s content was based almost entirely on these motifs: “The uncanny power of hypnosis is demonstrated inasmuch as Dr. Mabuse, who controls a money counterfeiting operation, compels through the force immanent within himself all people to submit to his will, and to use them to commit crimes without their own awareness, even to drive them to suicide.”68

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While conceding that it was too early to determine the impact of Lang’s film on the public, the report raised concerns about the probable effects of its representations of hypnotic phenomena on its “indiscriminately assembled spectator-­masses.” Among these was the possibility of awakening “more or less slumbering criminal impulses” in its audience, a concern that, it noted, was shared by medical and criminological experts alike. Due to the medium’s formal properties—​­such as the absence of the spoken word and the corresponding emphasis on exaggerated forms of facial expression—​­the dangers of the cinematic depiction of experiments in hypnosis far outweighed those of the live demonstration. Hence the need to tighten controls with respect to such representations, which endangered not simply “weak-­willed” types but even those who are “healthy, yet easily-­influenced.” The report concluded by recommending that eminent psychiatrists be asked to submit opinions on this question, which concerned issues central to their areas of expertise. In fact, this step had already been taken. At the beginning of 1922 the Appellate Board contacted the Interior Ministry to notify it that the board had once again taken up the issue of the representation of hypnosis in film and of its dangers for audiences. Present-­day expert opinion, it explained, remained divided on the matter; hampered by the absence of any actual cases, it often referred back to cases that were more than twenty years old (including the Czynski affair in 1895 that had prompted the original KGA inquiry of that year). As a result, the board had taken the position that the danger was minimal; more recently, however, the increase of allegations and press reports on this matter had compelled it to revisit the question. It recommended a survey of the Länder.69 In due course, the Interior Ministry sent memos to the Justice Ministry and the Reich Health Office (RGA) asking them to submit reports concerning the causal relation between, respectively, hypnosis and crime, and hypnosis and injuries to health.70 For its part, the Justice Ministry downplayed the dangers, reporting that the incidence of such cases was statistically negligible. The RGA, however, took a far more serious view of the matter. Implicitly challenging the Justice minister’s response, the RGA cited the increasing volume of press accounts, and also specifically noted the likelihood that cinematic representations of hypnosis could exercise an “unhealthy influence, especially in this time of nervous over-­stimulation,” particularly on “easily excitable and underage individuals.”71 Attached to this response were opinions by the psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin and Karl Bonhoeffer, who, as directors of the psychiatric clinics of the universities of Munich and Berlin, respectively, occupied the leading positions in their field in Germany.

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Roughly one month prior to the release of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, these two eminent figures concurred in expressing caution about the extent of the dangers of crime committed under the influence of hypnosis or film. Both, however, stressed the very real dangers of a variety of harmful effects on health, imagination, and morality. Kraepelin’s chief concern lay with the possibility that reckless individuals would be provoked to perform experiments with hypnosis: through this “wild” form of hypnosis, which “served only to satisfy curiosity,” “amateurs would very likely suffer injuries to their health.” In his opinion, Bonhoeffer repeated almost verbatim the views voiced by his assistant Forster in the censorship proceeding for the film Augen: apart from the possible “incitement to crime” (to which he gave more credence than did Kraepelin), Bonhoeffer also warned about the false ideas concerning hypnosis that popular films could awaken in viewers. Such representations, he wrote, “are capable of lowering the sense of individual self-­ responsibility with respect to criminal impulses on the part of youths and those who are easily influenced. The defendant’s claim, nowadays often heard, that he was under hypnotic influence, has gradually entered into the criminal’s inventory of excuses under the influence of such performances.” Bonhoeffer concluded that such performances were contrary to the interests of public health and might lead to the “hystericization of sectors of the populace.” Such concerns, however widely shared, nevertheless continued to run up against a lack of concrete evidence, as the Appellate Board signaled to the RGA in asking for proof rather than mere conjecture.72 In search of more definitive answers, the Interior Ministry broadened its inquiry, instigating the survey of the Länder as well as the turn to medical opinion, to case literature, and to earlier precedent. Yet despite the fact that virtually no unequivocal examples could be found attesting to the causal connection, cases like Rieding’s, along with the trail of documentation linking it to earlier rulings and expert testimonials, established the basis for a consensus that was shared by all but a few skeptics. In the meantime, the example of Mabuse clearly weighed heavily over the Appellate Board’s deliberations. Paradoxically, in granting the film a distribution permit, it asked for relatively minor cuts, these relating mainly to scenes of gunfighting that the board feared would awaken the public’s memories of the street violence associated with the Spartacist uprising in early 1919.73 Thus while signaling its commitment to regulating those effects that operated at a formal level—​­effects that, as in the Rieding case, implied a model of filmic

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influence analogous to that of hypnosis—​­it left intact the hypnotic themes serving as the film’s actual content. This was unexpected, given the concerns earlier voiced in regard to the film’s treatment of the “uncanny power” of hypnosis. The decision occasioned surprise among some reviewers who were aware of official concerns surrounding hypnosis films. One cited the film’s use of close-­ups, camera movement, and editing techniques to heighten its specifically “hypnotic” address of the audience. These, as Stefan Andriopoulos has written, work to directly position the audience within Mabuse’s hypnotic field of vision (see Figure 11). Through its use of such formal devices, the film foregrounds the very knowledge being brought to bear on the dangers associated with the cinema. Some reviews seemed to look for explanations for the censor’s relative lenience in noting that Lang’s film, while openly trafficking in themes of gangsterism and crime, had succeeded in elevating these from the level of trash to that of art. One reviewer adopted a more elaborate explanation that emphasized the film’s “caricature of hypnosis” and speculated that its real achievement lay in its “power over the film censor, whose solemn prejudice against all hypnosis in film was successfully suggested away (wegsuggeriert).” In fact the film—​­in a crucial scene that we shall return later to—​­incorporates a commentary on its own “hypnotic” power that may well have served to preempt the censor’s ban.74

Figure 11. Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922). The hypnotic gaze and narrowing of the field of vision.

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In a later interview, Lang claimed his film had been the first to represent hypnosis on-­screen and that this had entailed overcoming the strong objections of the censor because at the time it was completely forbidden to show hypnosis in a film.75 Though Lang’s memory deceived him on both counts, it is true, as the reviews cited above indicate, that authorities had become profoundly uneasy about the cinematic representation of hypnosis. Indeed, by this time they were openly considering the possibility of a specific antihypnosis film ban. In response to the survey circulated by the Interior Ministry, provincial authorities sent back reports confirming in extensive detail the alarming picture earlier drawn by Schrenck-­Notzing and Wagner-­Jauregg. Authorities in Saxony were especially keen on the necessity of imposing a solution at the national level; they wanted the matter resolved by the Reich in order to establish consistency between the Länder, arguing that this was especially necessary in the current “politically troubled times.”76 A report from the Regional Health Office in Dresden echoed many of Bonhoeffer’s fears concerning the likelihood that filmic representations of hypnotic experiments could lead to the “hystericization of those who allow themselves to be used as experimental subjects.”77 Hypnosis, which had proven so beneficial during the war in curing psychiatric and nervous disturbances, had become in the hands of postwar lay practitioners a means of spreading precisely such disturbances among otherwise healthy citizens. The report also posed the by now familiar question: “Could crimes be committed under hypnosis?” Its answer was equivocal: crimes occurred only rarely under hypnosis, but frequently in a state of waking suggestion, the boundaries between hypnotic Beeinflussung and waking suggestion remaining hard to determine. Though scientific opinion remained divided, laboratory experiments had established that people under hypnosis could indeed be induced to commit crimes. On those grounds, the report recommended strengthening the power of film censors to ban films featuring hypnosis. Reports like this, together with others submitted in response to the survey, strengthened the sense of urgency surrounding calls for more concerted action, eventually leading to demands for a concrete ban on hypnosis films. Such a ban remained elusive, however, attesting as much as anything to the complex legal landscape surrounding the regulation of lay medicine. Already in its initial attempt to address the problem in 1920, the Interior Ministry had signaled the dangers of any appearance of overreaching, and exempted some practices from its ban.78 The extent to which public opinion factored into the Interior Ministry’s deliberations is hard to gauge, but its files also contain evidence of sensitivity to citizens’ rights to choose alternative medical

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practitioners. In the end, it was less the disputes among communities of scientific experts that mattered than legal issues that blocked necessary preventive measures. As more than one respondent emphasized, the problem of hypnosis in film could not be treated in isolation from a larger set of issues that similarly required resolution through changes to the nation’s laws.79 In particular, despite the desirability of a ban encompassing lay hypnosis and its cinematic depiction, such a ban would be difficult to square with the laws on freedom of trade, as the RGA signaled to the Interior Ministry.80 Meanwhile, official communications relating to the nexus between hypnosis and film illustrate authorities’ continuing tendency to place this issue in the widest possible context. On the one hand, its spread was seen as a direct outgrowth of the political changes of recent times: “It is striking that the number of lectures on occultist topics has increased substantially since the revolution.”81 On the other, it was linked to a broad set of dangers defined in existential terms as threats to the health of the Volk. In a memo to the Interior Ministry, the Prussian Minister of Public Welfare again warned of the dangers of the “hypnotic epidemic” unleashed in Germany since the war, describing cases in which entire towns had become “infested” and trials in which allegations of hypnosis and counterhypnosis were flung back and forth.82 The problem of lay hypnosis, like that of medical charlatanism more generally, had not merely increased in the postwar era but was itself to be regarded as a leading indicator of a larger series of health crises afflicting the nation: “[T]he greatly worsening health conditions in Germany, which presumably will be felt for decades to come, make proper treatment by specialists imperative and require prohibition of the activities of charlatans.”83 Such a ban had become a centerpiece of a new law on combating venereal disease then under consideration by the Reichstag. But as the RGA subsequently wrote to Interior, it regarded such a ban as premature and on tactical grounds preferred to wait until the law on combating venereal disease had been adopted. It also cited the opinion of the Saxon Landesgesundheitsamt (LGA) as a precedent but saw its recommendation to ban hypnosis as going too far, posing the risk of backfiring or of complicating an eventual legal solution.84 • • • Before concluding, we should once again consider one of the chief claims made by doctors in their response to the dangers they associated with popular film. This was the alleged tendency of many courtroom defendants to respond

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to the charges against them with the statement: “I was hypnotized”—​­a tendency that doctors often blamed on cinema. Psychiatrists expressed broad agreement that such statements offered evidence of the condition of moral and psychological crisis that had become central to the narrative they constructed about the larger crises facing Germany. Emerging in response to defeat and revolution as well as to the social pathologies that followed in their wake (crime, “cultural Bolshevism,” the “occultist plague”), this became part of a psychiatric version of the stab-­in-­the-­back legend. Yet such statements also reflected ambiguously on their own claims to authority, which had emerged from the war simultaneously enhanced and tarnished. Writing in 1919, Wagner-­Jauregg disparaged what he saw as a widespread “superstitious fear” concerning the power of the hypnotist.85 Yet his own role as defendant in a malpractice suit that called into question the dubious and often brutal methods, including hypnosis and electrotherapy, used to treat war neurotics makes this statement striking for its failure to recognize the agency of psychiatry itself in the genesis of such beliefs and of the statements they gave rise to—​­all the more so, it should be added, given the aura of theater and magic that often surrounded the use of these methods.86 There are a number of ways of relating this claim to its specific historical and discursive contexts. The statement “I was hypnotized” could, of course, be invoked by many German soldiers who had come into contact with military psychiatry, a profession that in the war’s aftermath was often accused in the popular press of practicing a form of “scientific charlatanism,” even while its idioms gained ever broader circulation in postwar society. The widespread presence of war neurotics in German public life, whether in the form of the ubiquitous “war-­ trembler” (Kriegszitterer) who populated street corners, or of hypnotic ­showmen—​­many of them, according to police reports, former soldiers who first experienced hypnosis as patients—​­served as an all-­too-­vivid reminder of wartime conflicts between medical authorities and soldiers. In the war’s aftermath, hypnosis was routinely adopted as a method for treating alcoholism, homosexuality, and other conditions, yet it nevertheless continued to be seen as an esoteric practice. In this it had much in common with the human sciences more generally, whose ambivalent status Freud commented on when he surmised that those disciplines, like psychoanalysis, that tried to lay bare the hidden workings of the mind, were uncanny to many people for that very reason.87 It is precisely this sense of uncanniness that confers on Dr. Mabuse, whose many guises include that of a psychoanalyst, his aura of dangerous fascination. Mabuse uses his knowledge of those “hidden workings” to obtain control

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over individuals and masses. His psychoanalytic persona is just one of many masking his role as the secret power behind the criminal enterprise looming over the society portrayed in the film—​­a portrait that, in what Lang called its “documentary” treatment of the sicknesses afflicting this society (gambling, cocaine addiction, and occultism), appropriates for its own purposes a medicalized narrative of postwar German society, while at the same time also foregrounding the act of enunciation that produces such narratives. As we shall see in Chapter 4 in connection with the history of the enlightenment film, in the interwar period this act of expert enunciation increasingly acquired a specifically cinematic dimension.88 Mabuse is in this sense the embodiment of the “hypnosis myth” and its function in the modern era: the demonic “personification of a mythic power behind the chaos of society.”89 When he tells one of his victims that he will demonstrate for her “the power of will” and then compels her husband to cheat at cards, leading to the man’s ruin and eventual suicide, he reveals himself to be one of those “artists of will-­influencing” described by Schrenck-­Notzing. A crucial demonstration of this artistry occurs in a key scene in which, disguised as the showman Sandor Weltmann, he stages an experiment in “mass suggestion.” For the benefit of his spellbound audience, he conjures a collective hallucination that briefly transforms a conventional lecture hall into a film theater (see Figure 12). The moving images of a desert caravan seem to cite the scene in The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) in which Rabbi Loew summons for the King’s court the birth of cinema in the form of the story of Ahasverus, the wandering Jew. As Stefan Andriopoulos has written, Lang’s scene serves as a meta-­cinematic commentary on the cultural fantasy of film as a medium with the capacity to cast a powerful spell over its audience.90 As with the case of Anonymous, the unnamed writer who in 1903 had shared with the Prussian police his dark fantasy of being under the hypnotic control of a Jewish cabal, the figure of Mabuse awakened racial fears.91 Echoing the arguments of Werner Sombart’s influential text The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1913), which highlighted the Jewish people’s chameleon-­like adaptability and powers of suggestion, the radical right press identified Mabuse as a version of the “wandering Jew” who used his hypnotic powers to carry out plans for world domination.92 In such accounts, Mabuse gave human form to a constellation of methods of mass influence, suggestion, and control perceived to be in the service of the Jews’ mythic powers of psychological domination.93 Such myths took on great salience amid the conditions prevailing in postwar Germany. The combined effects of military defeat, political upheaval, and

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Figure 12. Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922). Experiments in mass suggestion.

economic calamity produced what historians have described as a condition of status panic among the Weimar middle and lower middle classes. Detlev Peukert has described the mentality of Weimar’s “salaried masses” in the following terms: “Certain groups experienced particularly acutely the upheavals of the modernization process . . . ​while remaining particularly in the dark about their causes.” Longer-­term processes of social change and restructuring combined with the multiple shocks of the Weimar period to produce extreme disorientation: “The whole intertwined complexity of crisis and change remained uncomprehended and was commonly reduced to a few easy catchphrases. . . . ​The causes, since in reality they were obscure and genuinely hard to separate out, were personalized and mythologized.”94 Peukert evokes the experience of millions of ordinary Germans who no longer felt themselves to be in control of their lives but rather under the sway of large, impersonal forces. Many became susceptible to the conspiracy narratives offered by the Nazis, which tapped into a deep “reservoir of existential anxiety.” Under these circumstances, many citizens experienced a sense of “agency panic”—​­a crisis of diminished agency that, as Anson Rabinbach writes, may occur in specific historical conditions like those that existed in postwar Germany.95 Yet it should be stressed that, however genuine the sense of crisis they fed

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upon, these narratives were ideological constructs. They relied heavily on notions of hypnotic power in ways that emphasized the masses’ essential passivity. In claiming that Germans had been transformed into “hypnotized rabbits” by Allied propaganda, military icon Erich Ludendorff and others also alleged that the nation’s Jewish enemies had orchestrated this campaign. The paradox here is that German citizens had, in the war’s aftermath, asserted a new role in public life, claiming novel rights and forms of emancipation not easily squared with such melodramas of lost agency.96 Nevertheless, such melodramas remained potent. Their power to condition ordinary Germans’ perceptions of social reality attests not least to the impact of that process whereby postwar mass society was constructed as a new object of scientific knowledge—​­a process in which hypnosis was invoked to explain a wide range of social phenomena.97 In stressing that Mabuse’s hypnotic gaze directly addresses the audience, reviews of the time also finally remind us that the phrase “I was hypnotized” could be invoked by anyone who went to the cinema; by anyone, in short, belonging to the social type homo cinematicus, the very exemplar of what doctors saw as a peculiarly modern form of mass suggestibility. Yet in explicitly thematizing the fantasy of hypnotic crime, Lang’s film also calls into question the power attributed to this fantasy. In so doing, moreover, it calls into question the institution of censorship. In an essay published in 1924, Lang lodged a protest against the censor, against “dictating” to people what “their brains need.” In defending the masses’ “unconditional right” to “relaxation . . . ​and recuperation,” Lang tied this to the new state of affairs in Germany: “I do not believe . . . ​that a people whose responsibility (Mündigkeit) has been politically affirmed by the state with universal suffrage, that this people would need a guardian because some claim that its members are not responsible enough to know what hurts or helps them.”98 Implicitly, Lang here posed the question: What would a Germany without censorship look like? Some were in no doubt as to the answer: the Nazi film publicist Otto Kriegk would later tie Lang’s film directly to the eighteen-­month period during which censorship had been repealed, “A straight line leads from the lying Aufklärungsfilme of the immediate postwar period to this film Dr. Mabuse.”99

Hypnosis, Censorship, and the End of Weimar That the figure of Mabuse conjured a vision of a time and a Germany in which censorship was inoperative was one message of the censor ruling in the case

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of Lang’s sequel. On March 29, 1933, Germany’s censor board announced its ban of the new Fritz Lang film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. In this sequel, Mabuse, who had gone mad at the end of the original film, has been placed in the care of the psychiatrist Dr. Baum. Mabuse eventually dies, but his criminal empire is taken over by Baum, who has in the meantime fallen under the sway of his patient’s “testament.” Baum sets in motion an elaborate new series of plots with the sole purpose of instilling terror in the populace. At the film’s end, however, Baum himself succumbs to madness and winds up a patient in his own institution. In the statement accompanying the ban, the censor could barely disguise his shock: “The film contains a truly horrendous accumulation of crimes, carried out by a gang whose leader is under the power of a hypnosis exercised by a psychotic.” Two months after Hitler had come to power, the official insisted that such a film had no place in the new Germany: I cannot conceal my astonishment that precisely in these days someone would attempt to offer such a film to the German people. Even if there were no film censorship in Germany, this film would be enough to make it a necessity. . . . ​This horrifying mixture of crime and madness threatens public order and security to the highest degree. One could go even further and call this film a threat to the security of the state. For the communist elements, who have now been condemned to political powerlessness, this film—​­which depicts the organization of a criminal gang and its division into different specialized units (Depts. I, II, etc.)—​­could serve as a virtual instruction manual for the preparation and commission of terrorist acts.100 With unintended irony, the censor seems to cite directly from a key scene in the film in which Baum’s colleague discovers that Mabuse’s scribbled “testament” contains an elaborate set of blueprints for the commission of crimes on a gigantic scale. From the censor’s perspective, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse represented a compendium of all the evils that reformers had long laid at the feet of popular film.101 In its embodiment of the medium’s malevolent agency, Lang’s film represented an incitement not just to crime but to revolution and terror. A film so vile that it threatened not simply law and order but the political order as such, from the vantage point of March 1933 The Testament of Dr. Mabuse may be seen as the exemplary instance of the cultural fantasy whose history

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this chapter has traced: that of the moving image’s power to gain near total control over the minds of audience members.102 Like its precursor, this film comments on this fantasy: in a scene that reimagines the notion of criminal suggestion, Mabuse’s gang assembles to receive their instructions in a room that is configured like a cinema. At the far end of the chamber hangs a curtain that is backlit to reveal a silhouetted form, while a deep voice barks instructions for the crimes that are to be carried out. A later scene reveals that there is no “man behind the curtain,” merely a cardboard cutout and a loudspeaker set up by Mabuse’s physician Dr. Baum to maintain the illusion that his patient is still alive (see Figure 13). As Tom Gunning notes, the sequel converts Mabuse’s charismatic power into a purely mechanical apparatus.103 Unlike its precursor, however, amid the very different circumstances of 1933 this gesture—​­which presents a disenchanted version of the hypnosis myth—​­failed to “suggest away” (weg-­suggerieren) the censor. Yet this defeat at the hands of the censor was, to say the least, an ambiguous one, not least given evidence of the lengths to which Joseph Goebbels went in an effort to circumvent the ban.104 These failed efforts—​­which focused on adding a frame device that would turn the film into an argument for

Figure 13. Fritz Lang, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). The man behind the curtain.

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capital punishment—​­compel us to consider anew the tangled relations between cinema, censorship, and the “hypnosis epidemic” unleashed in Germany at the end of the Great War. The eighteen-­month-­long period during which censorship had been suspended became in the minds of authorities a period of almost indescribable moral anarchy, a primal scene that haunted the political imagination up to and beyond 1933. Even after new controls were eventually put into place (along lines advocated, as we saw in Chapter 2, by medical authorities), questions about the efficacy of these controls remained. These questions are already evident in the plot of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which begins with the killing of the clerk-­censor and thereafter documents a shift in the locus of power from ineffectual police to white-­coated doctors.105 The discovery at the end that the fairground showman is actually the director of a psychiatric institution drives home the ambiguities of this shift. These ambiguities are further developed in the Mabuse films, which illustrate many of the ambivalent consequences of the expansion of medical authority in postwar German society, not least by the fact that the protagonists escape into madness at the end of both films. In thus eluding the traditional forces of law and order, they underscore the apparent ascendance of psychiatric over police power—​­a point not lost on Nazi commentators, who noted that Mabuse’s descent into insanity meant that his “crimes remain unpunished.”106 Like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse has frequently been read in terms of its political resonances. These films about the unconscious have been shown to have their own historical unconscious, to belong to an elaborate framework of references tied either to the Great War or to the Nazi era. Yet they are also very much a specific product of the Weimar era, of the hopes, experiences, and terrors distinctive of this period. An important aspect of the experiential horizon of Weimar was the degree to which ordinary Germans came into contact, in one context or another, with a new class of experts from the human sciences. Representatives of these “young sciences” claimed an enlarged public role, analyzing and proposing solutions to deep-­rooted crises of society and self. Yet they also became implicated in those very same crises and, as such, the object of both fascination and fear, nowhere more vividly than in the controversies surrounding military psychiatry. One site where this duality was registered particularly graphically was in the popular cinema, in filmic narratives that held up a distorted mirror to psychiatric authority. Caligari and the Mabuse films portray scientists of the mind (rather than police) as the real holders of power in modern society, a power they wield in tandem with that of the mass

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media.107 They thus stage both the emergence of and the contestations surrounding post-­liberal forms of governmentality and the professions and techniques associated with this development. In these films, the hypnotist becomes the representative figure of the human sciences, an uncanny authority who holds out the promise of a cure, yet simultaneously threatens the integrity and agency of the self through his deep knowledge of the mind, through an “artistry of will-­ influencing” that ­extends—​­as Mabuse clearly shows—​­to the technologically mediated public realm. Straddling the worlds of professional medicine and of charlatanism, the hypnotist is thus emblematic of a deep anxiety and an ethical divide that runs through the history of psychiatry in this period, and that ultimately can only be resolved by an act of splitting and disavowal. In a similar way, the ambivalent sense of fascination and anxiety surrounding the hypnotist finds a related expression in these films at the moment in which they incorporate a metacinematic reference to film as art of “mass suggestion.”

Chapter 4

What Is an Enlightenment Film? Cinema and Sexual Hygiene in Interwar Germany

The opening frame of the film Das Erbe (Inheritance, 1935) shows a door with a sign on it identifying the room within as “Cultural Film Department, Studio 2.” From inside, a young woman in a lab coat opens the door and calls to a doctor off-­screen to join the proceedings. The camera then enters the room, which is revealed to be a laboratory where a group of scientists, shortly joined by the distinguished figure of the head doctor, has gathered to film a battle between two stag beetles. Once underway, the filming of the insects is punctuated by exchanges between the scientists, concerning the Kampf ums Dasein (struggle for survival) that marks existence in the natural world. Subsequent scenes follow this group of scientist filmmakers as they continue to engage in repartee while filming their animal subjects or departing for the screening room to watch earlier footage. A key feature of this interaction concerns the exchanges between the female assistant and the male scientists. Throughout the proceedings, the woman is cast in the role of the student, posing questions and receiving instruction from her male colleagues. Billed as an Aufklärungsfilm, or enlightenment film, on questions of race and heredity, Das Erbe was released in 1935 as part of a campaign, largely overseen by the Nazi Office of Racial Policy, to educate the public about the Third Reich’s recently passed sterilization law. In addition to its rather unusual frame device, the film included a mix of elements that were more or less standard in these films: scenes from the natural history of the animal world; family trees (in this case, of the notorious Kallikak family) charting the

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transmission of tainted heredity across generations; footage of healthy individuals working, playing, and marching, juxtaposed with images depicting the lives of patients in institutions for the “incurably” mentally ill; and statistical tables documenting the cost of caring for those mentally ill patients. The film concludes with passages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which had been passed in the summer of 1933 and went into effect January 1, 1934.1 The literature on National Socialist race hygienic propaganda has largely neglected the film Das Erbe, focusing instead on more well-­known examples of the genre like Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past) (1937) and Ich klage an (I Accuse) (1941).2 Yet this short, twelve-­minute film and its distinctive frame device deserve greater attention. The inclusion of this self-­reflexive element within a film presenting lessons on racial hygiene to the German populace invites us to scrutinize closely the strategies adopted by the Nazis as part of their campaign of public enlightenment. This chapter traces some of the long-­standing debates surrounding the primary medium, motion pictures, by means of which the Third Reich sought to educate the public about its racial project, and suggests how the film Das Erbe, by bringing the audience “behind the scenes,” sought to negotiate these. In slightly different terms, Chapter 5 explores the complex ways in which film policy became interwoven with social and then racial policy in Weimar and Nazi Germany. In the course of this transition, what had emerged in the 1920s as a highly heterogeneous amalgam of public and private initiatives became centralized under the Nazis as a key instrument of state policy. A central role in this process was played by specialists in the human sciences, whose interests straddled these seemingly distinct realms and who helped forge links between them. The common connection lay in the claims of “hygiene,” a programmatic term that, as Philipp Sarasin has argued, functioned as a kind of “magic formula” for societies intent on identifying and preventively managing the risks of modern existence.3 In these films, risk is constructed as a problem of knowledge and its absence, and this problem is shown to have an explicitly medium-­ specific dimension. This is well-­ illustrated in the case of Das Erbe: at the same time that it presents the case for compulsory sterilization, this film also positions itself in relation to the ambivalent history of enlightenment films on themes of sexual hygiene. As we saw in earlier chapters, a key feature of this history concerned the intense debates that surrounded film censorship during the Weimar era, debates in which both the subject matter and the medium itself became implicated in

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moral hazards seen as posing a threat to the health of the nation. To the extent that censorship practice was itself framed as part of a wider hygienic enterprise, the history alluded to in this film reflects a convergence of cultural politics and bio-­politics characteristic of much of the interwar period. Crucial arbiters here were professionals in the fields of psychiatry and mental hygiene, who staked a claim both over censorship and over the definition and treatment of those allegedly hereditary illnesses identified in the text of the Nazis’ sterilization law. The structure of Das Erbe reflects these dual claims: in effect, the device of a film within a film functions here as the expression of a process of coming to terms with this ambivalent history, a form of strategic “internalization of the censor” that mirrors the hygienic knowledge embodied in the figure of the doctor and his cohort of assistants.4

Weimar Origins What was an enlightenment film? By the mid-­1930s, when Das Erbe was released, filmmakers, censors, public health officials, and others had grappled with this question for close to twenty years. Answers to it varied widely. On the most general level, it was a type of film made to educate the public about matters of social and sexual hygiene. But the term proved remarkably unstable and, depending on the context, could take on both positive and highly negative connotations. To understand the mode of address adopted in Das Erbe we must begin by retracing the history of film in the public health campaigns of the Weimar period. As Ulf Schmidt and others have shown, it was at this time that the Aufklärungsfilm first emerged as an instrument of health-­related discourse.5 From the beginning of this period, filmmakers strove to harness the new medium to ambitious projects of mass education. If Weimar was famously a time of “great disorder,” it was also one in which Germans were continually exhorted, by doctors, welfare officials, and policy makers, to remake themselves and their society in accordance with new norms and ideals. Precisely the absence of “operating instructions” that author Alfred Döblin identified as Weimar’s signature feature led to a proliferation of blueprints for social and personal change.6 Many of these blueprints stressed the need for vigilance and awareness regarding the many risks of modern life, risks greatly amplified by the war and its aftermath: venereal disease, tuberculosis, alcoholism, workplace accidents, mental illness, and so forth. Film was assigned a major role in this campaign of mass education and

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warning. As the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, “Whoever today serves the cause of enlightenment has not merely the right but the duty to use, alongside the written word, film as well.”7 Yet as the controversy surrounding Hirschfeld’s “social-­hygienic” film Different from the Others (1919)—​­a plea to decriminalize homosexuality—​­attests, considerable unease marked this undertaking. A still-­young medium that in both its educational and popular forms often addressed taboo subjects and, moreover, often did so in sensational ways, film frequently became itself caught up in concerns about wider risks to public health and welfare. The Weimar enlightenment film arose out of a confluence of developments dating from the end of the Great War. Partly to counteract perceived deficits in the field of propaganda, the war’s final years were marked by a flurry of efforts by the German High Command to develop a coordinated approach to the problem of influencing opinion at home and abroad. These efforts reflected a new appreciation of what Corey Ross calls the “scientific management of political communication.” Officials placed particular stress on what General Erich Ludendorff extolled as the moving image’s “exceptional power” as a means of enlightenment and of “influencing of the masses in the interest of the state.”8 This interest carried over into the postwar period, when talks took place between various ministries in the new government concerning the possibility (which remained unrealized until 1933) of creating an office of enlightenment (Aufklärungsamt).9 One feature of these talks was the attention paid by officials to scientific studies of audience response. Such studies became integral to the consolidation of the set of techniques for managing populations that Michel Foucault identifies with the term “governmentality.”10 During the interwar period, as we shall see, these techniques took on a significant role in the regulation of body, sexuality, and reproduction. This development bears out Foucault’s observation concerning the new “threshold of modernity” that is reached by a society when power shifts from protecting the “juridical existence of sovereignty” to an ensemble of “interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-­politics of the population.”11 A key figure in the early development of these techniques was Richard Kiliani of the Foreign Office’s Press Department, who oversaw Germany’s wartime propaganda operations in neutral countries. In a stream of speeches and memoranda Kiliani repeatedly addressed film’s power to arouse “mass emotions” and cited findings in experimental psychology to support his claims about the need for a new approach in German propaganda making. In a tone suggesting familiarity with the writings of both the sociologist Emilie

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Altenloh and the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, Kiliani observed in one memo that effective propaganda must take into account the basic principle of film psychology: namely, “the effects of the mechanization of modern life in intensifying the masses’ need for entertainment and emotional excitement.” While cognizant of the moral hazards associated with Schund, Kiliani argued that such hazards should not blind authorities to the masses’ natural and legitimate desire for well-­made film dramas.12 Given evidence that German propaganda until this time had produced “over-­saturation and boredom” among its audience, he stressed the need for a more sophisticated approach, citing D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) as both a dramatic model and a highly effective form of “veiled propaganda.” In a speech delivered in April 1919, he identified two main tasks facing authorities: the need to reform film and the need to mobilize fully its powers as an instrument of “mass influence.” Kiliani emphasized a strategy that relied on what he called “indirect” or “associative” techniques.13 It was a question, he argued, of correctly gauging the proper dosages of entertainment and political Beeinflussung: “Film penetrates millions of eyes and brains . . . ​the image makes the essence of a problem intelligible to every mind. This precise formulation of political thought is according to the nature of things an essential attribute of democratically governed lands. The democracies are in their very structure completely reliant on a precisely worked out, sloganistic formulation of problems.”14 Prompted by such insights, Kiliani pursued numerous projects, among them the commissioning of animated propaganda films by future Dadaists George Grosz and Helmut Herzfeld.15 One of the most significant was the film The Effects of the Hunger Blockade on National Health (1920). This film sought, by conveying the scale of the “biological catastrophe” facing Germany, to recast the nation as the victim of Entente injustice.16 At the same time, Kiliani developed a strong interest in questions of censorship, particularly with regard to Germany’s image abroad. Hirschfeld’s Different from the Others drew his special ire: Kiliani called the film a “national disgrace” capable of inciting class war and anti-­ Semitism.17 The concerns expressed by Kiliani would be constitutive for the subsequent course of postwar debates about the moving image. Such concerns intensified greatly amid the upheavals marking the empire’s collapse. During this highly fluid moment, official interest in exploiting new means of “mass enlightenment” was accompanied by a host of private initiatives led by commercial filmmakers who also endeavored to lay claim to this term. The fact that this period of political and cultural ferment coincided with the repeal of

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censorship ensured that the enlightenment film came to be identified by many with the widespread moral breakdown perceived to have followed the empire’s collapse. What did the makers of enlightenment films hope to accomplish?18 In the broadest sense, they used the medium to popularize medical knowledge and as a vehicle for their faith in the existence of scientific solutions for social problems. The embrace of film was itself one expression of this. As it had been since its origins in late nineteenth-­century motion studies, the moving image was privileged as a tool for capturing and representing natural and clinical phenomena with complete objectivity and truthfulness.19 Amid the multiple crises facing the war-­torn nation, filmmakers espoused the medium’s potential for mobilizing the citizens of the new democracy in the task of reconstructing their society. Painting a picture of a world composed of a host of risks, on the one hand, and supplying information about how to recognize, avoid, and manage such risks, on the other, medical experts, filmmakers, and officials invested great resources in this project of public instruction. No area of human behavior received more attention in these films than that of sex. Topics ranging from tuberculosis and alcoholism to workplace accidents were repeatedly addressed as well, yet sex and its significance for both the individual and the nation remained the enlightenment film’s major theme. Some films conveyed a positive, if generally highly normative, message concerning the pleasures of sex. Most, however, adopted a darker tone, stressing the dangers not only to traditional values and individual well-­being but also to the health and vitality of future generations. Between 1918, when censorship was abolished, and 1920, when it was reinstated, an estimated 150 films on sexual topics alone were made, including Richard Oswald’s Let There Be Light (1917), which dealt with venereal disease, and Oswald and Hirschfeld’s Different from the Others (1919). While this latter film became one of the most notorious films of the period, it was by no means alone in courting controversy. After 1920, many enlightenment films ran afoul of the censor. Yet the genre also counted notable successes. One acknowledged high point was the film False Shame (1925), directed by Rudolf Biebrach from a script by Curt Thomalla and Nicholas Kaufmann.20 False Shame explored the topic of venereal disease in a series of case studies, combining both instructional and fictional elements. As the Nazi film Das Erbe would later do, this film used close-­ups of psychiatric patients as a form of evidence to document the terrible consequences of disease (in this case, syphilis and gonorrhea). False Shame played to great acclaim both in Germany and

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abroad, receiving much praise for its skillful mixture of scientific material and popular drama. False Shame was just one in a parade of films addressing the social problems associated with human sexuality: venereal disease, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality. The widespread perception of postwar crisis in morals, health, and population policy opened the door to an unprecedented public airing of matters that had formerly remained taboo.21 This Weimar-­era “enlightenment wave” became a major facet of a broad public health campaign that received the backing of numerous agencies, including the Reich Health Office, the Prussian Welfare Ministry, the Reich Committee for Hygiene Education (RAHV), and the Cultural Film Department of the film giant UFA. In a circular sent to the German states in 1919, the Interior Ministry explained that the task of reconstructing the shattered health of the German people necessitated a far-­reaching project of “popular enlightenment.” The purpose of this “hygienic propaganda” was to “awaken the interest of the masses in health-­related questions,” ranging, as subsequent communications elaborated, from tuberculosis and war neurosis to alcoholism and job-­related accidents.22 The campaigns mounted by these agencies commonly employed a rhetoric of vigilance and warning concerning the risks of irresponsible, unenlightened behavior, and strove to inculcate new norms of responsibility—​­to oneself and to society—​­and new ideals of hygiene among the public. Insofar as it addressed itself to an audience conceived of as amenable to such appeals, this project of improving the moral, physical, and social health of the nation represented an aspect of the larger process of social rationalization that Detlev Peukert has described as permeating many areas of German society (including that of “instinctual life”) in the 1920s.23 But given that this public was also seen as burdened by a combination of deeply rooted ignorance and folk belief and was moreover viewed as highly susceptible to the sensationalistic fare of popular film, this campaign remained marked by considerable ambivalence.24 Throughout the early 1920s, the claims made for the enlightenment film repeatedly ran afoul of concerns about the relation between the medium and its audience. As we have seen, these concerns dated back to the Wilhelmine era, when film reformers first began to demand strict regulation of popular film while at the same time espousing, as an alternative, the so-­called Kultur­ film as a medium of education and moral improvement.25 Such ambivalence continued to shape Weimar film policy. Some commentators, it is true, were prepared to take the claims of the sexual education film at face value. Thus a review in the liberal Vossische Zeitung praised Oswald’s Let There Be Light for

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its message concerning the need to cultivate a sense of responsibility for one’s own body.26 But for many, the enlightenment film became synonymous with the period of perceived moral collapse following the war’s end, when German theaters were seemingly flooded by sexually themed films.27 As the filmmaker Curt Thomalla later lamented, this period had subsequently burdened the enlightenment film with a deeply suspect pedigree.28 Most conservatives and film reformers flatly condemned the enlightenment films of the immediate postwar era as a form of “trash” masquerading as science.29 Critics singled out Hirschfeld’s Different from the Others as, to cite one critic, a form of “repulsive propaganda in favor of homosexuality.”30 This film in particular, as one scholar has observed, seems to have awakened an “anxiety of infection,” an anxiety that was rooted in “the phantasm of psychic contagion.”31 Combating such phantasms required the judgment of qualified specialists. As we saw in Chapter 2, shortly after the reinstatement of censorship in 1920 Oswald and Hirschfeld’s film was evaluated by several eminent psychiatrists, among them Emil Kraepelin and Karl Bonhoeffer. Kraepelin and Bonhoeffer’s negative opinion of the film lent scientific authority to the censor board’s decision to ban public screenings of it, and it underscores the newly ascendant role of psychiatrists in the regulatory practices surrounding film, both commercial and popular scientific.32 What was at stake in these practices was spelled out by Bonhoeffer, who was part of a wider investigation into Hirschfeld’s newly created Institute for Sexual Science prompted by criticism in the conservative press. Critics had attacked the institute’s scientific trappings as a smokescreen for deviant sexual activities and its department for scientific cinematography as a manifestation of a thinly veiled form of pseudoscientific voyeurism.33 Commissioned by the Prussian Welfare Ministry to submit an opinion on the problem of “homosexual propaganda,” Bonhoeffer was categorical in affirming that, through its “suggestive influence” and its awakening of “abnormal instincts” (including, presumably, voyeurism), such “propaganda” represented a threat to sexual morality and to public health. The purpose of this propaganda—​­to blunt the “healthy instinct of aversion to homosexuality” that existed in the populace—​­must on grounds of “reproductive hygiene” be considered “harmful.”34 The legacy of the immediate postwar period was to make “enlightenment” a highly contested term, one often at risk of slippage into a variety of negative others: trash, pornography, or propaganda (for controversial causes like decriminalizing abortion). Film policy became a semantic battleground and a site of both enormous possibility and enormous risk. Many scientists,

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filmmakers, and censors reacted to this situation by falling back on a strict distinction between popular and scientific films. From this perspective, policing the boundary between the two represented a crucial part of the task of social hygiene in its own right. The war against cinematic trash and its demoralizing effects became a central front in the larger public health campaigns of the Weimar period, as evidenced by the fact that the proposal for reinstating film censorship was debated in the Reichstag’s Committee for Population Politics.35 As the case of Different from the Others illustrates, physicians played a key role in this process, gaining a quasi-­institutional role in Weimar’s film censorship apparatus. Psychiatric categories helped establish the conceptual framework for this apparatus, and its rulings were permeated by psychiatric modes of reasoning.36 The project of extending hygienic behavioral norms—​­long part of the cultural property of the bourgeoisie—​­to the masses thus represented both a natural development and one fraught with difficulty. How were filmmakers to ensure the intended reading of their message by an audience perceived as lacking middle-­class virtues of self-­control? While some commentators welcomed educational films on venereal disease, others saw them as a moral risk in themselves and as a direct incitement to sexuality.37 The issue was further complicated by the fact that those enlightenment films that strove to remain within strictly defined boundaries of respectability often failed to resonate with audiences.38 The results of public surveys revealed all too plainly the limitations of the hygiene film in its narrowest form. Such realizations pointed to the need for new strategies: to capture the broadest possible audience, it was necessary to embed social-­hygienic messages within a dramatic framework, to slip themes of warning and scientific instruction into narratives of love, melodrama, and suspense. The risk such strategies courted was obvious: did the entertainment serve the purpose of enlightenment, or, as many critics insisted, was it the other way around?

The Aufklärungsfilm Between Deterrence and Incitement Seen in this light, the issue was cast as one of properly calibrating effects, as Curt Thomalla, the scriptwriter for The Effects of the Hunger Blockade on National Health (1921) and False Shame, stressed. Thomalla’s contribution to the history of the enlightenment film has been noted in earlier chapters. Trained

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as a neurologist, he became an influential filmmaker who over the course of a twenty-­year career in this field repeatedly pushed the frontiers of cinematic enlightenment into new terrain. Thomalla also argued that feature films would benefit from employing the services of medical or scientific advisers, whose expertise could easily be woven into any film; modern motion pictures, he wrote, were so full of illness, accidents, and death that hygienic instruction could be incorporated into them without disturbing the treatment in the slightest.39 Much of Thomalla’s career reflected this impulse to align the medical expert’s gaze with that of the film camera. Thomalla’s entry into this field occurred at the end of the war, when he first became interested in the uses of medical film while serving in a military hospital. At the end of the war, Thomalla was put in charge of the medical archive of the newly created UFA’s Cultural Film Department before later going on to head the RAHV’s film archive.40 From the early postwar years onward, he collaborated on films on venereal disease, tuberculosis, accident prevention, and numerous other topics. Many of these films followed a straightforward format, emphasizing didactic instruction and relying heavily on the visual conventions of the scientific instructional film: x-­ray and microscope images, charts, graphs, and statistical information.41 Mindful of the need to make concessions to his audience, however, Thomalla also proved quite willing to experiment with integrating more dramatic or narrative elements into his films.42 Like Kiliani, Thomalla viewed the most effective enlightenment as that which took place at a level below the audience’s conscious awareness. Drawing on his wartime experience of treating soldiers with suggestive methods, he stressed throughout his career the need to take into account the role of unconscious forces in the mental life of individuals and masses, arguing that both doctor and politician ignored these forces at their peril.43 At the same time, Thomalla also remained highly attuned to the moral and other perils associated with motion pictures. As early as 1919, he signaled that proper appreciation of the role of censorship would be of central importance for the Aufklärungsfilm’s success, and he returned repeatedly to this issue throughout his career, often prefacing his written commentary on his films with assurances that they had been subjected to “rigorous scientific controls.” In the late 1920s, reflecting back on the genre’s checkered history, he invoked its baptism of fire amid what he called the “time without censorship, the terrible time (die zensurlose, die schreckliche Zeit).”44 Even while vesting transformative powers in their alliance with this medium, medical specialists like

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Thomalla were repeatedly compelled to pay obeisance to the moral sensibilities of audiences and censors. As part of this process, Thomalla continually refined his strategies for preempting criticism of his films. These are well illustrated in the case of the film that became his greatest success, False Shame. As the film Das Erbe would later do, False Shame included as one of its central dramatic elements a representation of the didactic process: two of its male protagonists are depicted as being “enlightened” by visiting an exhibit on venereal disease at a large health fair. Significantly, this moment of enlightenment is preceded, at the film’s outset, by a visit to an open-­air screening of a boxing film. During the screening, several female boxers stand alluringly to one side of the stage, and following its conclusion the two men approach and begin flirting with them. At this juncture, a doctor in the audience intervenes, suggesting to the two men that they instead pay a visit to the exhibit on venereal disease. Having done so, they—​­along with the audience—​­are then guided through a series of displays and images that document in graphic detail the consequences of venereal disease. Microscope preparations, slides, and magnifying lenses awaken them to a reality normally hidden to the naked eye and the untrained gaze. This marks only the beginning of an elaborate mobilization of clinical modes of representation that recuperates the early history of scientific cinema, and that encompasses charts, graphs, and optical devices, including quasi-­cinematic “light boxes.” Other forms of evidence are subsequently introduced: pathological specimens in formaldehyde, and—​­most disturbing of all—​­a parade of asylum patients. In a series of close-­ups, the faces of these patients reveal the ravages of advanced and probably incurable syphilis. Through means such as this, observes Annette Kuhn, hygiene films narrativize the passage from ignorance to knowledge.45 False Shame frames the enlightenment process not least as necessary antidote to the very dangers that reformers had identified in the popular cinema, though it must be noted that here it is less the boxing film itself and more the social space of the cinema itself that represents the site of danger. If at the film’s outset we find ourselves in the space of the “cinema of attractions,” the medium’s wild youth, then film—​­so we are reminded—​­has another lineage as well and it is part of this particular film’s work to recover it.46 What should be emphasized about this is that the process of cinematic enlightenment incorporates both a representation of its audience and of the dangers and possibilities of film as medium of public address. Through its disqualification of certain forms of seeing and authorization of others, this film enacts, as a

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crucial part of the work of enlightenment, the internalization of the censor and, by extension, the normalization of the spectator. This is borne out in a later segment depicting a young couple who, prior to obtaining the doctor’s approval for their marriage, must attend an educational film on venereal disease. These sequences illustrate popular hygiene’s function as, in Sarasin’s words, “discursive immunization system.”47 In a text accompanying False Shame Thomalla issued a disclaimer, warning that “[v]iewers who expect lewd pleasures and nerve-­tingling sensations behind the facade of science” would be disappointed. In this gesture of disavowal, he sought to distance his film from the protest lodged against many enlightenment films, namely that hygienic discourse all too often acted as an incitement. The censor board agreed that in this instance the filmmakers had succeeded in avoiding any impropriety. Not all were so persuaded, however: the government of the state of Baden, for instance, demanded that False Shame be banned for young audience members on the grounds that “the film is capable of having adverse rather than enlightening effects on children and youth.” Here is a typical formulation of the risks seen to plague this project of public education, risks discursively linked to the sexually transmitted diseases forming the subject matter of the film itself: “The description of the circumstances where the individuals became infected themselves will have the effect of a temptation rather than the intended deterrent effect on youthful viewers.”48 In rejecting the call for a ban, the censor board invoked the expert testimony of an official from the Reich Health Office, who in turn cited the advisory role of the private organization the Society for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases, which had been consulted in the making of the film. This, in the official’s view, had ensured the “success of a rational enlightenment of youth” about the dangers of such diseases, and not incidentally protected audiences against the dangers of “psychic contagion” that critics had identified in the earliest examples of the genre.49 The RAHV offered an enthusiastic endorsement, predicting that the film would “bring enlightenment to millions of viewers.” Although the Baden government’s objections were overridden, these censorship proceedings illuminate the highly sensitive nature of the public realm in which such films circulated. Similar fears were echoed repeatedly in censor decisions of this period, often resulting in rulings against filmmakers even when they had, as in the case of False Shame, consulted medical experts and welfare agencies in bringing their films to the public.50 Viewed in this context, Thomalla’s disclaimer may be seen as part of a

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complex strategy: more than merely a form of preemptive self-­censorship, this was also a gesture of authorization, a means of claiming a mandate to advance new—​­and, in some cases, transgressive—​­forms of knowledge.51 That this claim functioned on a formal level as well became clear in his next significant project, when in 1927 he scripted what was hailed at the time as the first German film on eugenics, The Curse of Heredity. This film yoked the formulas of the popular crime drama to an argument for the compulsory sterilization of those afflicted with allegedly hereditary diseases like alcoholism and epilepsy.52 In advocating a program of selective breeding, Thomalla adopted a hybrid film practice based on “making concessions to the sensational requirements of the masses” by embedding its warnings within a narrative so “full of sensation and exciting catastrophes that the public hardly realizes it is being taught.”53 In such formulations, the line between disavowal and incitement became highly fluid. Yet confronted with persistent conservative opposition as well as his own doubts, Thomalla continued to grapple with the genre’s ambivalent qualities. In the same year as the release of this film, he wrote to lament the continuing difficulties that filmmakers like him faced in addressing the public. According to Thomalla, the blame for the problems of “kitsch and trash” plaguing the German film industry and those who hoped to use the medium for mass instruction should not be placed at the feet of filmmakers. Rather, he wrote in what would become a familiar refrain, the source of this problem lay with the public, whose addiction to trash remained a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the project of mass enlightenment.54 In the task of national renewal, the new type of homo cinematicus remained an unreliable interlocutor. Changes in behavioral norms therefore required changes in viewing norms—​ i­ ndeed, this represented an essential task of the hygienic enterprise. In stressing this dimension of the problem, Thomalla invoked a broader Weimar discourse about film and its audience. While he regularly extolled the medium’s ability to influence the mass psyche, Thomalla’s faith in public enlightenment remained in uneasy tension with his view of the masses as impaired in their judgment.55 Drawing on nineteenth-­century crowd discourse and fueled by the impact of wartime and postwar social transformations on Germany’s traditional gender order, such ambivalence was widely shared and was often framed in gendered terms.56 The public’s taste for melodrama and the heightened suggestibility attributed to the film public were often conceptualized as expressions of female psychology writ large. Sociological and journalistic accounts echoed this tendency, stressing the high percentage of

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adolescents and women in the audience, as well as the effects of intense film imagery on overly impressionable minds. Discussions of audience psychology became a staple of film periodicals; meanwhile, psychiatrists and specialists in related fields wrote extensively on the connections between film going and addiction, hypnosis, and other forms of individual and collective psychopathology.57 As we saw in earlier chapters, Kraepelin, Bonhoeffer, and other experts were repeatedly consulted on censorship rulings and on wider debates concerning the regulation of popular cinema. Similar debates continued to surround noncommercial cinema as well. In connection with the Aufklärungsfilm and its dangers, specialists in sexual science, for instance, stressed the medium-­specific nature of the Schautrieb (scopophilia, “a pathological wish to see obscene images”) activated in the darkness of the theater.58 Another of the specters haunting popular hygiene concerned the problem of false or dangerous forms of knowledge, most often identified with the figure of the lay practitioner.59 In the eyes of medical officials, the dangers to public health posed by sexually transmitted diseases were matched by those posed by medical charlatans, who, in public performances and in films strove to win a public for their dubious ideas, while cloaking these in a pseudo-­ scientific rhetoric. The shadow side of mass Aufklärung, stressed mental hygienists, was the danger of “psychological epidemics” associated with homeopathic or esoteric forms of healing.60 Official communiqués repeatedly invoked this danger: in 1922, a report in Leipzig’s Freie Presse titled “False Enlightenment” conveyed a warning from the regional branch of the RAHV, according to which people claiming to be representatives of government agencies fighting venereal diseases had made public appearances at which they spread dangerous ideas about abortion and other illegal procedures.61 In the broadest sense, these concerns reflect a persistent unease about the public that was the enlightenment film’s intended addressee. As an article contributed by the RAHV to the Reich Health Weekly in 1927 put it, the new mass hygienic consciousness demanded by the nation’s multiple postwar health crises reflected the larger restructuring of public life in Germany. Combating disease was no longer simply a matter of medical authorities ministering to a passive populace; it assumed some degree of popular mobilization: “[A]long with the proper measures by the authorities, the participation of the people is necessary.” Mass participation, however, represented a double-­edged sword. As the article went on to lament, lay healers and homeopaths had recognized this state of affairs earlier than the professional physicians and, in the void created by lack of oversight, had taken it upon themselves to “enlighten” the

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populace on all kinds of health-­related topics, often for the purpose of winning them for their natural-­healing and alternative-­medicine associations.62 Prompted by such concerns, the Weimar state succeeded in passing new laws against “trash and filth” (1926) and against lay healers (1927). However, this legislation proved ineffectual in stemming both problems.63 By the late 1920s, the writings of Thomalla and like-­minded figures convey a growing sense that the movement for hygienic enlightenment was losing ground on several fronts: in its battle against trash, against the public’s thirst for sensation, and against the pornographers and pseudoenlighteners fueling this thirst. Thomalla spoke for many in demanding greater centralization and stricter censorship. Without more vigorous regulation—​­in effect, a form of hygiene of the cinematic public sphere—​­efforts to promote awareness of public health–­related matters would become themselves implicated in the proliferation of new dangers.

Enlightened Totalitarianism The doubts that crept into late Weimar discussions concerning the enlightenment film proved temporary. Under the Nazis, this genre experienced a dramatic revival. Indeed, as Robert Proctor has provocatively suggested in his study of the Nazi campaign against smoking, the term Aufklärung may have been invoked more during the Nazi era than at any other time in German history.64 Curt Thomalla played a key role in this following his appointment to a post within Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, where he was charged with overseeing propaganda in the fields of public health, welfare, and population policy.65 This position afforded him great latitude in advancing what he called the regime’s “biological revolution.”66 His writings of this period repeatedly evoke his wartime experiences in drawing connections between the suggestive treatment of the war neurotic and the suggestive influencing of the populace.67 The hybrid formula used in his film False Shame proved highly influential in the Nazi era. It may be seen as one of the precursors of the notorious I Accuse (1941), whose didactic content—​­the tragic but ultimately “merciful” choice of euthanasia for those classified as “incurable”—​­is embedded within a highly melodramatic feature narrative. Film became central to the “gigantic educational task” ordained by Hitler to instruct Germans in the need to purify the Volkskörper (body politic). First, however, the medium had to undergo its own process of cleansing. In

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a speech in 1933, Goebbels referred to film as a “body” and himself as a physician who would rid “the afflicted organism of harmful alien elements.”68 This entailed the purging of Jews from the motion picture industry, the withdrawal of many Weimar-­era films from circulation, and the passage of strict new censorship legislation. These developments were part of a process of total renovation of the public sphere: the book burning of May 10, 1933, represented for Goebbels an “enlightenment campaign” designed to eliminate Jewish, Bolshevik, and homosexual influences from German culture. Among its casualties was Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, which was completely destroyed. It was the Office of Racial Policy (RPA, originally named the Reich Bureau for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare), under the direction of Walter Gross, that became the key agency in the Nazi appropriation of the enlightenment film.69 The RPA worked closely with Goebbels’s ministry, yet also assiduously protected its own turf against Goebbels’s designs to concentrate all filmmaking in his own hands. Gross oversaw production of a series of films designed to educate the German public about racial doctrine and, in particular, to create a climate of opinion within which the sterilization law could gain acceptance, especially in the face of opposition by church authorities. In addition to countless lectures, exhibits, and publications, this campaign resulted in the production of seven films, including Das Erbe, Victims of the Past, Hereditarily Ill, and Sins of the Father, all made between 1935 and 1937. According to Claudia Koonz, more than twenty million Germans saw these films each year.70 Meanwhile, as many as 400,000 people were sterilized, the large majority of them women.71 As was foreseen by Ernst Rüdin, the psychiatrist and racial hygienist who helped author the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, a broad program of eugenic enlightenment would be necessary both to prepare the medical personnel required for the law’s implementation and to counter opposition by the clergy.72 Under Rüdin’s leadership, psychiatrists assumed a crucial role in all areas of racial policy as well as in the accompanying task of public education. • • • At this point, we should step back for a moment to consider the meaning the Nazis attached to the word “enlightenment.” Do continuities in personnel and genre point to deeper continuities between the Weimar-­era and the Nazi-­era

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enlightenment film? What exactly did Goebbels and Gross have in mind when they invoked the term Aufklärung? Was this the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century?73 Or rather a term of more recent derivation, echoing the Bolsheviks’ usage during the Civil War or in their literacy campaign: mass enlightenment conceived not as escape from authoritarian tutelage but as the path to proper party doctrine?74 Or was it, instead, that of the enlightenment officers whom Ludendorff commissioned to maintain troop morale during the war’s final stages? Finally, is the proper referent here the immediate precedent established by Weimar public health campaigns, which oscillated between advocating self-­ help, on the one hand, and state and medical intervention, on the other, between self-­directed integration and integration directed from above?75 Some clues may be found in the writings of the RPA’s Walter Gross. As the regime’s chief racial publicist, the medically trained Gross worked tirelessly to popularize hereditarian doctrine.76 In an article published in 1936, he spelled out what he saw as the key differences between the Nazis’ approach and other approaches in this field. He stressed the need to free Germans from the false notions of equality propagated by the French Revolution and to instruct them in racial science. Doing so effectively meant grasping the key distinction between education and propaganda (Volksaufklärung): “What is needed is not the transmission of isolated scientific facts, not Bildung [education] in the classical sense, but rather Einprägung [imprinting] of a few fundamental building blocks of knowledge.”77 RPA communiqués appealed to the notion of a new, specifically “völkisches [racial] conscience,” the growing strength of which, they claimed, could be measured in terms of rising numbers of sterilizations and declining numbers of abortions. Yet the specter of racial crisis remained ever present, a fact largely blamed on the continuing influence of the churches. The uncompromising Gross cast the issue in the starkest possible terms, as a battle between the forces of enlightenment and those of “darkness,” referring in one context to the need to combat the “obscurationist tactics” (Verdunklungsmanöver) used by the “shadowy figures” (Dunkelmänner).78 Building this new conscience entailed banishing all traces of “exaggerated humanity” or “false pity” just as it did rejecting any concession to liberal, reactionary, or confessional worldviews. Such statements lend support to Robert Proctor’s argument concerning the Nazis’ intention to recast relations between those responsible for formulating race hygiene doctrine and the German public. While Peter Fritzsche has

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argued that “the most basic continuity between Weimar and Nazi policy lies in the assumption that human material could and should be molded,” Edward Ross Dickinson stresses the radical nature of the break that occurred in 1933. Among other things, this meant the closing down of that space that, during the Weimar period, allowed heterogeneous views to coexist, including those associated with figures like Hirschfeld.79 Enlightenment was no longer conceived of as something arrived at on one’s own but as something imposed from above by the state.80 Perhaps this development may best be characterized as the expression of a form of “enlightened totalitarianism”: a regime carrying to its most radical conclusion that distinctively modern conception of human and social engineering that Detlev Peukert refers to as Machbarkeitswahn (“dream [or, more literally, mania] of perfectibility”).81 • • • The “gigantic educational task” envisioned by Hitler was one to which the regime devoted considerable resources. In the enlightenment film’s revival we see a striking convergence of the Third Reich’s bio-­politics and its cultural politics. Even so, the advent of National Socialism, though it may have answered the wishes of film reformers, educational filmmakers, and medical experts for a more strictly regulated motion picture industry, did not put an end to Weimar-­era questions concerning the relation between the medium and its audience. The Nazis may have supplied the “operating instructions” Döblin saw as lacking during the Weimar years, yet in film policy as in other areas, much remained open to improvisation, negotiation, conflict, and reversal.82 In the trade press and other publications of this period, one finds a highly variegated picture: for every confident claim regarding the contribution motion pictures were making to the task of national renewal, another can be found stressing the German public’s low threshold of boredom and standards of taste, its deplorable preference for sensational subject matter, and the persistent problem of trash. The author of one article titled, symptomatically, “What does the public want?” lamented the success of the recently released adventure film The Tiger of Eschnapur (1938) and dwelled on its “nerve-­ wracking stimuli” and its “orgy of effects.”83 Such commentary also contained an implied criticism of the regime for failing to suppress remnants of a Weimar-­era industry perceived as in thrall to purely commercial, that is, Jewish, interests. Well into the war years, the Sicherheitsdienst’s (Security Service,

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SD) secret reports were recording that German youth remained in the grip of an intense “addiction” to trashy films.84 Racial specialists repeatedly voiced similar concerns. In 1934, the RPA’s journal Volk und Rasse published an article titled “Film and Race,” in which the author argued that the medium’s role in promoting racial enlightenment remained largely unfulfilled. Film, he went on, had a special responsibility to avoid conveying false ideas on racial questions, a responsibility that even explicitly Nazi films had failed to take to heart.85 The point was echoed in an article titled “Sins of the Past in Health-­Related Popular Enlightenment,” whose author suggested that the popular media continued to be burdened by a suspect cultural pedigree and needed to be treated accordingly.86 Some critics argued for tests, on a case-­by-­case basis, of each film’s “aesthetic hereditary health” (künstlerische Erbgesundheit). Such forms of “cultural eugenics” posited a close equivalence between film censors and the medical specialists who staffed the hereditary health courts that oversaw sterilization cases; the threat of the Schnitt (cut) wielded by the censor found its parallel in the “cut” mandated by the health court.87 Assessing films in terms of their racial content was one thing; an altogether more complex matter concerned audience response and how to calibrate it. Scholars who have written on this topic agree that it remains difficult to evaluate the success of Nazi racial propaganda.88 Goebbels’s own shifting views are indicative of the difficulty the Nazis themselves faced in measuring the effectiveness of their efforts at public enlightenment.89 Stricter regulation aside, officials recognized that an effective film policy required a reliable understanding of audience response. As Ulf Schmidt notes, the basis for this had been earlier laid in psychological experiments on the effects of film on schoolchildren.90 The most systematic Nazi-­era investigation into the medium’s effects was undertaken by the experimental psychologist Alois Funk, who surveyed a large group of adolescents and young adults, many with criminal records or histories of institutionalization, about their film-­going habits. Funk’s study, which served as a kind of appendage to the new RLG enacted in 1934, devised an elaborate form of case study that assembled information about each of his subjects’ criminal records, film-­going habits, family background, and personality profile. Citing the statements of several youths that certain films (among them, The Blue Angel) had “infected” them like bacilli, he claimed that his investigations pointed to conclusions that went far beyond what he regarded as the rather cautious formulations of earlier investigators like Albert Hellwig, and he postulated a direct causal link between crime

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dramas and criminal behavior. His findings were frequently cited in Nazi-­era publications.91 Such findings led many authorities, like the psychiatrist Robert Sommer, to completely reject feature-­film production because of its inherently sensational nature. The founder of the German branch of the international mental hygiene movement, Sommer had integrated cinematography into his research from the turn of the century on. He had close ties to Ernst Rüdin and, like him, advocated a major campaign of public enlightenment on questions of reproduction and racial hygiene. Yet he also stressed the need for careful assessment of a given film’s psychological effects, identifying this as a special task of the field of mental hygiene.92 Such claims, already implicit in early Weimar censorship debates, reflected a broader international development that crystallized in the 1930s. The 1936 London Conference on Mental Hygiene, attended by several German delegates, included on its program a panel on mental hygiene and popular film.93 Yet complaints by theater owners and distributors that the public found most purely educational films tedious could not be ignored, least of all by Goebbels.94 These issues continued to plague the makers of racial propaganda films as well. Such films, argues Gertrud Koch, sought to create a “phobic gaze”: to train audiences to see clinically, without false pity, but also without the voyeuristic thrill offered by carnival sideshows (which the Nazis banned).95 Yet how could filmmakers be certain that viewers would accept the logic of a film about the high costs of caring for the mentally handicapped, or draw the necessary conclusions? And what was the best way of conveying this message: through rational argument, through images meant to shock and disturb, through melodramatic narratives, or through a combination of all three approaches? At a time when the German public was, as Carol Poore has written, being subjected to a “flood of images of disability,” how could the impact of images of the severely mentally handicapped on audiences be measured? RPA officials prided themselves on the “bluntness” of their methods of enlightenment, and indeed many of the RPA’s films showed deeply disturbing images of asylum patients. At the same time, great care was taken to control the conditions of their reception, by creating separate versions of the films for specialist or general audiences or by editing them to make them age and gender appropriate. The content of the film Victims of the Past was considered so shocking that one newspaper advised having a medical doctor present at the screening in case the images were too much for those with “weak nerves.”96 Echoing Curt Thomalla’s earlier disavowals, RPA official Rudolf Frercks noted

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with respect to this film that the view it offered into the life of an asylum was not meant to satisfy the audience’s needs for “sensation” but merely to provide evidence for the correctness of the film’s message.97 Yet Frercks’s disclaimers represented merely the flip side of an open inducement to disgust and fear of the racial other. The charge of sensationalism had been central to reformers’ attacks on popular film since nearly the dawn of the medium. Did state-­sponsored propaganda sanction the use of sensational imagery? That such questions remained far from settled is suggested by the fact that the “euthanasia” film I Accuse closes the door on the camera when one protagonist visits a handicapped child in an institution for the disabled (a directorial decision that prompted much debate).98 RPA pamphlets described the asylum as a “school of visual instruction”; yet the earlier history of debates about films on venereal disease and related social problems offered ample testimony that the filmic image was far from a simple or an unequivocal signifier. Few were more alive to the possibility of “dangerous readings” than Joseph Goebbels.99 In public, Goebbels expressed deep faith in film’s status as a supreme instrument of modern statecraft and of molding peoples, and his speeches essentially cast the new social type homo cinematicus as synonymous with the Volk. Yet his journal entries betrayed constant anxiety and uncertainty regarding audience response, and in debates about how to balance the competing imperatives of indoctrination and entertainment, Goebbels tended to come down on the side of the latter. Nazi cinema avoided explicit propaganda to a surprising extent, a tendency that became more pronounced as the propaganda minister grew increasingly sensitive, on the one hand, to public doubts concerning the regime’s policies and, on the other, to signs of enlightenment fatigue among the public.100 Boredom remained a persistent concern, as Goebbels was reminded with the mixed response to one of his major projects, The Eternal Jew (1940). Despite efforts to limit women with “sensitive natures” from attending a version that included scenes of Jews ritually slaughtering animals, many viewers were nevertheless disgusted by these “horror scenes” or complained that they were an exceptional “strain on the nerves.” Others were left merely indifferent, having already reached the limits of their interest in anti-­Jewish themes.101 Ultimately, the minister adopted a position in favor of what he called “invisible propaganda,” which “pervades the entire public, without the public becoming aware at all of the initiative of propaganda.” Such formulations are reflected clearly in the making of I Accuse, the euthanasia film in which Goebbels took a close

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interest, which embeds its didactic content within a highly melodramatic narrative.

Cultural Eugenics and the Enlightenment Film Viewed against the background sketched above, the film Das Erbe, despite its modest dimensions, can be recognized as occupying a crucial position in the corpus of National Socialist race hygienic propaganda.102 Directed by I. C. Hartmann from a script by Walter Lüddecke, Das Erbe was one of two examples of this genre (along with Victims of the Past) made with sound and shown to the widest possible public, receiving screenings at all major cinemas as well as at regularly held “enlightenment events.”103 In its marshaling of various forms of scientific “evidence” (footage of animal life, family trees, statistical charts, close-­ups of patients), the film is a typical product of what Dagmar Herzog describes as the Third Reich’s gigantic venture in reproductive engineering. What distinguishes it from others of the type is its self-­referential dimension. In a film concerned with pedigree and with the costs to society of inferior pedigree, the film asserts its own impeccable lineage in the opening shot of the sign on the door. This shot both identifies the room and alludes to the history of the genre’s origins in UFA’s Cultural Film Department. The stag-­ beetle battle scene filmed by the scientists further underscores this gesture by evoking one of UFA’s first Kulturfilms, The Stag Beetle (1920).104 Once these establishing shots have set the stage, the film then—​­in a brief close-­up—​­aligns the camera’s gaze directly with that of the head doctor, thus integrating the hereditary health specialist’s perspective directly into the filmic address (see Figures 14–­15). Das Erbe is marked by an unusual self-­consciousness that manifests itself in several ways, among them an exuberant use of camera techniques, as well as an offhand acknowledgment of its technical limitations: at one point, a doctor notes that the camera speed is not rapid enough to truly capture the movement of a rabbit in flight from a pursuing dog. No film of this genre goes further in thematizing the film experience itself or in stressing the conditions of its own reception. By drawing attention to its own making and reception, the film stages the didactic process that is its raison d’être as part of its content, the better to ensure the correct reading. It is not incidental that Das Erbe makes the female assistant (Fräulein Volkmann) the addressee of its message, given the earlier noted long-­standing

Figure 14. Das Erbe (1935). The cameraman.

Figure 15. Das Erbe (1935). The doctor as “grand enunciator”: aligning the camera’s gaze with that of racial expert.

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tendency to code the film public as female in its sensibilities. The film’s structure hinges on the depiction of her dawning “enlightenment.” In the key scene in the screening room, to which she has been accompanied by one of the head scientists (Dr. Lang) as well as another male doctor, the woman is represented simultaneously as student and audience member, as potential spouse and future mother. As footage of animals fighting for survival rolls, Volkmann’s interlocutor Dr. Lang provides commentary, observing at a key point that some animal mothers sacrifice their weak offspring for the sake of the healthy. Whereas earlier, Volkmann’s face had expressed troubled concern over the fate of the stag beetles, now, awareness dawning on her features, she draws the necessary conclusion: “Then animals have their own racial politics as well?” The semi-­coquettish undertones of the interaction are further drawn out in the next scene, which establishes the woman as object of desire: as Lang stresses the importance of spousal selection, the camera cuts away to a shot of Volkmann’s blonde-­tressed head framed by the heads of the two doctors, one on either side (see Figure 16). The visual point made here is then driven home with the aid of scientific data, supplied in graphical form by an image of the Kallikak family tree, which traces the results of the progenitor’s mating with

Figure 16. Das Erbe (1935). Cinematic interpellation of the audience as the Volk.

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two spouses, one healthy and one hereditarily tainted, and stresses the social costs of the second family line. Having thus learned to see the didactic lesson and process as inseparable, the audience is prepared for the next, crucial transition: just as the opening sequence takes the audience behind the scenes of the film’s making, so too in the next sequence the veil is lifted on a world, the asylum, that normally remains behind closed doors. Brief close-­ups of patients, many with grotesquely distorted features in various postures of helplessness, are accompanied by a voice-­over stating the costs of caring for such “incurables” (“700 million Marks annually”). The voyeuristic pleasure formerly gratified by the traveling sideshow is here transformed into a clinical gaze that points directly to the Nazis’ euthanasia program.105 Although the film employs many of the devices of the cinematographer’s craft (dissolves, wipes, iris fades), it is in the close-­ups of the patients that its representational practice draws most attention to itself. These images use conventions of representation that naturalize a view of the disabled as completely other. As if to emphasize their fundamental separation from society, the patients’ heads seem to float in an almost disembodied space. At the same time, words identifying the institutions are flashed across the screen—​­“insane asylum,” “sanatorium,” “institution for the mentally disabled”—​­a bold script evoking commercial film advertising (see Figure 17). This crucial piece of evidence is presented in a peculiarly

Figure 17. Das Erbe (1935). Sanatorium patient.

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nondocumentary or antirealist fashion. It is as though, in crossing the threshold into this disturbingly different world, the film shifts into an entirely different visual register, one that seems both to evoke the sensationalism of the commercial drama and to mimic the diseased perceptions of the patients themselves. The film ends by returning to the visual iconography of the healthy Volk. Its message is driven home with an intertitle exhorting the audience in the following terms: “No longer randomly, but consciously . . . ​Towards a happy and correct spousal selection.” The text serves to separate and quarantine the shocking images of institutional life from the film’s final message of racial renewal. In his writings, Walter Gross defined the image as superior to the word as a medium of public address, yet it is telling that the film’s ­conclusion—​ a passage from the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased ­ ­Offspring—​­mediates the ambiguous power of the moving image with the authority of the written word. In conflating the laboratory with the film studio, Das Erbe invites its audience to see Dr. Lang as both scientist and film director, a metteur en scène of the Volkskörper in all its radiant health but also its sicknesses, including those requiring special medical intervention. He is identified as “grand enunciator”: master of a process of image making and of the authority claimed by virtue of that process. Fräulein Volkmann, for her part, is treated as student, as subject of audience identification and fantasy, and, not incidentally, as object of the clinical gaze embodied in Dr. Lang (women, it should be recalled, were sterilized in far greater numbers than were men). Crafting a mode of address that takes the viewer behind the scenes—​­both of the film’s making and of the asylum and the scientific “truth” it contains—​­Das Erbe doubly initiates its audience into a new state of enlightenment.

Conclusion In a recent survey of scholarship on medical and popular scientific films, Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter propose that such films may best be thought of as boundary objects, emerging at the intersection of, and mediating between, different filmic genres, forms of knowledge, modes of address, and audiences.106 This designation seems especially apt for the enlightenment film. In their efforts to reach the widest possible public, the makers of such films staked out a terrain defined, on the one hand, by the conventions of the scientific film and, on the other, by those of the feature drama. Yet the hybrid

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status of this variant of the Kulturfilm, along with its often-­risky subject matter, generated considerable unease and debate. While the genre’s hybridity undoubtedly helped broaden its appeal, it also placed it at the very center of many of the deepest controversies of Weimar society and culture. From the outset, the Aufklärungsfilm’s history was marked by fundamental questions about its content, its proper mode of address, and its audience. Was it to be purely instructional, or should it couple information with persuasion, and thus become a form of propaganda? Alternatively, was it best to adopt the conventions of the feature film, to educate by entertaining? Should it craft its message through appeals to reason, or rather use sensationalistic means to shock its audience into awareness of the risks surrounding, say, spousal choice? Such debates, which plagued the genre throughout the Weimar era, survived into the Third Reich even while it underwent a dramatic revival. However surprising on the face of it, this underscores the extent to which the enlightenment film remained haunted throughout its history by its Doppelgänger the commercial entertainment film—​­a relation made manifest in Das Erbe in the peculiarly anti-­realist presentation of its crucial scene, which borrows from the visual repertoire of the sensational popular drama. The representational strategy adopted in this instance demonstrates how the makers of such films repeatedly found themselves compelled to negotiate anxieties surrounding what Sarasin calls the mediality and discursivity of popular hygiene.107 In the final analysis, hygienic knowledge must be based on a form of self-­knowledge that governs one’s relation to practices and norms of viewing. Initiation into this knowledge entailed not simply recourse to scientific modes of visualization but also a commentary on the medium itself. In effect, this treatment of the film-­going experience reflects what I have been calling the genre’s internalization of the censor, as well as the elevation of the hereditary health specialist into a new kind of censor. These films teach their viewers lessons not only in hygiene and in new forms of knowledge—​­whether sexological, eugenic, or racial—​­but also in how to see the world in hygienic terms and how to regulate their behavior accordingly, not least in relation to the filmic medium itself.

Chapter 5

Scientific Cinema Between Enlightenment and Superstition, 1918–­4 1

In June 1941, with Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union imminent, Joseph Goebbels announced that, as part of an internal campaign aimed at combating the problem of medical charlatanism, the Nazi regime had taken steps to round up and arrest astrologers, anthroposophists, magnetopaths, and other such figures. In his diary, the Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda crowed with delight that this motley assortment of alleged “clairvoyants” had, in what he called a “bad sign for the profession,” failed to foresee their own arrest.1 Shortly thereafter, Goebbels was contacted by Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, who communicated the Führer’s wishes that the “sharpest possible measures be taken against the further spread of occult teachings.” In addition to the arrests undertaken by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Bormann requested that Goebbels mount a public enlightenment campaign against occultists and recommended that he call upon Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti and his expert on the subject of occult teachings, Bernhard Hörmann, to assist in this campaign.2 Goebbels had earlier objected on grounds that such campaigns often provoked rather than discouraged interest among the public, but now, with the war about to enter its most critical phase, he cast these cautions aside. In the crackdown that followed, strict bans were enforced on public experiments in telepathy and hypnosis, and medical specialists and psychiatrists were enlisted to provide expert opinions on those rounded up in the SD’s dragnet as well as to conduct research on the phenomenon of “superstition.”3

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One year prior to these events, Goebbels had authorized the production of an enlightenment film devoted to combating this problem. Titled Aberglaube (Superstition, 1940), it was directed by Walter Ruttmann, best known for the innovative montage sequences of his Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927).4 Ruttmann here turned his camera on the figure of the medical charlatan, who is portrayed in the film by the “Psychotherapist-­Clairvoyant” Elena Proschowski. Proschowski receives a visit from a young woman whose doctor has informed her that she needs an operation to cure her unnamed illness. Refusing to believe the doctor, she flees the hospital before the scheduled procedure and seeks out Proschowski, who uses her esoteric methods to prescribe a less invasive cure.5 Meanwhile, the clairvoyant has come to the police fraud department’s attention. In one scene, the assistant to the head of this department muses that “[Proschowski] is reputed to be an excellent psychologist,” to which his chief responds dismissively: “Every swindler is a ­psychologist. . . . ​They all claim to be scientific—​­they are all swindlers.” Later the chief himself assumes the role of psychological expert as he explains the conditions in which figures like Proschowski flourish. He cites public anxiety about the current political prognosis and the circulation of rumors concerning the end of the war: “A minimum of 10 different predictions has been made about the end of the war in the last few months. . . . ​Weak-­willed people believe these kinds of predictions. They are affected in the nerves by such things!” In the end, though help comes too late for the young woman, who dies as a result of Proschowski’s misdiagnosis, justice is served when the police, acting on a tip by the woman’s doctor, arrest the clairvoyant. The final image of the film depicts the clairvoyant’s mug shot, lingering on features with an unmistakably alien racial cast. The Eastern Jewish qualities of her visage and name underscore earlier scenes depicting her unseemly interest in her patients’ fees, as well as the contrast with the selfless man of medical science. As evidence of the truth behind clairvoyance, the photograph anchors the film in a stable indexical order grounded in the dogmas of racial science.6 Older members of the audience for this film would likely have been alert to the echoes between the conditions alluded to by the head of the fraud department and those prevailing at the end of the previous world war. Then, too, uncertainty about the military prognosis, along with widespread death and suffering, had driven many Germans to seek out astrologers, clairvoyants, and the like; then too, the military campaign had been accompanied by a campaign against medical quackery.7 An important salvo in this campaign was fired by the eminent psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, whose essay “One Hundred

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Years of Psychiatry” (1918) had celebrated the victory of scientific psychiatry over charlatanism. Yet in declaring that psychiatry had overcome its prescientific past, Kraepelin ignored the fact that during the war German doctors had widely resorted to methods of treatment (especially hypnosis) they had earlier disparaged as those of frauds.8 Moreover, these methods were used in ways whose therapeutic value was ambiguous, exposing doctors to charges of abuse and charlatanism in the press and in a handful of postwar trials. And while the moving image was used to provide scientific legitimacy for these methods, charges of abuse also found their way into popular films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, called into question both the assertions of experts like Kraepelin and the truth claims made for scientific cinema. The aftermath of World War I was marked by repeated skirmishes between mainstream doctors and unlicensed healers specializing in alternative or esoteric methods of treatment. Many physicians saw the suppression of lay medicine as itself a crucial front in their campaign to restore the health of the defeated Volk. The “occultist plague” was identified as a “psychic epidemic” and its spread through Germany tracked closely by specialists in mental hygiene.9 Kraepelin’s student, the psychiatrist Mathilde Kemnitz, held occultists responsible for many of her patients’ mental illnesses, and her stridently anti-­ Semitic form of hostility to the occult was eventually incorporated into her husband General Erich Ludendorff ’s version of the stab-­in-­the-­back legend.10 Doctors treated the figure of the charlatan as a grave threat to the nation’s health, the best remedy for which was a sustained program of hygienic enlightenment. Yet this figure also became a kind of Doppelgänger who confronted medical professionals with a disturbing reminder both of their own recently overcome prescientific past and of their claims to new, untested, and often deeply controversial forms of knowledge. In many ways, Germans in the interwar period thus oscillated between two kinds of human science, a situation emblematized in the tale of the half-­ scientist, half-­charlatan Caligari. Increasingly they were exposed to a wide array of new practices, extending from psychological aptitude testing and psychoanalytic treatment to sexual and reproductive counseling. On problems like war neurosis, venereal disease, juvenile delinquency, and eugenic sterilization, the influence of the psy sciences became evermore pervasive in German society. This further intensified under the Nazis, whose “ethnocrats” exhorted citizens to maximize production in the workplace, to produce the greatest possible number of healthy children, and to assist the regime in identifying cases of “life unworthy of living.”11 Even while these processes gained

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momentum, however, they also generated considerable anxiety, as is attested to, for instance, by warnings dating from the mid-­1930s concerning the risk that the public would come to regard euthanasia panels with the same horror as it did “the hypnotic gaze of the ‘mad doctor.’ ”12 At the same time, many Germans also sought out more esoteric kinds of medicine and science. In doing so, they did not simply perpetuate older belief systems but rather became participants within distinctly modern constellations of thought and practice.13 Kraepelin’s declaration of victory notwithstanding, postwar Germany witnessed a major surge of interest in alternative medicine. Often operating under the banner of “life reform,” faith healers aroused much fascination among ordinary Germans—​­a fascination often mixed with unease. The popular representation of such figures as racially alien reflected these mixed attitudes. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Mabuse-­like figure of the hypnotist remained a staple of Weimar popular culture, often tapping into anti-­Semitic fantasies of Jews as masters of psychological control. Such representations, however, obscured a more complex reality. Whether driven by desperation for relief from their suffering, curiosity, a wish for new (self-­)knowledge, or simply a desire for entertainment, Germans continued to seek out such healer showmen, often in defiance of official bans. This persisted throughout the 1930s. Despite the Nazis’ own efforts to regulate this alternative medical public sphere—​­efforts complicated by the predilection of many leading party members for natural or esoteric methods of healing—​­popular interest remained strong. It is within this context that the release of Superstition in 1940 must be understood. Its making underscores once again the central role of moving images in delineating the Nazi hygienic imaginary. Throughout the interwar period, popular-­scientific cinema continually thematized the figure of the charlatan as the charismatic yet dangerous purveyor of fringe science. As part of a medical enlightenment campaign, scientists and others used film to instruct the public on the fraudulence of mediumistic practices and of claims for special healing powers. Walter Ruttmann wove the figure of the medical swindler into several of his films, including Enemy in the Blood (1931) and A Film Against the Volkskrankheit Cancer (1941). At the same time, motion pictures were also implicated in this campaign: On the one hand, lay healers and clairvoyants sought to use film to document and publicize their esoteric practices; on the other, popular film continued to be seen by authorities as a medium whose formal properties and content gave it a strange power over audiences, “hypnotizing” or even “experimenting” on them.14 The specter of the charlatan became as such central to the moral economy

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of the hygienic enlightenment film. Both a danger to be combated and a continually evoked discursive presence, it formed part of the ambiguous dialectic that accompanied the process of legitimating new forms of scientific knowledge, specifically, as we shall see, in connection with racial hygiene. At the same time, the treatment of the phantasmal figure of the charlatan in a film like Superstition also functions as part of a reflection on its own mediality. In both senses, it figures as an important element within what Philipp Sarasin calls a strategy of “discursive immunization.”15

Cinema, Enlightenment, and Superstition A central theme of hygienic doctrine since the Enlightenment was the progress of scientifically based medical knowledge and the suppression of superstition or deviant bodies of knowledge. From the late nineteenth century on, the professionalization of medicine and the extension of health insurance in Germany to wider sectors of the populace advanced this project significantly.16 Yet by enveloping matters of health within layers of expertise and bureaucratic procedure, this development also produced on the part of many Germans a desire for more unmediated, natural, or “auratic” forms of healing. Insofar as it assumed a partly voluntary dimension, hygiene discourse created an opening for lay practitioners of all kinds, who “operated in the space between medical authority and popular knowledge.”17 Health became simultaneously the site of a process of disenchantment and of aspirations for reenchantment, often under the banner of “life reform.” Yet, as Michael Hau has shown, nineteenth-­century life reform cannot be seen as simply a backlash against the rationalization of medicine.18 In many respects it represented a natural extension of the hygienists’ emphasis on self-­scrutiny and self-­regulation. Even as they cultivated a self-­consciously holistic approach to questions of health, many life reformers also appropriated natural scientific modes of inquiry, and in their exploration of esoteric states catered to public fascination with the ceremonies of scientific experimentation. In the aftermath of World War I, such hybrid approaches to the healing arts found expression in a vibrant medical subculture. Amid the conditions of what Michael Burleigh calls “ontological crisis” that prevailed in postwar Germany—​­conditions highly conducive to the proliferation of new “political religions”—​­charismatic healers found a large public.19 By some accounts, the expansion of the field of lay medicine reached its high point in Weimar Germany.20

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Efforts on the part of officials and professional groups to regulate this phenomenon met with limited success. Physicians desirous of asserting monopolistic controls over the healing arts were stymied both by the laws guaranteeing freedom of trade and by the persistent interest many citizens took in alternative medicine. Though the boundaries between mainstream and lay medicine remained permeable, licensed professionals persisted in seeing the latter phenomenon as symptomatic of resistance to their authority, and in condemning so-­called “charlatans” for exploiting public credulity and for enriching themselves at their clients’ expense.21 Failing a change in the laws, they placed their hopes in a campaign of mass enlightenment intended to warn Germans against all forms of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. In the war’s aftermath, the moving image was enlisted in this campaign. Stressing the inadequacy of the printed word for conveying hygienic instruction to people left too fatigued by their work for reading, hygienists embraced film as a tool of popular enlightenment on occultism and related topics. By the year of the exhibit on “Superstition and Health” at the International Hygiene Exhibition held in Dresden in 1930, this had been identified as a special branch of “hygiene politics,” and a publication released in connection with this exhibit emphasized the importance of mental hygiene in combating the postwar proliferation of “transcendentalist” and “irrationalist” tendencies: “Perhaps never since the advent of the Enlightenment and of natural-­scientific knowledge has there been such an explosion of superstition and misbelief in such a short timespan.”22 The need to combat such phenomena was stressed by authorities in many fields. In an article written in 1924, film expert Oskar Kalbus cited the example of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and included stills from Lang’s film to make his point that the supernatural had become one of the popular cinema’s favorite themes. To counteract this tendency, Kalbus called for instructional films to enlighten the masses on so-­called supernatural phenomena. In doing so, he harkened back to the earliest days of scientific cinematography, arguing that the supernatural in its purest sense—​­the supersensory (Übersinnliche)—​­ could be considered the cinematic subject par excellence. Just as Etienne-­Jules Marey’s original researches had been devoted to capturing processes and movements imperceptible to the naked eye, so too now motion pictures could serve as a “registration-­technology” for determining whether “ghost-­like” phenomena represented objective facts or rather the “unreliable and often auto-­suggestively influenced perceptions of séance participants and experimenters.” Film, claimed Kalbus, was never subjectively biased but always

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“non-­partisan, skeptical, absolutely faithful to the truth,” and as such it represented the ideal medium for exposing spiritualist fraudulence of all kinds.23 Like the earliest scientific cinematographers, Kalbus saw the moving image as a control apparatus, whose formal techniques could be used to test the claims of spiritists, telepaths, and other specialists in mediumistic activity. Kalbus identified this work of demystification as part of film’s special mission at a cultural moment in which Germany had been engulfed by a veritable flood of would-­be sciences of all kinds. Kalbus also argued that film had a vital role to play in authenticating certain phenomena that fell into the category of the supersensory and yet had gained scientific validity. Again invoking Lang’s Mabuse, he contrasted it with a handful of educational films on hypnosis that had been produced since the war under the direction of reputable scientists. The most significant of these was A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul: Film of the Unconscious (1923). Produced by Arthur Kronfeld and Curt Thomalla, this film, as we saw in the Introduction, responded to the provocation of Mabuse by attempting to reclaim hypnosis from the realm of mass culture and to reassert professional controls over the image and methods of the trained medical practitioner.24 Using diagrams, animation, and examples drawn from everyday life, the film demonstrated the medium’s power to capture inner life, providing its audience with graphical representations of the topography and workings of the mind, unconscious activities, and dreams. Kalbus especially praised the film for its visual representation of the concept of Beeinflussung—​­the mysterious force that lay behind Mabuse’s uncanny powers but that scientists had naturalized and shown to operate in ways perfectly consistent with the laws of science. The phenomenon of “influence” could be found at work throughout the human organism, from the most basic physiological functions of the vasomotoric nervous system to the more complex realms of psychic life. Hypnosis, as Thomalla’s film showed, represented simply a special application of this phenomenon. Divesting hypnosis of its supernatural ballast, he explicated both its very real powers—​­its ability to explore the unconscious and to treat psychological disorders—​­and its limits. In doing so, the film demonstrated that hypnosis had little to do with the occult or with the specter of “criminal suggestion” that animated the plot of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. Yet Kalbus’s faith in scientific cinematography was hardly free of ambivalence. He sounded a note of caution in alluding both to the risks of the filmic representation of hypnotic experiments and to the example of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, a cinematic invention that embodied many of the dangers associated

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with the medium. He further cited the embarrassing case of Albert von Schrenck-­Notzing, a leading psychiatrist whose research in the field of the paranormal had culminated in his collaboration on several films allegedly demonstrating the phenomenon of “materialization.” Such cases called into question any naïve view of film as a “partisan of the truth.” On the one hand, Kalbus praised film’s unparalleled objectivity and ability to “convey instruction to the masses”; on the other, he expressed dismay at the extent to which the “supernatural” had become part of the elemental vocabulary of Weimar cinema.25 For Kalbus this duality expressed itself most powerfully in the “magnetic” allure exercised by film over its “indiscriminately thrown together” public—​­a public that was, he noted, marked by the same unstable forms of “double-­consciousness” that Thomalla’s film identified as a feature of all psychic life.26 Another figure who repeatedly addressed the nexus between censorship and the supernatural was the professional Schundkämpfer Albert Hellwig. As we saw in earlier chapters, Hellwig had long been active in the field of film censorship. To this he coupled an equally intense interest in the occult, a subject on which he published an important wartime study. Indeed he tended to lump the two problems together: from the beginning, he included occult themes within the broader category of “trash” that made popular film dangerous to young audiences. During the 1920s, he served as expert witness in several highly public trials in which charges of fraudulence were brought against self-­styled clairvoyants. Hellwig’s scientific credentials had been somewhat tarnished by these battles in which he suffered a handful of high profile defeats. He continued, however, tirelessly to pursue his campaign against the scourge of the medical swindler, serving as a consultant to the section on “Superstition and Health” at the 1930 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden.27 In his article “Cinema as Important Factor in the Investigation of Occult Phenomena” Hellwig echoed Kalbus in stressing film’s ability to “make the invisible visible,” and thus to assist in investigating phenomena beyond the threshold of ordinary human perception.28 Perhaps somewhat chastened by his earlier setbacks in court, he refrained from making any categorical pronouncements, saying only that it was too early to form a “definite opinion as to the actual existence of occult phenomena.” Yet he listed several claims of mediumistic activity that had been exposed as fraudulent, singling out the case of the telepath August Drost (at whose 1924 trial Hellwig had offered testimony that was widely panned in the press).29 Following the trial, the UFA

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planned a film titled Ghosts, Spirits, and Expressionism in Film, documenting Drost’s experiments in clairvoyance; however, in what Hellwig saw as an admission of failure, the film was never released. Like Kalbus, Hellwig believed that the moving image could be used to expose so-­called occult phenomena, showing that there were no invisible processes to be captured on film. Yet he increasingly shifted his focus away from the truth claims surrounding such phenomena to the question of the mental state of occultists and their public, evaluating their activities through a psychiatric lens.30 Hellwig’s dual career points to underlying affinities. For this man of science, film and the occult occupied a shared conceptual space; the regulation of one mirrored that of the other, and allowing either to escape the stringent controls of authorities carried grave risks, not least among them outbreaks of “mental contagion.” Yet Hellwig’s checkered history of performances in trials involving clairvoyants suggests that the boundaries he sought to police were far from stable. The war against occultism might well be a “Battle against Schund” (as one pamphlet offering enlightenment on parapsychology claimed) yet, like the problem of Schund, the figure of the charlatan represented a moving target.31 In part, as this chapter will show, because of the very exigencies of hygienic discourse, competing claims to epistemic authority remained far from easy to adjudicate.32

“Experiments Whose Object Is Man Himself” According to Thomas Elsaesser, the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari marks the moment in German film history when the folkloric or science fiction figure of the Golem, man machine, or homunculus switches over into “the register of hypnosis, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.”33 In this film, the Gothic theme of artificially created beings is recast in terms of the more naturalistic—​­if ultimately no less fantastical—​­theme of psychological influence and control. Weimar films wove innumerable variations on this motif. At the same time, this idea also found repeated expression in the self-­reflexive treatment of film as the modern era’s most powerful “means of influencing.”34 As is the case in Caligari, this theme also became interwoven with that of the unstable boundaries between legitimate and pseudoscience. Public interest in hypnosis and other mediumistic practices formed part of a larger interwar debate about claims made in the name of science. A key element of these debates concerned the meaning and status of experimentation as both a

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scientific and a cultural practice. Medical professionals attacked advocates of alternative and esoteric medicine for making false claims for their own “scientificity” and for their practice of staging public “experiments.” Stressing the danger of allowing such procedures, physicians sought to assert a monopoly over the right to experiment. And yet precisely here lay a weak point in their campaign against alternative medicine, for, as many doctors were forced to concede, their profession’s poor public image often drove people into the arms of lay healers, who seemed to offer patients a more personal connection—​ ­often involving suggestive methods—​­all too often missing from mainstream medicine. What was at stake in these matters may be illustrated by looking at events that occurred in 1930, when the Reich Health Council met in a special session to discuss calls for imposing stricter regulations on medical research and practice. Following the session, the council issued guidelines spelling out the principle of voluntary informed consent, guidelines later invoked as a key antecedent of the Nuremberg Code.35 Galvanized by a series of scandals involving questionable medical procedures, prominent physician Julius Moses had publicly condemned the “experimental mania” in German medicine. By the time it met to discuss the question “To what extent is experimenting with human beings justified?” the Health Council was responding to considerable public outrage. Noting widespread belief that experimentation served to satisfy scientific curiosity and theoretical interest rather than the practical purpose of healing, council members agreed on the need to define clearly the boundaries of permissible human experimentation. Yet as the minutes of this session reveal, these boundaries were by no means self-­ evident to the council.36 In an effort to clarify the issues raised by Moses’s attacks on “criminal experiments,” council member Alfons Stauder suggested that the distinction between experiments for therapeutic purposes and those purely for research purposes could best be illustrated by reference to the practice of hypnosis. Stauder explained that in the hands of a trained physician this method of treatment was immensely valuable, even if by general consent it exercised such a “deep-­reaching and profound influence over the patient’s mental life” that it could only be used with proper appreciation of the risks involved. Very different, he continued, was the use of hypnosis by lay practitioners and showmen, whether for the purpose of healing or for the sake of gratifying public interest in demonstrations of unconscious or occult forces. He stressed both the danger such experiments posed to subjects—​­even to volunteers, many of

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whom he suggested were probably “psychopaths” to begin with—​­and the disrepute such practices could bring to medicine. Drawing a revealing parallel that we shall return to later, Stauder stated that medical ethics rejected invasive procedures, like the sterilization of healthy people in the absence of a valid reason, just as it did experiments with hypnosis. He concluded by stressing the financial motives that prevailed in the world of alternative healing.37 That Stauder chose to illustrate the general problematic addressed in this session by reference to hypnosis is less surprising than it seems. His comments allude to a wider history of debates concerning the ethical, professional, and epistemological boundaries of medicine. In these debates, hypnosis and related practices were often invoked, both because they threw into relief the interpersonal dimension of medicine and because of their lengthy association with amateur healer showmen, a history that cast a long shadow over efforts to stabilize the boundaries between professional and lay medicine.38 Mainstream physicians and scientists fought efforts to impose stricter guidelines on experimentation and claimed that prospects for scientific progress demanded total freedom in this regard. At the same time, they condemned unlicensed practitioners, stressing the ethical dangers of public experiments in hypnosis. In calling for greater regulation of such practitioners, they sought to purge hypnosis not simply of its associations with quackery but also of its association with the realm of spectacle and popular culture. Yet charges of charlatanism cut both ways, exposing the vulnerability of a medical profession whose public image had been damaged by numerous instances of what Julius Moses referred to polemically, in articles in the popular press, as “medical quackery.”39 These charges also exposed the dilemmas facing a scientific caste anxious to claim new authority for itself in postwar society, yet repeatedly forced to defend its professional terrain against a flourishing culture of healer showmen who, moreover, proved quite adept at appropriating its methods and idioms. As figures like the psychiatrist Robert Gaupp warned, the circulation of scientific vernaculars within the public realm set in motion dynamics that were difficult to keep in check.40 Throughout the 1920s, officials repeatedly sought to rein in a popular culture of experimentation, in part by regulating use of the word “experiment.”41 Authorities condemned the proliferation of “experiments undertaken in public that belong in the doctor’s consulting room or the psychological laboratory.”42 Under the heading “Office for Psychological Reconstruction,” a press article in December 1921 reported on a proposal to create a new psychological counseling office in Altona. The article noted that, in addition to treating nervous illnesses, this office would help combat the

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current widespread “tendency towards the supernatural,” a tendency that had taken on “epidemic” proportions and that expressed itself in the dangerous proliferation of “experiments whose object is man himself.” The need for enlightenment on such dangers was identified as a primary task of the office.43 Such warnings, frequently echoed in official communications, hint at the complex dynamics behind the charges of “experimental mania” made by Moses against German medicine. Even as the Weimar public was scandalized by cases of medical abuse and transgression, many Germans remained drawn to public demonstrations of the experimental procedures that professional communities claimed as their special prerogative. These manifestations of mixed public attitudes point to deeper ambivalences in Weimar society. On the one hand, new fields in the clinical and human sciences found a host of opportunities to test their largely unproven methods: in the name of “psychic reconstruction,” disciplines like psychotechnics, psychoanalysis, eugenics, and sexology gained new prominence.44 Experimentation became a leitmotif of postwar life, extending from the workplace and the arena of sexual relations to the cultural realm. Animated by what Detlev Peukert calls a “heady sense of the possible” (Machbarkeitswahn), new classes of experts gained support for their ideas, ideas that breathed the spirit of an epochal vision of social renewal.45 Through interactions with such experts and through exhibits, the mass media, and print culture, ordinary Germans were encouraged to internalize new blueprints for personal behavior. As part of a wider discourse of the “new man,” a belief in the malleability of human nature, its amenability to reform and improvement, took hold. Everyday life, as Cornelius Borck has written, became an arena of ongoing experimentation.46 At the same time, many ordinary Germans—​­especially those subscribing to the tenets of Lebensreform—​­claimed new rights of self-­experimentation, which they defended as a natural extension of the cultural shift described above but which they also articulated in opposition to the claims of medical practitioners. This was especially true at moments when those claims had been tarnished by scandal, or when citizens perceived their interests as patients as having been compromised by professional agendas or longer-­term trends in medical practice. Alongside the charges of pseudoscience that many new fields were forced repeatedly to defend themselves against, charges of “over-­ bureaucratization,” “mechanism,” or “materialism” also resonated widely throughout this period. These frequently invoked terms became part of an emotionally and at times racially charged debate that made the health of the Volkskörper the site for intense conflicts of Weltanschauungen.47

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If we now return to Stauder’s comments, we can see more clearly the larger context in which they operated. They remind us not least of the fact that hypnosis had emerged from the war as a deeply contested practice. Wartime treatment by hypnosis on a mass scale spawned intense interest mixed with ambivalence. Scientific application of suggestive methods became common in fields ranging from the treatment of homosexuality to alcoholism to advertising. At the same time, medical and other specialists increasingly relied on hypnosis as a conceptual tool for charting the psychic and emotional currents of mass society. The motif of suggestion became integral to discussions of crowd behavior, enlisted by experts in many branches of knowledge in their efforts to probe the inner and outer dispositions of the German populace.48 Along with this specialist discourse, hypnosis also became an object of popular fascination. Repeatedly enjoined by experts to envision themselves as new kinds of subjects, ordinary Germans increasingly found themselves operating in, to cite Elsaesser again, “the register of hypnosis, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.”49 On the one hand, this register evoked the omnipotent figure central to the “hypnosis myth” whose emergence at the turn of the century, as we saw in Chapter 3, represented a response to the opaque nature of the social forces unleashed by the modernizing process. During the 1920s, this myth, personified in the figures of Caligari, Mabuse, and other screen “tyrants,” tapped into deep unease rooted in a perceived loss of personal control and autonomy, a condition of “agency panic” experienced by many Germans during this period of ongoing social crisis.50 But the Weimar era was also a period of emancipation, of continual experimentation with “new ways of life and forms of regeneration.” In parallel with the condition of uncertain agency that hypnosis so often evoked, it also held out the promise of a recovery of agency. Frequently advertised as offering new paths to health, enlightenment, and self-­ knowledge, it seemed to offer the possibility that individuals could discover through it the laws of their own subjectivity; that, as Michael Cowan puts it, they could make themselves “subjects rather than objects of history.”51 Many Germans proved highly receptive to this promise, and this fact, as public officials complained bitterly, greatly complicated their efforts to regulate the sphere of lay medicine. The frequent recourse to suggestive methods by lay practitioners attests to the desire of many ordinary Germans for a more direct, personal relation to their doctor. While appropriating scientific procedures, lay healers—​­many of whom, police records suggest, were veterans of the Great War and had probably gained their first exposure to hypnosis while being treated for shellshock—​­also based their

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knowledge claims on their own narratives of overcoming illness through suggestive methods.52 Such assertions of expertise rested on firsthand experience of the simultaneously transgressive and emancipatory potential of hypnosis. The faith in the possibilities of molding human subjects that Peter Fritzsche has identified as a hallmark of the interwar period was shared not least by those subjects themselves. A characteristic expression of this faith appeared in the form of a letter sent in 1923 to the Interior Ministry and the Prussian Ministry of Welfare by a leading association in natural medicine circles, the Verband der Heilkündiger Deutschlands. Protesting new measures intended to curtail alternative medicine, and specifically the practice of popular hypnosis, the association reminded officials of the wartime context of the recent resurgence of interest in suggestive healing: “[D]uring the war, the enormous increase of psychic disturbances as a result of nervous shock forced doctors to give more attention to hypnosis and psychotherapy.” The letter then cited the 1869 law of freedom of trade, granting every person the right to seek medical help wherever they could find it: “Today we in Germany have voting rights for women; the people have been declared mündig [responsible] and can choose their own government. To now deny a person this Mündigkeit when he bestows his trust on his doctor contradicts the current interpretation of the law.”53 Individual healer-­ performers wove innumerable variations on this theme, framing it as an issue of trust between patient and doctor or as a question of civic rights. In one case in which officials brought charges against an itinerant magnetist known as Nena, the defendant claimed that any ban on performing experiments on people could not apply to experiments conducted on oneself. Using language that resonated in the context of contemporaneous debates over abortion, the defendant based the right to self-­experimentation on a “right to sovereignty over one’s body.”54 The case ended in acquittal, on grounds that it could not be proved that Nena was consciously fraudulent; despite considerable evidence that he was a swindler, he nevertheless “believed in his own art” and there was insufficient proof that he acted in bad faith. When Albert Hellwig presented testimony at one such trial in which he accused the performer of bad faith, he was criticized for overstepping his competence and for being a “poor psychologist.”55 Stauder’s remarks attest not least to how the German medical profession deflected charges of ethical transgression onto the figure of the charlatan. Yet even as licensed physicians condemned the tendency of practitioners like Nena to clothe themselves in the mantle of science by assuming titles like

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“Experimental psychologist” and even while they mocked the rhetoric with which such figures promised to instruct their public in the methods of “Selbst Suggestion-­Heil,” of “making everyman his own Heil suggestor,” they remained deeply frustrated by the ability of such figures to elude regulation and by continuing evidence of public mistrust toward their profession.56

Mediumship on Screen 1929–­37 Given the possibility that the perceived dangers associated with a figure like Nena could be amplified many times over when transferred to the screen, officials went to great lengths to limit such possibilities. In doing so, as we saw in Chapter 3, they frequently turned to medical experts. In a 1922 opinion solicited by the film censor board concerning the representation of experiments with hypnosis in popular film, Emil Kraepelin had cited the risk that members of the public might be tempted to volunteer for experiments or to perform them on others, with grave consequences for their own psychological well-­being.57 Such warnings were widely echoed by experts in the field of mental hygiene. All too often, however, censorship proceedings only underscored the difficulty in resolving the claims and status of new or alternative sciences and the mediumistic activities associated with them, much less the supposed dangers associated with a public screening of such activities. Consider the case of the (now lost) film Somnambul (1929). Originally titled The Clairvoyant, this film was banned and then extensively reworked before finally being granted a distribution permit. It marked the screen debut of Elsbeth Günther-­Geffers, a clairvoyant who had gained some renown for assisting local police forces with her telepathic abilities. In a series of decisions by the censor board that stretched out over nearly a year, what began as a film meant to capitalize on Günther-­Geffers’s talents as a stage performer in the mediumistic arts was transformed into something quite different: her role in the film was cut significantly and the claims providing the original inspiration for the film treated as false. A scene in which she attempts to conduct an experiment ends in fiasco, followed by an intertitle that reads: “It’s all a swindle! There is no such thing as clairvoyance!” In the end, the crime is solved by the police, with the assistance of a professional physician.58 The final decision by the censor board relied on the views of an extensive panel of experts, chief among them those of Dr. Heinrich Hesse of the Reich Health Office. Hesse struck a cautious note, skirting the issue surrounding the

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truth claims of clairvoyance and stating simply that “science had no unequivocal position on telepathy and occultism.” The censor board, he went on, was not obliged to decide whether clairvoyance was a reliable means of investigating the facts in criminal cases. It needed only to consider whether the representation of experiments in telepathy could “negatively influence the health of normal audience members.” In his view, the answer was clear: such practices could produce serious illnesses among even those who were not particularly sensitive, and even in cases in which individuals were not direct participants in a séance. At its heart, he stressed, the issue came down to the formal properties of the filmic medium and the dangers associated with them: “Film is an extraordinary means of conveying (Vermittlung) clairvoyant procedures. The audience sees the process unfold, not in a séance conducted by an untalented medium, but by actors, who portray the whole procedure with the utmost plasticity.”59 In framing his opinion in this way, Hesse confined himself strictly to the question of the medium’s effects, defined in medical terms, and refrained from addressing the knottier questions surrounding the merits of clairvoyance as a form of Aufklärung or aid to police investigation. Presumably this reflected a desire to avoid being drawn into a wider debate in which the verdict on those merits remained, at least as far as a certain sector of the German populace was concerned, open. (Like Hellwig, Hesse’s scientific credentials had been called into question on several occasions.) In the extensive press coverage that the deliberations over the film generated, the initial decision to ban it was depicted in some quarters as an attack on science. Though the ostensible reason given for the ban was that the film showed the police in a bad light, the real motive, according to one article, was the authorities’ desire to suppress the science of parapsychology: this kind of “attack on scientific freedom” reflected a narrowly “materialistic worldview,” and, moreover, was a step that even the prerevolutionary censor would “never” have taken.60 Numerous other articles also protested the ban in similar terms, implying that the censorship of the film in terms of effects was merely a thinly veiled form of censorship of content, and that the scientific grounds for the latter remained shaky. Indeed, a lengthy forensic investigation into Günther-­Geffers’s alleged supernatural abilities had resulted in a decidedly equivocal decision. A distinguished expert panel made up of six leading figures had been assembled. The resulting 200-­page document included eyewitness testimony, reports on numerous experiments, and the transcripts of several trance sessions.61 While the panel gathered much evidence of the defendant’s impressive appearance

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in a trance state—​­witnesses described her in cinematic terms as “uncannily” expressive, “death-­like”—​­the experiments themselves all ended in failure. Medical examination revealed that while she seemed to be in a deep hypnotic state, the actual signs of hypnosis were absent; tests found no anomalies in her pulse, blood pressure, or sensibility. Yet despite the absence of these telltale signs or of any evidence of unusual abilities, the experts found no grounds to conclude that the defendant’s performance was consciously simulated or fraudulent. Failing any clear-­cut evidence of bad faith, the experts speculated that Günther-­Geffers labored under a form of autosuggestion: If . . . ​the defendant is in an auto-­suggestively produced state of exception when she performs her “criminal-­telepathic” activities, then it cannot be ruled out that she enters each such state with the hope that she can provide assistance to her client. In her belief in the authenticity of the trance-­state and in the nature and scope of her telepathic abilities, she has in this sense deceived herself. . . . ​According to the opinion of the expert panel, while the utterances and behavior of a medium in a trance-­state may be objectively false [“Medien lügen”], the fraud is perpetrated completely at the level of the unconscious, without the knowledge of the conscious mind.62 It is worth noting how closely this phrasing echoes the language of wartime debates concerning the authenticity of the symptoms of war neurosis, especially given that many of the self-­proclaimed clairvoyants circulating in Weimar Germany were veterans who traced their first exposure to hypnosis back to the war.63 The subtleties voiced in the expert panel’s report on Günther-­Geffers were lost on Albert Hellwig. In an article that appeared following the release of Somnambul, he identified Günther-­Geffers as an obvious “swindler” whose stated wish to appear in a “scientific film” was a smokescreen disguising her true goal of making an “advertisement-­film” for herself. The resulting film had so clearly exposed the fraudulence of clairvoyant practices that Hellwig surmised its director had closely studied his own “enlightening” texts on the subject. He concluded by asking sardonically whether Günther-­Geffers would now devote herself to a career in cinematic debunking, offering “instead of clairvoyance, enlightenment on so-­called clairvoyance.”64 As we shall later see, the Nazis entertained similar hopes regarding the possibility of recruiting self-­ styled clairvoyants to their own campaign of anti-­occultist enlightenment.

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First, however, we must turn to one further example of the filmic representation of mediumship. By the end of the 1920s, the lively culture of mediumistic experimentation that flourished on the Weimar stage and screen had begun to close down, though as we shall see in the conclusion of this chapter it survived in an underground form into the Nazi era.65 During that period, the practice of hypnosis became increasingly subject to monopolistic controls by the medical profession, and as a popular theme it virtually disappeared from the screen. In only one case did this favorite motif of Weimar film survive in cinematic form, and this took the form of a two-­part film intended for exclusively medical and legal audiences. As Ulf Schmidt has documented in detail, the project originated with Kurt Gauger, a psychotherapist and director of the Nazi regime’s educational film office (RfdU), and the psychiatrist Ludwig Mayer, who served as scientific adviser for the two films, On the Phenomenology of Hypnosis (1937) and The Forensic Meaning of Hypnosis (1937).66 Twenty years after Max Nonne produced his short film documenting the hypnotic treatment of shell-­shocked soldiers, Gauger and Mayer turned to this subject with two films that explored at great length hypnosis in all its complexity: on the one hand, hypnosis as a mode of treatment and of producing altered states of consciousness and, on the other, hypnosis as an instrument of crime. The debates occasioned by the intervening history of the popular “hypnosis film” mark these films in numerous ways, most obviously in the gesture of precensorship announced on the opening title screen: “The public screening of this film as well as reports of any sort about the contents of the film to a lay audience are prohibited.” Beyond this, the films go to great lengths to mark the confines of a topic that, as Mayer acknowledged, had long existed at the “boundary between exact medical science and charlatanism.” The films address this topic in a resolutely sober fashion: the framing of scenes is conservative and the camera work artless. In these ways, the films distance themselves from the spectacular qualities both of hypnosis and of the cinematic medium itself. Only in one brief scene is allusion made to the wider context in which the dangers of hypnosis had been so widely thematized during the Weimar era. This scene, introduced by the intertitle “Comedy in the Kino,” depicts a subject who, in a state of hypnotic trance, experiences the hallucinated visual impression that he is witnessing an amusing scene in a movie. The scene treats what has become a central experience for millions of ordinary Germans as an object of clinical interest, whose basic features can be produced under controlled experimental conditions. Mayer’s participation in this project was based on his role in a sensational

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case of fraud and attempted murder involving a man who had allegedly used his hypnotic powers to manipulate a young woman into participating in a seven-­year crime spree. The resulting study of this case was a lengthy exposé of the dangers of lay hypnosis.67 This formed a key part of the context for the making of the films. In a pamphlet accompanying The Forensic Meaning of Hypnosis, Mayer spelled out both the dangers of hypnosis and the scientific value of cinema as means of investigating those: Disturbances of health of the most varied forms may arise through negligent hypnoses and post-­hypnoses. Here I remind you of the work of Prof. I. H. Schultz, “Disturbances of Health under Hypnosis,” which presents hundreds of cases that have been subject to exact scientific investigation. Situations similar to those presented there are shown under experimental conditions in our motion picture, where the extraordinary capacity of film to serve as an objective and easily reproduced form of visual reporting is palpably demonstrated. What no written account or even photographic plate can capture with anything approaching real thoroughness, the film camera, by means of close-­ ups and slow-­motion, can reproduce in the smallest details—​­the play of expressions and the reaction of the muscles—​­and in this way the project of representing hypnotic phenomena that has been undertaken by the RfdU will open up significant new prospects for research.68 Having reminded his reader of the essential affinity between cinematography and scientific method, Mayer’s film proceeded with its demonstration that hypnosis could, in fact, be used to compel subjects to perform actions against their will: crimes, murder, even suicide. The central scene, introduced by the intertitle “Construction of a murder attempt despite deep inner resistance,” involves a female subject who, under hypnosis, is handed a gun and instructed to fire it. The order produces visible distress in the woman: as the “play of expressions” on her face bears witness to her struggle to overcome her inner resistance, a ticking clock on the wall behind her endows the disturbing scene with a requisite objectivity effect, betokening the scientific impulse to measure and quantify (see Figure 18). At the end, in the apparent belief that she has committed a murder, the woman bursts into tears. The specter of hypnotic crime that had so exercised turn-­of-­the-­century psychiatry, and that provided Weimar cinema with so many of its most memorable creations, was here shown to have a definite empirical basis.69 Like Nonne’s film in World War I,

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Figure 18. Ludwig Mayer, The Forensic Meaning of Hypnosis (1937). Subject struggles to resist command to shoot revolver.

Mayer’s films were screened repeatedly—​­ albeit for exclusively medical ­audiences—​­throughout World War II, when hypnosis was again used to treat soldiers who suffered nervous breakdowns.70

Figures of the Hygienic Imaginary In his celebrated study From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Siegfried Kracauer probed Weimar film culture in search of evidence of the “psychological structures” that had allowed the Nazis to come to power. Claiming to find symptoms in this culture of widespread unconscious yearning for authoritarianism, he argued that screen tyrants like Caligari anticipated the actual tyrants who assumed political power in Germany in 1933. Kracauer’s fascinating yet highly problematic reading, subtitled A Psychological History of German Film, grew out of a study of Nazi propaganda that he completed in 1942 and that served as a contribution to the Allies’ psychological warfare campaign; it represents one facet of the broader recruitment of the human sciences in the conflict against National Socialism.71 Treating popular film as a “research medium” into “mass behavior,” Kracauer’s study participated in a larger project meant to produce knowledge of the enemy, and it fed into an emerging profile of “the Nazi mind” that stressed its fundamentally atavistic characteristics. As

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Daniel Pick has recently shown, a central exhibit in this profile was Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s long-­time deputy. Following his solo flight to Scotland in the spring of 1941, Hess’s interest in homeopathic medicine, his habit of sleeping with a magnet over his bed, and his venting about the sinister experiments of “Jewish hypnotists,” all helped fuel an emerging narrative of National Socialism as a political phenomenon deeply rooted in antimodern belief systems.72 The reality, of course, was considerably more complicated. On the one hand, the alleged elective affinity between fascism and esoteric science is highly problematic. Corinna Treitel has shown that occultism was a far more complex phenomenon than once assumed, claiming adherents across the political spectrum. Moreover, the assumption that occult beliefs were rooted in a reaction against modernity—​­a reaction supposedly explaining the Nazis’ attraction to such beliefs—​­is itself problematic. Despite their frequent reliance on antimaterialist rhetoric, its followers by no means defined themselves in direct opposition to modern science. Rather they sought to “re-­enchant” science, appropriating its methods and language and reworking them according to the needs of their belief systems.73 On the other hand, adopting such a view also makes it difficult to evaluate properly the role of science and medicine under the Nazis, a role whose importance could hardly be overstated. While Nazi medicine was once taken as a byword for quackery, this view is now clearly untenable. A large body of recent scholarship has documented the degree to which it was rooted in broader trends in western scientific medicine. Any effort to address the “science question under Nazism” has to grasp these realities, along with the possibility that in at least some instances the regime’s experts made real contributions to medical research.74 Nevertheless, if Kracauer misreads the relation between Caligari and Hitler, his intuition concerning the existence of a connection between these two figures was not entirely misplaced. The connection lies, I would argue, in the alliance between cinema and science, and in the transformative powers vested in this alliance, that forms the subject of this book. Joseph Goebbels articulated one version of these powers when he spoke of the role of propaganda in realizing the Nazis’ dream of a “new man” by “giving form to the primitive substance of an inert mass.” Yet no one appreciated more keenly than the propaganda minister himself the potential risks involved in conjuring these powers. His perpetual anxiety about audience response—​­reflected, for instance, in his initial qualms about using cinematic enlightenment to combat occultism—​­was but one expression of this.

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On the one hand, the vital importance of medicine to the Nazis’ racial project made the centralization of controls, and therefore the suppression of quackery, a national priority. Occultists, as one police report noted in 1937, were enemies of the state who, if allowed to spread their deviant medical teachings, would fatally undermine the strength of the Volk, leaving the nation vulnerable to the threat of epidemic disease.75 On the other—​­and just as crucially from Goebbels’s perspective—​­the specter of medical charlatanism also had to be combated in order to defend German society against another, more intangible if no less real kind of threat, that of psychological epidemics. Rounding up the ranks of “shameless profiteers, pseudo-­philosophers and pseudo-­scientists, crazed prophets and nutrition reformers,” constituted in this sense both a public health measure and a form of political hygiene. To help prevent future outbreaks of “psychic contagion,” the report called for bans and arrests and recommended that in future all such figures should be subject to expert opinions by both psychiatrists and jurists.76 As Treitel suggests with reference to the Jewish hypnotist Hanussen, who was murdered in 1933, it was more often the occultists’ power to influence public opinion than their alleged occult abilities that made such figures a perceived threat from the regime’s perspective. Nazi officials feared occultists and clairvoyant showmen for their ability to “hypnotize” and manipulate the masses, “poisoning their minds with medieval superstitions.”77 One measure of how seriously Goebbels took the problem is that by the time war broke out, the Propaganda Ministry’s health section included, alongside its department for mental hygiene, one for occultism.78 Yet the Nazis were not easily able to escape the tensions running through German medicine. Efforts to regulate the sphere of alternative medicine were complicated not least by the predilection of many leading party members for natural or esoteric methods of healing. Erwin Liek, the “father of Nazi medicine,” influenced many in the party with his criticism of the impersonality of modern scientific method. Liek emphasized the true doctor’s quasi-­magical aura and espoused a holistic form of medicine that took proper cognizance of the role of empathy and suggestion in healing.79 Hitler himself followed a lifestyle of strict abstinence with many of the hallmarks of life reform. More broadly speaking, alternative methods of healing found adherents among many ordinary Germans, fueled in part by disenchantment with the bureaucratization of the nation’s health care system, by medical scandals, and, not least, by the diatribes of figures like Julius Streicher, a prominent adherent of natural medicine who launched shrill attacks on the “Jewification” of modern

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medicine.80 Following its ascent to power, the regime took steps to reconcile the conflicting tendencies in German medicine. Reich Health Leader Gerhard Wagner and his patron Hess sought through a synthesis of orthodox and alternative medicine to restore “the population’s trust in the medical profession.”81 During the first half of the regime’s existence, homeopathy and other branches of alternative medicine continued to flourish. A handful of esoteric organizations survived well into the Nazi era, offering adherents lessons in the techniques of “will-­training” and self-­knowledge. With their openly individualistic appeals to self-­knowledge, however, such phenomena, as Treitel notes, fit uneasily with the regime’s collectivist ethos.82 By the beginning of the war, following Wagner’s death in 1939 and his replacement by Leonardo Conti, “coordination” of the sphere of alternate medicine began in earnest. The Health Practitioner’s Law, passed in 1939, ended the freedom to cure that had existed in Germany since the founding of the Reich; according to Conti, this “liberal-­democratic” policy had merely served as a license for Jews to swindle gullible Germans.83 In truth, suggests Proctor, this outcome was all but inevitable, given the difficulty of reconciling the “natural” approach with plans for engineering a new race: “[T]he ambitious medical initiatives launched by the regime—​­mass x-­ray screenings, sterilizations, racial surveys, vaccinations, the “euthanasia operation,” to name just a few—​ ­required the talents of orthodox practitioners.”84 Curt Thomalla, a key figure in the history of the Weimar enlightenment film who served as the expert on health and population policy in Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, cast all resistance to the Nazis’ modernization of health policy—​­whether this meant inoculation, sexual enlightenment, or racial hygiene—​­as rooted in superstition.85 In the incessant power struggles that marked the Nazi state, the “ethnocrats” won out; meanwhile, allegations that Hess was mentally defective helped provide the rationale for the repressive measures that Goebbels and others regarded as long overdue.86 As we have seen, such allegations reflected the tendency of mental health professionals to pathologize claims for esoteric healing powers or mediumistic abilities.87 The irony is that, despite their initial openness to alternative medicine, the Nazis ultimately succeeded where previous regimes had failed, by cracking down on this sphere with all the considerable resources at their disposal. This process illustrates clearly the convergence between the regime’s bio-­politics and its media policy. In connection with the handling of Hess’s case, Bormann wrote to Goebbels, police actions against occultists were to be accompanied by an enlightenment campaign drawing on the expertise of the highest

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medical authorities in the land, to prevent any possibility that “wide circles of the population would be led astray by occult teachings.”88 Reich Health Leader Conti and his assistant Hörmann, the head of the Reich Office for Medical Abuses and an expert in the occult, stood at the ready to assist Goebbels. Even as the regime entered the final stages of its preparations for the assault on the Soviets, its propaganda ministry devoted renewed attention to fighting wavering morale in the West as a result of Allied bombing raids, fearing these would trigger mass panic and “psychological epidemics.”89 One Reichspropagandaleitung (RPL) communiqué warned that “[c]onfessional and occult circles were circulating apocalyptic prophecies concerning the end of the world and harping on the uncertain political and military future.” Clairvoyants and fortune-­ tellers, it was reported, were exploiting the heightened tension with which citizens awaited news of the subsequent political and military progress of the war, while also doing a brisk trade in amulets and imagery designed to provide magical protection against bomb attacks.90 It is to this conjuncture that Ruttmann’s film Aberglaube alludes, when in one key scene the police chief explains to his underling the impact of the uncertain military situation on making people susceptible to figures peddling occult beliefs. Given the regime’s very real concerns about the German public’s vulnerability to “air raid psychosis” and related disorders, filmic enlightenment thus constituted an elemental form of preventive mental hygiene. Beyond the immediate political and military circumstances, however, there is another significant conjuncture to note here, namely that of the film’s relation to medical politics and the broader escalation of the regime’s racial project. This too is hinted at in the police chief ’s reference to the “weaklings” who believe in fortune-­telling, with its implied warning that such weakness is a sign of a deeper defect and that such people represent a kind of ballast for a healthy Volk. The film’s attack on quackery was part of what Proctor calls the assertion of monopolistic controls over the healing arts by medical professionals, at a moment when their service to the regime had entered a significant new phase.91 The participation of psychiatrists and hereditary health experts in the regime’s sterilization program had long raised concerns of a further crisis in relations between the profession and the wider public, with the result that patients would—​­as the film Aberglaube warned—​­be driven into the arms of quacks.92 As noted earlier, warnings had been issued as early as the mid-­1930s concerning the possibility that euthanasia panels would come to be viewed among the public with a horror akin to that evoked by the “hypnotic gaze of

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the ‘mad doctor.’ ”93 Though they tended to blame popular culture for the specter of “mad science” associated with their profession, psychiatrists were only too aware that their new service to the state carried real risks. Such concerns were further intensified by the onset of Aktion T4, the regime’s “euthanasia” operation, in 1939. Reich Health Leader Conti was charged with overseeing this operation, and, with Goebbels’s assistance, the public relations campaign that accompanied it.94 The racial hygiene films commissioned by the regime from the mid-­1930s on form a body of work that vividly illustrates the power vested by the Nazis in the alliance between cinema and important strains of modern science. In these films, the moving image functions as an instrument of bio-­political discourse and policy, naturalizing the claims of racial science in the face of all doubts to the contrary.95 They thus exemplify the process of what Michael Cowan calls the “production of the Volk by means of film itself.”96 In addition, as Burleigh notes, they perform the subsidiary function of inoculating the medical profession against criticism, by portraying the hereditary health specialist as a benevolent figure: “Lest audiences confuse the professors with cinema’s ubiquitous ‘mad scientists’ the scripts and treatments invariably characterize them as omniscient men of the world, straight of eye and firm of hand.”97 This campaign culminated in the film Ich klage an (I accuse, 1941), made to quell mounting public unease concerning rumors of the death of institutionalized patients and protests originating in Catholic milieus. Here the murder of the “incurably” mentally handicapped was portrayed as a form of mercy killing intended to provide relief from suffering. The film exorcizes the specter of “mad science,” meanwhile, by means of a subplot in which the victim’s husband, a prominent medical researcher, is depicted experimenting obsessively through the night in his laboratory, surrounded by the usual paraphernalia of test tubes and microscopes, in an ultimately fruitless search for a cure for his wife’s fatal condition. Only with the failure of this understandable yet “mad” quest does he come to accept the inevitability and higher truth of “mercy killing.”98 Indeed by the end of the film, anything short of such an outcome is depicted as unnatural, the remnant of a falsely humanitarian, obsolete worldview that impedes further scientific progress—​­in short, a superstition that must be purged from the social body.

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Science, Superstition, and the Struggle for Existence Götz Aly has argued that, apart from the methods and personnel it bequeathed to the Final Solution, the political success of the T4 program, its ability to obtain the at least tacit consent of the population to a policy of mass murder directed at a marginalized population, made it significant for what came later.99 Despite the resources committed by the Nazis to organizing popular consent, this success was far from assured. We can gain some sense of why this was so by examining the conflicted role played by the regime’s racial experts in this process. The ambitions of these experts were considerable, reflecting their belief that the eradication of the social problem of insanity and the eradication of the social problem of superstition represented two sides of the same coin—​­a task the fulfillment of which would enshrine psychiatry as “the psycho-­hygiene of the national community, the queen of medical knowledge par excellence.”100 This was the ardent wish of Carl Schneider, head of the Psychiatric and Neurological Clinic at Heidelberg University, and senior researcher for the T4 program. Early in his career Schneider had expressed reservations about the scientific basis for arguments for the compulsory sterilization of patients, but after 1933 he concluded that the National Socialist dream of racial purity necessitated the most radical measures. He subsequently rose to a leading position within the regime’s program of medicalized murder.101 In addition to his functions within the T4 apparatus, Schneider occupied himself with issuing programmatic statements defining psychiatry’s crucial role in the Third Reich. To secure this position, he argued, the profession needed to combat its poor image among other medical disciplines, on the one hand, and among the general populace, on the other. In this regard, the T4 program represented both an unprecedented opportunity and a not inconsiderable risk. Schneider’s writings on this reflect an acute sense of the challenge facing his profession. Militancy was accompanied by a persistent sense of its embattled status, expressed in repeated references to the “false ideas” and the mistrust felt by ordinary citizens toward the field of psychiatry—​­a long-­ standing aversion that had only intensified with the field’s deepening involvement in hereditary health policies. Concerns about its status as an inferior science, he argued, were to be actively combated by enlightenment and by seizing the advantages for fresh knowledge presented by wartime. Yet such plans continually ran up against opposition: in connection with his hopes to

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study photographs of victims of brain damage (so-­called traumatic epileptics) from both the current and previous wars, Schneider bemoaned the reluctance of the organization that represented such patients to comply with his requests, and stressed the need “to overcome this anti-­psychiatric complex for the purposes of the investigation.”102 However nebulous the basis for Schneider’s reference to an antipsychiatry movement, it underscores the existence of deep anxieties about the field’s professional status. To allay such concerns, he sought to use the T4 program both to deepen scientific knowledge of the disease pictures associated with certain incurable conditions—​­knowledge recorded in the form of several medical films that he produced—​­and to communicate this knowledge to the public. At the same time, he saw this as an opportunity for research of a more anthropological kind, suggesting that it would be valuable to test audience response to the cinematic propaganda campaign that accompanied the program.103 In connection with the latter aim, he proposed a two-­pronged strategy. As Ulf Schmidt has shown, Schneider suggested that the 1942 film Existence Without Life, which promoted euthanasia by demonstrating the incurability of certain diseases, be screened first for women and lay audiences to measure the emotional impact of its images. In the event that the material proved too disturbing, he proposed that it be shown only to medical students, having first carefully prepared them in advance: “One should then screen a purely therapeutic film approximately 8 or 14 days before. Then the audience is ‘pre-­trained,’ so to speak, and it will be immune to certain emotional shocks. Furthermore one has then introduced more forcefully the necessity for the ‘Aktion T4’ logically and psychologically [into the minds of the audience].”104 While film, as Schmidt writes, is here harnessed to a process of psychological reconditioning, this statement also underscores the persistent challenges facing psychiatrists in using the cinematic medium to win public support for their actions. In addition to the immediate tasks defined by the T4 program, Schneider envisioned making fundamental interventions in the “intellectual history of mankind” that had been inaugurated by the Enlightenment: “As happened with astronomy through the work of Copernicus, so one day psychiatry will, through the work of its researchers, exorcise those superstitions regarding the nature of the soul that are upheld by religious beliefs and dogmas.”105 Such remarks make clear that the Third Reich’s campaign against the problem of superstition, while initially focused on fringe or alternative belief systems, had now broadened to encompass religion. This development reflected the extent to which the psychiatric profession’s involvement in implementing the

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regime’s racial policies had entangled it in open conflict with the churches. Again referencing the opportunities for gaining knowledge (in this case, of conditions like idiocy and epilepsy), Schneider argued that the church’s former monopoly over the care of the mentally ill had produced a situation of deep scientific stagnation, which current research, if allowed to proceed unchecked, would clear away once and for all. In the struggle between psychiatry and its old nemesis, nothing less than the nation’s survival was at stake: “Given the situation with respect to population politics which the German people now finds itself confronting in its struggle for existence . . . ​failure to carry out the appropriate research is unthinkable. This important health sector has now been wrested away from the church.” He concluded by spelling out psychiatry’s overriding mission: “We must now participate in the molding (Formung) of the German Volk during the war and the time following the war.”106 This process of molding required deeper understanding of both the institutional and the psychological forces offering resistance. Schneider’s assistant Konrad Zucker, who conducted brain research on euthanasia victims, devoted himself in his spare time to researching the phenomenon of superstition, with the help of police records on fortune-­tellers and astrologers that he received from the Gestapo following its round-­up in mid-­summer 1941.107 His Psychology of Superstition (the publication of which was delayed until 1948), invoked the conflict between enlightenment and superstition as a central problematic of modern times. Yet Zucker expressly distanced his own study from any shallow or naïve form of enlightenment. His book explored the boundaries between superstitious belief and mental illness, especially schizophrenia, while also stressing that the problem of superstition could only be fully eradicated once it was recognized that it “belongs to the possibilities of every person’s existence.”108 A central task of this process of medical enlightenment lay in combating the problem of charlatanism and the forms of ignorance (Unwissen) it was responsible for spreading. Among these, he included the “mystical superstition” surrounding the concept of hypnosis in the lay imagination, which he blamed on popular culture and the press.109 Yet despite the grandiose ambitions of Schneider and his colleagues and despite the very real increase of his profession’s powers under the Nazis, the “crisis of trust” that haunted its relations with the public persisted. As one key figure in the field lamented: “The mistrust of the public against psychiatrists had been gradually stilled through faithful public service on the part of psychiatrists over about 100 years, but this policy of killing the mentally ill stirred up all that mistrust again. ‘Psychiatrists, you know, were always suspected of

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“putting people away,” and now they were not only suspected of putting them away, but there was real evidence that they were actually killing them. That was the tragedy.’ ”110 Such statements hint at another way of understanding the energies devoted by the regime and its racial experts to combating the figure of the charlatan and the deviant beliefs he trafficked in.111 It was precisely their own deepening involvement in transgressive policies that made this figure such an important theme of hygienic discourse and propaganda of the period. The institutionalization under National Socialism of policies of medical intervention far surpassing in their scope and brutality the kinds of “criminal experiments” condemned by Julius Moses during the Weimar era virtually compelled such a strategy.112

Enlightenment and Counterhypnosis Viewed in this context, the film Aberglaube may be understood as serving two closely related purposes. First, it functions to disqualify esoteric forms of healing, in part by associating these with racially alien elements and the “weaklings” who seek out their help; and, second, it functions to rehabilitate the image of the professional doctor, to restore trust in this figure, thereby validating the claims of scientific medicine and clearing space for the new forms of human engineering promoted in the “euthanasia” film Ich klage an. When the “clairvoyant-­psychologist” Proschowski welcomes the young woman, who has come to her straight from the hospital, with the knowing phrase that “the doctors know only how to cut,” she alludes to the anxiety that surrounds contemporary medical science, especially in connection with the sterilization program. The young woman’s death at the end of the film, following Proschowski’s failed treatment, drives home for the audience the lesson that a “cut” is often the sole means of preserving life. Similarly, the fraud chief ’s biting reference to the tendency of such faith healers to cloak themselves in the title of “psychologist” alludes to the criticism of scientific medicine by now-­discredited naturopaths like Erwin Liek, according to whom lay healers were often better psychologists than were professional doctors.113 The message is clear: telling the patient what she wants to hear is a false means of gaining her confidence; a genuine relationship of trust can only be established on the basis of the scrupulous, hard, yet ultimately benevolent expertise of the true man of medicine. Beyond these immediate purposes, Aberglaube also illustrates the filmic medium’s contribution to a strategy of inoculating Nazi science against the

Enlightenment and Superstition  193

charge of false or illegitimate forms of knowledge.114 In this respect, it is worth considering how this film positions itself with respect to the history of the cinematic medium.115 In formal terms, Aberglaube remains conventional, all but renouncing the montage techniques that had been Ruttmann’s signature in his Weimar films. Only in the opening credits does this twenty-­minute film use such techniques. Here we find ourselves in an ambiguous space: lights and objects swim in and out of focus; a pendulum suspended from a hand swings back and forth; a photograph depicting a bearded man reading an astrology text dissolves into an image of celestial constellations; a group of women is shown in an attitude of prayer (here organized religion is clearly identified with the larger problematic addressed by the film); an elderly woman with a furtive glance pours tea grounds, amid which the features of a vaguely sinister-­ looking man slowly materialize (see Figure 19). Using superimposition, dissolves, and switches in focus, this brief opening montage sequence employs a form of filmic address expressly designed to disorient, beguile, and fascinate us, to draw us into a liminal and—​­as the film subsequently shows—​­dangerous space. This is, we could say, a specifically filmic space, one that evokes the suggestive power central to the Weimar discourse about the medium; it is worth

Figure 19. Walter Ruttmann, Aberglaube (1940). Opening credits showing astrologer and celestial formations.

194  Chapter 5

recalling here that one of Ruttmann’s early experimental films was banned by the censor because of apparent concerns about its hypnotic qualities.116 Subsequently the film adopts a purely narrative form of address that renounces the use of such effects, and the danger associated with them comes instead to be personified in the figure of the “clairvoyant” Prochowski. Her reference to the fact that doctors know “only how to cut” invites us to consider this renunciation in terms of another kind of “cut”—​­namely, as an act of self-­censorship. This lesson is driven home by a brief scene in which a member of the fraud unit is shown debunking some of the practices that form the stock-­in-­trade of clairvoyants. Here the film recuperates the moving image’s function as part of a control apparatus for policing such practices. While the film begins within a highly ambiguous visual register, it thus ends in an altogether more stable one. The final photographic image of Proschowski’s mug shot draws our attention to a crucial intermedial dimension of the film’s rhetorical strategy (see Figure 20). This image helps anchor its mixture of didactic and dramatic elements within a secure discourse of truth. Here Aberglaube reveals its dual role: while its manifest purpose is to combat the threat to public health posed by the charlatan, Ruttmann’s film operates at another level to stabilize the regime’s symbolic order. It does so, finally, by playing on long-­standing associations of the figure of the clairvoyant hypnotist with an iconography of the racial other in which Jews were imagined as masters of new forms of psychological control associated with the mass media.117

Figure 20. Walter Ruttmann, Aberglaube (1940). Mug shot of “clairvoyant-­ psychologist.”

Conclusion

Science, Cinema, and the Malice of Objects

During the Third Reich, German film and its public became enlisted in the project of creating a new ideological and racial order. While this process reached its apogee during the war years, it was, however, far from new; rather, its origins dated back to the previous war. What was first identified in the aftermath of that war as the object of conservative fears—​­the new mass type homo cinematicus—​­became over the next two and half decades the focus of increasingly ambitious programs of human engineering. Under the auspices of two very different political systems, cinematic techniques of total mobilization originally adopted during wartime were directed first toward resolving the many problems of postwar society and, ultimately, toward a campaign of radical social transformation.1 The Nazis invested particularly grand hopes in this undertaking. Yet in crucial ways these hopes remained only partially realized. In certain respects, it is true, their endeavors met with success—​­a success whose effects can be measured by the survival of many of its key motifs well into the post–­World War II era. If cinema had already begun to take over the function of mediating ordinary Germans’ perceptions of reality by 1918, there is much evidence that this process only intensified under the Third Reich. Even amid the ruins of war-­torn Berlin in 1945, Joseph Goebbels exhorted audiences to continue fighting by asking them to imagine themselves in a film that would be seen by future generations: “Don’t you want to play a part in this film, to be brought back to life in a hundred years time?”2 This tendency to conceive of history and human destiny in cinematic terms continued even after the regime’s downfall. In On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald notes the

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continuity that exists between what he calls the “celebration of destruction for its own sake” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the Nazis’ “intoxicating vision of destruction,” and the fascination with scenarios of destruction present in postwar German fiction. And in a letter that found its way into his hands, in which a certain Dr. H of Darmstadt reflects darkly on the Allies’ bombing of German cities, Sebald finds traces of the paranoid sensibility that shaped the Nazi worldview. This sensibility, he notes, shared many features with the vision that animates another of Lang’s films, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, which he identifies as a parable of “the xenophobia that spread among Germans from the end of the 19th century onwards”: “Dr. H’s remarks about the Jewish specialists in human psychology allegedly behind the strategy of destroying German cities derive from this hysterical view of German society’s constitution as a whole.”3 As this letter suggests, the bombing raids that form part of the context for the making of Walter Ruttmann’s Aberglaube (see Chapter 5) continued to haunt the imaginations of Germans long after the war ended. It was in part concerns about the uncertain response of Germans to those wartime raids, and the possibility that they might be tempted to seek refuge in alternative or esoteric belief systems, as well as the implications this could have for public morale, that lay behind the production of that film. These concerns, however, draw our attention to the fragile nature of the regime’s hold over its subjects. The process of human molding to which it committed such resources remained an incomplete one, complicated not least by the very dynamics set in motion by this process. There are many ways of measuring this apparent paradox. Again, an especially telling expression of it comes from Goebbels himself, who in 1939 confided to his diary that “German cinema is still in need of reform”—​­by which he assuredly also meant that the German film public was still in need of reform.4 Goebbels here echoed a decades-­old theme of film discourse. Since the dawn of the century, no discussion of the new medium could dispense with obligatory, even ritualistic disavowals of Schund, which, in the minds of many reformers, was also an anthropological category. Well before the Nazis came to power, the purging of “trash,” both cultural and human, from society had been central to fantasies of national renewal within important circles of German society.5 And yet there may be good reasons not to take Goebbels’s lament entirely at face value. The deep anxiety about Schund that made it such an important leitmotif of German modernity is in many ways marked by the

Conclusion 197

same pattern of disavowal and incitement that Dagmar Herzog has found in German attitudes toward sexuality.6 This ever-­present feature of the discourse about film, together with the accompanying, perpetually reiterated calls for “reform,” generated a social dynamic in which the most extreme possibilities of such calls eventually became thinkable. Censoriousness masked deep fascination; indeed, it was likely its aura of the taboo and the forbidden that endowed cinema, in the mind of Goebbels and others, with such transformative powers. Already in the final years of World War I, the recognition had dawned on German officials that effective film propaganda had much to learn from the film genres most often identified with trash.7 Such genres might well, according to a standard reformist protest, “speculate on the audience’s lowest instincts,” yet precisely this quality offered important lessons for those seeking to break free of the conservative attitudes that inhibited German filmmaking. As the Foreign Office official Richard Kiliani, confronted in 1919 with the task of mobilizing patriotic feelings against the threat of national disunity, put it quite simply, “At this moment it is a question of arousing mass emotions, rapidly and in a sustained manner.”8 For those desiring to enlist the cinematic medium on behalf of such tasks, tapping into the realm of affect, instincts, and the unconscious assumed a paramount strategic importance, all the more so as the limits of traditional approaches became plain. Only through such means, stressed Kiliani (here echoing General Erich Ludendorff) could the moving image’s exceptional powers as a medium of “mass influencing” be fully harnessed. Control over the “means of influencing” became a chief objective of postwar governance.9 It was not simply that effective filmmaking had much to learn from trash but that the boundaries of this construct remained fundamentally elusive, especially so as the medium was enlisted in new social policy initiatives. Viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that the constantly reiterated protest against Schund served both to justify and to camouflage increasingly radical departures from traditional values and norms. The outrage generated by this construct fueled a strategy of social and cultural transformation that depended on such provocation to maintain its forward momentum. This was especially true as film reform became closely tied to human reform—​­to that knowledge and “improvement” of the German Volk that lay at the core of National Socialism.10 The alliance between cinema and science whose history is traced in this study was a crucial manifestation of what Peter Fritzsche has identified as a

198 Conclusion

deep faith in the possibilities of molding human beings and publics that animated the interwar era.11 Produced against the backdrop of a postwar search for new techniques of governance and new means of understanding the citizenry to which those techniques were addressed, films of this period allow us to trace the emergence but also the vicissitudes, unanticipated effects, and internal tensions within this faith. This faith in the molding of people was far from untroubled. Even those, like the neurologist and filmmaker Curt Thomalla, who were most deeply committed to this endeavor, acknowledged doubts about the prospects for success given the contradictory forces present in Weimar society. Thomalla welcomed the Nazi regime for putting an end to those contradictions. Yet despite the sharp break that occurred in 1933 and despite the dramatic escalation of techniques of ideological programming under the Nazis, there were nevertheless limits to this process. Recent literature on public opinion under the Third Reich is skeptical of the notion that Germans were mesmerized by the regime’s propaganda and has rather tended to cast doubt on the extent of indoctrination, pointing to evidence of a gradual loss of “trust in the media.”12 An older strand of historiography, typified by Siegfried Kracauer’s “psychological analysis” of German film history in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), placed much emphasis on the hypnotic effects orchestrated by the Nazis’ propaganda campaign; yet such an analysis clearly overstates the power of that campaign. It is also worth noting that attributions of mesmeric power took on a highly self-­serving meaning: many high-­ranking party officials invoked Hitler’s “hypnotic” persona as a way of minimizing their roles in the regime’s crimes.13 While cinematic image-­making emerged as a crucial form of political power in the early twentieth century, there were nevertheless real limits to that power. These were already manifest in other realms. The moving image’s contribution to what Corey Ross calls a new paradigm of scientifically regulated political communication owed much to an already well-­established tradition of scientific image-­making.14 In that tradition, film had become integral to the process of discipline formation embraced by a host of emerging scientific fields, whose members used it as a tool of observation, research, and teaching, a means of producing and communicating knowledge of disease pictures and other clinical phenomena. The great virtue of film, enthusiasts proclaimed, was its capacity to mitigate a long-­noted malaise of scientific observation, the “malice of objects.” By capturing and representing syndromes like war neurosis with new precision, film contributed significantly to the quest for reliable

Conclusion 199

knowledge. These kinds of knowledge claims were in turn used to support wider claims to identify and propose solutions for numerous afflictions of postwar society. By the early 1920s, however, such claims were being qualified. The eminent psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin was one figure who drew attention both to the medium’s technical shortcomings—​­the shutter speed, he noted, was not fast enough to capture the rapid-­ fire twitching of particularly agitated ­patients—​­and to the problems posed by the persistent “recalcitrance” of certain patients, who often failed to show precisely the symptoms expected of them.15 Moreover, while film may have contributed to what Foucault calls the “formation of objects,” once formed such objects did not always remain stationary. By the end of the war, some doctors were expressing mounting concern that combatants had become adept at mimicking the widely circulated disease picture associated with the neuroses of war to strengthen their disability claims. In a development that echoed earlier criticism of Charcot’s photographs of his hysteric patients, cinematic imagery became implicated in a perceived epidemic of malingering and simulation. Released into the public realm, such imagery seemed to take on a life of its own. Kraepelin’s newly expressed reservations concerning the motion picture medium also reflected other contemporaneous developments: on the one hand, the dramatic expansion of Germany’s commercial film industry and of the social problems this was perceived to engender, and, on the other, the emergence of new forms of popular-­scientific filmmaking that addressed controversial subject matter. The primary example of the latter phenomenon was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Anders als die Andern (1919), a groundbreaking film that was attacked by critics as an example of a new form of Schund masquerading as “enlightenment.” In response to concerns about the implications of such films for public morality and for population policy, Kraepelin and other leading psychiatrists assumed a central role in debates about film censorship during the Weimar era. Even while filmmaking in the human sciences entered a kind of golden age, the doubts expressed by Kraepelin continued to plague this enterprise. An official report written by a representative of a leading institute of scientific filmmaking in 1932 summarized these doubts: “On the basis of the decades-­ old slogan within film-­making—​­‘technical difficulties no longer exist’—​­it was believed that miracles could be achieved and answers to great mysteries (Welträtsel) could be found. Yet the practicing, creative filmmaker is continually confronted by the challenges posed by brute facts. . . . ​ The battle with

200 Conclusion

unfortunately still deficient technical means, the battle with the beast ‘the malice of objects’ (der Kampf mit der Bestie ‘Tucke des Objects’), must continually be waged by the filmmaker.”16 If scientific cinema had emerged around 1900 as an important expression of a new ideal of mechanical objectivity, by the interwar period deference to this ideal had become more qualified. A growing emphasis on the virtues of “trained intuition” and of a more “physiognomic” style of interpretation became common within fields like racial science.17 The objectivity aspired to through the cinematic capture of disease pictures may have remained elusive, but the cinematic production of objectivity effects by professional communities nevertheless remained vitally important to the authority claimed by those communities. Throughout this period, scientific filmmaking tried to establish and secure the image of the human scientist as “grand enunciator.” Yet this endeavor remained an uncertain one, as a further aspect of Kraepelin’s criticism of Hirschfeld’s film illustrates. What the psychiatrist found particularly objectionable about it was the fact that the sexologist had allowed his image to be used in a film intended for the wider public, thereby transforming a claim to scientific expertise into a form of “advertisement” or “propaganda.”18 Such criticisms underscore the persistent sense of unease surrounding the public image of the professional physician, especially, as we have seen, that of the doctor of the mind. As Kraepelin stressed, what mattered here was the circulation within the public realm of false claims to “scientificity” and the corollary need to police those claims. This was all the more urgent given the German medical profession’s growing reliance on film in its counteroffensive against what the Viennese psychiatrist Julius Wagner-­Jauregg called the “lying propaganda” that depicted wartime doctors like himself as torturers. The moving image came to serve as a vital tool of this project of professional image management, which accompanied a wider campaign of medical enlightenment intended to help resolve the myriad problems posed by the nation’s postwar health crises. Yet these public health initiatives remained troubled by uncertainty and contradiction. All too often, scientists discovered, the imagery produced as part of this campaign generated complex counterimages—​­of “mad scientists,” of esoteric and occult healers and experiments. Their circulation in the public realm, in an open rather than a restricted economy of images, created a kind of hall-­of-­mirrors effect. If, as we have seen, clinical phenomena like war neurosis proved unstable, then this was no less true of the image of the professional man of medicine, which (as Kraepelin intuited) could take on strange

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meanings when released into the public. In popular films, the alliance between science and cinema was often turned on its head or was appropriated for purposes that lay far outside the medical mainstream. The authority claimed by the professional physician could, under such circumstances, be directly challenged or could mutate into a form of Scheinwissenschaftlichkeit—​ ­a spurious claim to “scientificity” that threatened to compromise the authority of the medical profession. Political and medical authorities accordingly identified this as a significant problem, and it became one of the functions of the new censorship law of 1920 to police the popular representation of the professional physician.19 The issues pointed to here are thrown into relief by the countermeasures taken by authorities to combat the problem of medical charlatanism. Here too cinema was mobilized: on the one hand, as part of a wider effort to tighten controls over the field of medicine, the figure of the charlatan became central to the discursive and visual strategies of the enlightenment film, often appearing as the personification of resistance to medical authority; on the other hand, film became a tool within the scientific investigation into claims of esoteric abilities. A striking continuity may be observed here, insofar as the use of cinema to adjudicate claims of special healing powers or mediumistic abilities mirrored its earlier use for testing claims of war-­related psychological disability. Many of the self-­styled clairvoyants who flourished in postwar Germany were, according to police reports, war veterans who had earlier been treated by hypnosis for symptoms of shell shock. In what emerged as a new variant on the problem of the malice of objects, allegations of simulation—​ ­whether of disease pictures or of trance states—​­repeatedly became entangled in the question of whether the claimant believed in his or her own claims. As had been the case with soldiers, debates about the good or bad faith surrounding clairvoyance and other mediumistic practices often fell back on the notion that the subject labored under a form of autosuggestion, or else simply remained unresolved. Efforts to stabilize the boundaries between science and nonscience confronted persistent difficulties of this nature. Inevitably, this hall-­of-­mirrors effect that marks the history of scientific filmmaking in Germany extended to the realm of political image-­making as well. This was true not least in the case of the image of the Führer himself, a figure whose often-­cited mesmeric power over audiences was frequently traced to the autosuggestive states that, as Victor Klemperer noted, he seemed to enter into almost at will.20 The tendency on the part of members of Hitler’s inner circle to invoke the hypnotic qualities of his persona has already been

202 Conclusion

noted above; in biographical accounts, these qualities have often been traced to his treatment by hypnosis for war-­related hysterical blindness.21 In such accounts, Hitler seems to embody in his own person the continuities between the suggestive “influencing” of the war neurotic and the “influencing” of wider publics.22 Hitler’s clairvoyant-­like abilities were attested to by many contemporaries, among them the political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who referred to the Führer’s “uncanny” contact with the public and his “almost medial dependency on the audience.”23 At the same time, in his capacity as leader of a state based on the principles of “political biology,” Hitler also preached a vision of racial regeneration that required mobilizing to their fullest extent all the resources of modern medicine. Nazi filmmaking went to great lengths to draw parallels between the Führer and German medical heroes like Robert Koch, in so doing framing resistance to public health measures like inoculation as a form of medieval superstition.24 In films like Robert Koch, der Bekämpfer des Todes (1939) the National Socialist project was located firmly within a modernist medical tradition. Yet this project had other, and decidedly more ambiguous, antecedents as well. Another key film of this period—​­Paracelsus (1943)—​­endeavors to establish a lineage for Nazi medicine extending back to the early modern era. In this film, G. W. Pabst relates the story of a figure who is seen by the medical establishment of the time as a charlatan but saves a city threatened by plague by introducing new preventive measures, including quarantine. Yet his medical interventions are only part of the story, for Paracelsus, who may be read as a “fictional extension” of the Führer, is also depicted as an expert in mass psychology, one who has mastered the art of hypnosis.25 In one key scene, he uses these arts to subdue a crowd that has been afflicted with the St. Vitus’s Dance, the outbreak of convulsive dancing associated with the Black Death. Such outbreaks had been identified by Charcot as a form of mass hysteria, and, in the aftermath of the Great War, medical observers drew repeated parallels between the pathological “dance-­mania” that swept German cities and the St. Vitus’s Dance (see Figure 21).26 In Paracelsus’s pacification of the dislocated, half-­epileptic movements of the crowd, we see a striking visual and thematic echo of the hypnotic cure practiced by Max Nonne on war neurotics in his 1917 film (see Figure 22). National Socialism, as scholars have frequently noted, was deeply entangled with its “enemy-­phantasms.” Among the many Feindbilder constructed by the Nazis, the image of the charlatan hit particularly close to home. This was true both with respect to the regime’s medical project and with respect to

Figure 21. G. W. Pabst, Paracelsus (1943). St. Vitus’s Dance as mass hysteria.

Figure 22. Max Nonne, Funktionell-­motorische Reiz-­und Lähmungszustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern und deren Heilung durch Suggestion in Hypnose (1917). Patient with “clown-­like disturbances of movement caused by shock.”

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the highly medial aspects of Hitler’s rule. If the regime’s anti-­Semitic films may be seen, according to some interpretations, as a distorted projection of the Nazis’ identification with Jews, so too in the treatment of the figure of the charlatan we see another kind of uncanny mirror-­image of the Nazis.27 The complex significance attached to imagery of this figure attests both to the deep tensions generated by the regime’s program of racial hygiene and—​­to the extent that this spectral figure came to embody the ambiguous agency of the mass media—​­anxieties about the role of cinematic image-­making and the power associated with it in the modern era.28

Notes

Introduction 1. BA R 901, 71942, Richard Kiliani, “Auslands-­Filmpropaganda,” 22.4.19, Bl. 266–­326. 2. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York 2002 [1916]). On German officials’ awareness of Münsterberg’s text, see Philipp Osten, “Emotion, Medizin, und Volksbelehrung: Die Entstehung des ‘deutschen Kulturfilms,’” Gesnerus 66 (2009): 98. 3. On this development, see Cory Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford 2008), 223ff. 4. Wilhelm Stapel, “Der homo cinematicus,” Deutsches Volkstum 10 (1919): 319–­20. 5. Harry Graf Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (New York 2000), 7, 11. 6. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London 1989). 7. See Brigid Doherty, “See: ‘We Are all Neurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24, 1 (1997): 93–­95. On his wartime films, see Jeanpaul Goergen, George Grosz (Berlin 1994). 8. Viktor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (Cambridge, MA 1992), 542–­69. 9. Anton Kaes, Shell-­Shock Cinema (Princeton, NJ 2012). A record of the censorship proceedings can be found at www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/dframe12.htm. 10. BA R 901, 71942, Richard Kiliani, “Auslands-­Filmpropaganda,” 22.4.19, Bl. 266–­326. 11. See Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality, 1909–­1925 (London 1988), 124. 12. Berufseignung und Leistungsprüfung (Menschen-­Ökonomie) is in the holdings of the BA-­FA. The film depicts the adoption of psychotechnical methods in the hair-­stylist profession. 13. Fritz Giese, Girl-­Kultur (Munich 1925), 141; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York 1968), 246, 7n. On Giese, see Andreas Killen, “Weimar Psychotechnics Between Americanism and Nazism,” Osiris 22 (2007): 48–­71. 14. Philipp Lersch, Gesicht und Seele: Grundlinien einer mimischen Diagnostik (Munich 1932), 11. For more on Lersch, see Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA 2002); Mitchell Ash, “Weimar Psychology: Holistic Visions and Trained Intuition,” in P. Gordon and J. McCormick, eds., Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton, NJ 2013), 35–­54. 15. Lersch, 161. See also idem, 33.

206 Notes to Pages 6–10 16. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (Cambridge 1990 [1862]), 213–­21. 17. In this regard, Lersch’s study may be understood as occupying what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison identify as a pivotal moment as the history of scientific epistemology, marking the transition from mechanical objectivity to “trained intuition.” See Daston and Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA 2010), ch. 6; Ash, 48. 18. Lersch, 142. 19. For more on this, see Giuliana Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images,” Grey Room 36 (2009): 88–­113. 20. Matt Erlin, “Tradition as Intellectual Montage: F. W. Murnau’s Faust,” in N. Izenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide (New York 2009), 166; on the “grand enunciator,” see Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London 2000). 21. Michael Hagner, “Verwundete Gesichter, verletzte Gehirne: Zur Deformation des Kopfes im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in S. Gilman and C. Schmölders, eds., Gesichter der Weimar Republik (Ostfildern 2000), 78–­95. 22. For documents on this film, see BA R 901, 72199, “Hungerblockadefilm.” Production was delayed by extended disputes over the question of how to strike the right balance between purely scientific and more overtly propagandistic methods. The phrase “biological catastrophe” comes from Waldemar Schweisheimer, Bedeutung des Films fur soziale Hygiene und Medizin (Munich 1920). 23. Ulf Schmidt, “‘Der Blick auf dem Körper’: Sozialhygienische Filme, Sexualaufklärung und Propaganda in der Weimarer Republik,” in M. Hagener, ed., Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino (Munich 2000), 23–­46. 24. See Thomalla’s war memoir Lorettoschlacht (Cologne 1918). 25. Curt Thomalla, “Aus den Memoiren des deutschen Lehrfilms,” Film-­Kurier, 18.10.27. The records of the Cinematographic Institute created at the University of Berlin after the war list two medical films that Thomalla helped make during this period: Endstadium einer Athetose and Beziehungen zwischen Kopfhaltung und Muskeltonus. See HUB, Med Fak, Kinematographisches Institut 1921–­35, Ufa to Med Fak 2.12.26, Bl. 20–­27. 26. See Adolf Nichtenhauser, Films in Psychiatry, Psychology, and Mental Health (New York 1953). 27. GStA Rep 76, Thomalla, “Die Verwertungsmöglichkeiten des medizinischen Lehrfilms,” UFA pamphlet, Das Medizinische Filmarchive, Bl. 154–­86. Martin Weiser echoed these claims in identifying neuropsychiatry as the specialty that stood most to gain from cinema: “The myriad disturbances of movement of the nervous invalid and the many forms of facial expression of the mentally ill open up a wide field of study.” Weiser, Medizinische Kinematographie (Leipzig 1919), 131. 28. Curt Thomalla, “Hygiene und soziale Medizin im Volksbelehrungsfilm,” Zeitschrift für Medizinal-­beamten 21/23 (1922): 591. 29. Curt Thomalla, “Aus den Memoiren des deutschen Lehrfilms.” 30. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York 1959 [1921]); idem, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York 1961 [1930]). 31. See Oscar Kalbus, “Das Übersinnliche im Film,” in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 235–­37; Paul Ries, “Popularise and/or Be Damned: Psychoanalysis and Film at the Crossroads in 1925,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis 76, 759 (1995): 759–­91; BA R 86, “Ein Wissenschaftliche Hypnose-­Film: ‘Die Tiefen der Seele,’” Vossische

Notes to Pages 10–15  207 Zeitung, 19.5.24. See also BA R 86, Urania betreff: Das Medizinische-­Aufklärungsfilm, Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele, 28.10.26; Harry Price, “Adventures with a Showman-­Hypnotist,” in idem, Confessions of a Ghost-­Hunter (Glasgow 1936), 297–­311. 32. Curt Thomalla, “Medizin und Arzt im Spielfilm. Kritische Bemerkungen anlässlich des Dr. Mabuse,” Der Kinematograph, 23.7.22. 33. Andreas Killen, “Accidents Happen: The Industrial Accident in German Historical Consciousness,” in N. Lebovic and A. Killen, eds., Catastrophes: A History and Theory of a Concept (Berlin 2014), 75–­92. On this film, see Sophie Ledebur, “Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele: Hypnose im Kultur-­und Lehrfilm (1920–­1936),” Berichte zur Wissensschaftsgeschichte 37 (2014): 363–­78. 34. Curt Thomalla, “Hypnose und Suggestion im Bild,” Die Gartenlaube 26 (1923): 510–­11. Thanks to Sophie Ledebur for pointing me to this article. 35. See, especially, Curt Thomalla, “Zum Unbewussten im Leben und Alltag,” in idem, Gesund Sein—​­Gesund Bleiben (Berlin 1936), 309–­406. 36. Ibid., 402. Here Thomalla draws explicit connections between the suggestive treatment of hysteria and the manner in which effective propaganda “penetrates the unconscious.” 37. See Edward Ross Dickinson, “Bio-­politics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Thoughts on Our Discourse About ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37 (2004): 1–­48. For more on Thomalla’s trajectory, which ended with his suicide under mysterious circumstances in 1940, see Schmidt. 38. Kathleen Canning, “Introduction,” in Kathleen Canning et al., eds., Weimar Publics/ Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York 2010), 10. 39. On the history of emotions, see Ute Frevert, “Geschichte, Emotionen, und die Macht der Bilder,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37 (2011): 5–­25; and the forum on this topic in German History 28 (2010). 40. The phrase is sometimes translated as the “scientific penetration of society.” See Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 165–­ 93; Detlev Peukert, Max Webers’ Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen 1989); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York 1979); Peter Becker, Verderbnis und Entartung: Eine geschichte der Kriminologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen 2002); Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London 1989); K. Brückweh, R. Wetzell, B Ziemann, and D. Schumann, eds., Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies 1880–­ 1980 (London 2012). 41. On film’s role in the history of the crafting of an “objectivity effect” in psychology—​­“this most problematic of evidentiary fields”—​­see Alison Winter, “Screening Selves: Sciences of Identity and Memory on Film,” History of Psychology (2004): 368. 42. Daston and Galison; Ramon Reichert, “Kinematographie der Objektivität: Zur Medienästhetik des Wissens um 1900,” in C. Wagner, M. Greenlee, and C. Woolf, eds., Aisthesis: Wahrnehmungsprozesse und Visualisierungsformen in Kunst und Technik (Munich 2013), 93–­105. According to Reichert, this represented a kind of moral hygiene of scientific observation—​­a renunciation of the subjectivity of the observer. 43. On the relation between social and epistemological order in early modern England, see Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ 1986), 332–­45. 44. Kuhn, 102. 45. Several of the disciplines examined here achieved new levels of professional advancement under the Nazis. See Matthias Weber, Ernst Rüdin: Eine kritische Biographie (Berlin 1993);

208 Notes to Pages 15–19 Ulfried Geuter, Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany (Cambridge 1992); and Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich (New York 1997). On the mobilization of the human sciences during World War II, see Daniel Pick, The Nazi Mind (Oxford 2012). 46. Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine geschichte des Körpers, 1765–­1914 (Frankfurt 2001); see also Alfons Labisch, Homo hygienicus: Gesundheit und Medizin in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt 1992). 47. Theodor Adorno and Max Horckheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London 1973 [1944]). 48. A recent edited volume on Weimar cinema all but ignores nonfeature film. See Noah Isenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide (New York 2009). On the enlightenment film, see Schmidt; Malte Hagener, ed., Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino (Munich 2000); U. von Keitz, Im Schatten des Gesetzes: Schwangerschaftskonflikt und Reproduction im deutschsprachigen Film 1918–­1933 (Marburg 2005); Jill Suzanne Smith, “Richard Oswald and the Social Hygiene Film,” in C. Rogowski, ed., The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy (Rochester, NY 2010), 13–­30; Christian Rogowski, “The Dialectic of (Sexual) Enlightenment,” in C. Rogowski, ed., The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy (Rochester, NY 2010), 211–­34; Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (Amsterdam 2015). Meanwhile, the tangled legacy of the Enlightenment in the interwar period has become a focus of renewed critical scholarship. See, inter alia, Anson Rabinbach, In The Shadow of Catastrophe (Berkeley, CA 1997); and Peter Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA 2010). 49. See Moritz Foellmer and Rüdiger Graf, eds., Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt 2005); Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 629–­56. 50. On the Nazis’ use of the term, see Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, 48–­50. 51. Doris Kaufmann, “Science as Cultural Practice: Psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, 1 (1999): 124–­44; K. Brückweh, R. Wetzell, B. Ziemann, and D. Schumann; and Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany, ca. 1900 to 1945 (Cambridge 1994). 52. Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter. “Moving Images: Film in Science and Medicine—​ S­ cience and Medicine in Film,” Gesnerus 66, 3 (2009): 121–­46. 53. Curt Thomalla, “Hygiene und soziale Medizin im Volksbelehrungsfilm,” Zeitschrift für Medizinal-­beamten 21/23 (1922): 593. 54. See, for instance, BA R 1501/111804, Dresden LGA to MdI, 21.8.24; GStA R 76 1324, Arztekammer für Provinz Sachsen to PMV, 14.4.22, Bl 312. 55. Cornelie Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (New York 2007); Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore 2004). 56. NA T-­1021, Roll 12, 127460, Carl Schneider, 19.11.42; Konrad Zucker, Psychologie des Aberglaubens (Heidelberg 1947). See also Burleigh, 38, 192. 57. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA 1968). 58. See Friedrich Kittler, Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA 1999), 115–­82; Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power (New York 2008). 59. See K. Brückweh, R. Wetzell, B. Ziemann, and D. Schumann, “Introduction: The

Notes to Pages 19–27  209 Scientization of the Social in Comparative Perspective,” in K. Brückweh, R. Wetzell, B. Ziemann, and D. Schumann, 8. 60. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London 2003), 2. 61. On the significance of this formula, see Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago 2008). 62. See Andreas Killen, “The Scene of the Crime,” in K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa, eds., Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (Indiana 2009), 99–­112. 63. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (Princeton, NJ 1947). The original study of German propaganda is included as the appendix. See author’s note, 274. 64. Fritzsche, 652.

Chapter 1 1. Walther Poppelreuter, Die psychischen Schädigungen durch Kopfschuss im Kriege 1914/16 (Leipzig 1917), 195–­210. 2. Jules Janssen, cited in Virgilio Tosi, Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography (London 2005), 33. 3. Jacob Tanner, “Populäre Wissenschaft: Metamorphosen des Wissens im Medium des Films,” Gesnerus 66 (2009): 15–­39; Peter Weingart, “The Ambivalence Towards New K ­ nowledge—​ S­ cience in Fiction Film,” in B. Hüppauf and P. Weingart, eds., Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences (London 2007), 267–­82. 4. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York 2002 [1916]), Allan Langdale, ed., 45–­53. See also Martin Weiser, Medizinische Kinematographie (Dresden 1919); Tosi, 11. 5. Marey was preoccupied with overcoming the defects of the senses and felt that moving images only perpetuated the illusions of sight. See François Dagognet, A Passion for the Trace (Cambridge, MA 1992), 156–­57; Marta Braun, Picturing Time (Chicago 1992). 6. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis 1995), xvi. 7. Dagognet, 58–­59; Cartwright; Ramon Reichert, Im Kino der Humanwissenschaften (Bielefeld 2007); Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter, eds., “Moving Pictures and Medicine,” Gesnerus 66 (2009); Janina Wellmann, ed., “Cinematography, Seriality and the Sciences,” Science in Context 24 (2011); Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science and Early Cinema in Germany (New York 2015), 90–­141. 8. BA R 1501 110658, P. Hildebrandt, “Medizinische Filme,” Leipziger Tageblatt 27.11.21. 9. Cartwright, ch. 3; Adolf Nichtenhauser, ed., Films in Psychiatry, Psychology and Mental Health (New York 1953); Anthony Michaelis, Research Films in Anthropology, Biology, Psychology (New York 1955); Klaus Podoll, “Geschichte des wissenschaftlichen Films in der Nervenheilkunde,” Fortschritte der Neurologie und Psychiatrie 66 (1998): 122–­32. 10. Referring to the work of F. W. Taylor and Freud, Giedion identified the year 1895—​­the year of cinema’s birth—​­as a moment marking the discovery of a new capacity to investigate the “inside of processes.” Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York 1948), 100. 11. On the history of photography in psychiatry, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA 2004); Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York 1982); idem, “The Image of the Hysteric,” in Sander Gilman et al., eds., Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley, CA 1993), 345–­452.

210 Notes to Pages 27–30 12. On the lineage extending from Duchenne to Londe and François-­Franck, see Didi-­ Huberman; Tosi, 136–­38; Cartwright, ch. 3. 13. On the shift from subjective to objective forms of evidence in medicine, see Stanley Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge 1978). For an account of this shift in relation to film, see Scott Curtis, “Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies, and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany,” in Klaus Kreimeier and Annemone Ligensa, eds., Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (Libbey 2009). 14. See Nichtenhauser, 45; Curtis. 15. Marey, cited in Giedion, 20. 16. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA 2007). 17. Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–­64; Michael Hau and Mitchell Ash, “Der normale Körper—​­seelisch erblickt,” in S. Gilman and C. Schmölders, eds., Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (Cologne 2000), 12–­31. 18. See Didi-­Huberman; Gilman, “Image of the Hysteric”; Daphne de Marneffe, “The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud,” Signs 17, 1 (1991): 71–­111. 19. Curtis (2015), 32–­37, 122. For more on this, see Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fields, and Fabrics: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (Berkeley, CA 2004); Anne Harrington, Re-­enchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ 1996). 20. On “threshold of scientificity,” see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London 2002), 210; on the “formation of objects,” 44ff. 21. This mark was both a burden and a form of emancipation: by freeing these sciences from the “epistemological blockages” prevailing in older disciplines, it ensured an attitude of openness to the “new” that encompassed research methods, disease pictures, and modes of treatment. See Michael Hagner, “Die Elektrische Erregbarkeit des Gehirns,” in M. Hagner and H.-­J. Rheinberger, eds., Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens (Berlin 1993), 97–­115. 22. Cartwright, 61–­62. See also Gilman, “Image of the Hysteric,” 352. 23. R. Kutner, “Die Bedeutung der Kinematographie fur medizinische Forschung und Unterricht,” Zeitschrift für die ärztliche Fortbildung 8 (1911): 249–­51. Attributions of malice to patients for failing to cooperate with the needs of the demonstration were common. See H. Hennes, “Die Kinematographie im Dienste der Neurologie und Psychiatrie, nebst Beschreibung einiger selteneren Bewegungstorungen,” Medizinische Klinik 51 (1910): 2010–­14. 24. On film’s role in resolving evidentiary problems in the human sciences, see Alison Winter, “Screening Selves: Sciences of Identity and Memory on Film,” History of Psychology (2004): 367–­401. 25. Kutner, 250. 26. Ibid. Doyen’s statement is cited in Tosi, 167. This statement invites comparison to Walter Benjamin’s observation that the surgeon and the cameraman are alike in both penetrating “deeply into [reality’s] web.” “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York 1968), 233–­34. 27. On Marey, chronophotography, and the science of work, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (New York 1992); for more on film and efficiency, see Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank Gilbreth,” in V. Hediger and P. Vonderau, eds., Films That Work (Amsterdam 2009), 85–­99. 28. Pierre de Coubertin, “Know Thyself,” International Review of Educational Cinematography 6 (1930): 681–­83. The subsequent issue of this journal was devoted to Scientific Management.

Notes to Pages 30–35  211 29. One expression of this was the howls of protest raised by Doyen in response to public screenings of his surgical films; critics condemned the commercialization of scientific imagery and the impact on audiences. For more on the Doyen controversy, see Curtis. 30. Benjamin, 230–­31, 235–­37. As examples of these new possibilities, he cited occupational psychology and psychoanalysis. See also 246, 10n: “The camera director in the studio occupies a place identical with that of the examiner during aptitude tests.” 31. Schuster, “Vorführung pathologischer Bewegungscomplexe mittelst des Kinematographen,” Fortschritte der Neurologie und Psychiatrie 66 (1898): 122–­23. See also Podoll, 124; Gilman, Seeing the Insane, 189–­90. 32. Marinescu, cited in Nichtenhauser, 44. 33. Ibid. 34. See Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism 1870–­1945 (Cambridge 1993); Matthew Thompson, “Mental Hygiene as International Movement,” in Paul Weindling, ed., International Health Organizations and Movements 1918–­ 1939 (Cambridge 1995), 283–­304. 35. Sommer is cited in Gilman, Seeing the Insane, 189. 36. See the account of Sommer’s presentation in “Über die psychologischen Untersuchungsmethoden,” Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie 29 (1911): 493–­95. 37. Robert Sommer, “Der medizinische Unterrichtsfilm,” Film und Bild 1 (1935): 45. 38. See Karl Ludwig Rost, Sterilisation und Euthanasie im Film des “Dritten Reichs” (Husum 1987); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany ca. 1900–­1945 (Cambridge 1994); Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Germany (Husum 2002). 39. M. Weber and W. Burgmair, “Ein Gutachten Emil Kraepelins zu dem Film ‘Anders als die Andern,’” in J. Steakley, ed., Anders als die Andern (Hamburg 2007), 142. 40. BA R 901/72202, Reichfilmstelle. See also Julia B. Köhne, Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens 1914–­1920 (Husum 2009), 185. 41. Though even during filming, he wrote, patients often “showed precisely . . . not that which we would like to capture.” Emil Kraepelin, “Psychiatrische Bewegungsbilder,” Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Neurology und Psychiatrie 85 (1923): 611. See also idem, “Demonstrationen von Kinematogrammen,” Zentralblatt fur Nervenheilkunde 32 (1909): 689. 42. See Theodor Ziehen, Prinzipien und Methoden der Intelligenz-­Prüfungen (Berlin 1909). Kurt Boas, “Intelligenzprufung mittels der Kinematograph,” Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie 69 (1909): 141-­44. 43. Kurt Boas, “Über die verwendung der Kinematograph in der forensichen Praxis,” Archiv für Kriminologie (1918). See also idem, “Psychiatrie im Film,” Die Umschau 20.4.18. 44. H. Stelzner, Die psychopathische Konstitution und ihre soziale Bedeutung (Berlin 1911). 45. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ 1995), 216–­17. On the development of IQ tests, see also Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London 1989). 46. Poppelreuter, 206. Included among the methods of examination he described were tests of the visual field. Disturbances of this function had long served as a marker of nervous illness. Charcot saw narrowing of the visual field as evidence of hysteria and hypnotic suggestibility, and he boasted, “I have tested the visual fields of thousands of hysterics.” See Didi-­Hubermann, 129; Andreas Killen, “The Scene of the Crime,” in K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa, eds., Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (Bloomington, IN 2009), 99–­112. 47. On the nexus between research on traumatic brain injury and Taylorist rationalization,

212 Notes to Pages 35–38 see Michael Hagner, “Verwundete Gesichter, verletzte Gehirne: Zur Deformation des Kopfes im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Gilman and Schmölders, 78–­95. Hagner contrasts the competing “images of man” that appear in the work of Poppelreuter and Kurt Goldstein, whose magnum opus The Organism was also based on his work with brain-­injured war veterans. Goldstein used film extensively in his own research. See RAC, RG 1.1 Series 200A, Box 78, Fold. 939, Kurt Goldstein File. The films are housed at Columbia University. 48. See Fritz Giese, “Die Psychologie under der Krieg,” Die Umschau 15.5.15. On Giese and the institutionalization of psychotechnics during the 1920s and 1930s, see Andreas Killen, “Weimar Psychotechnics Between Americanism and Nazism,” Osiris 22 (2007): 48–­71. See also Killen, “Industrial Accidents in German History,” 75–­92. 49. Siegfried Kracauer later similarly identified film as an ideal “medium of research” into “mass behavior.” See his From Caligari to Hitler (New York 1947), v. 50. Fritz Giese, Girlkultur (Munich 1925), 51. See Killen, “Weimar Psychotechnics.” 51. See Rose; Rabinbach, chs. 9–­10; Greg Eghigian, Andreas Killen, and Christine Leuenberger, eds., “The Self as Project” Osiris 22 (2007). 52. See Peter Holquist, “Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-­European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 426–­50. 53. Daniel Pick has analyzed how, during World War II, the Allied powers mobilized human science on behalf of the project of defeating the Third Reich. But this had an earlier history dating back to the Great War. See Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (Oxford 2012). It is worth noting in this context that Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (subtitled A Psychological History of German Film) was conceived of as part of a campaign of military intelligence and psychological warfare. 54. Many research projects were funded by the RF. See Paul Weindling, “The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Science,” in Volker Roelcke et al., eds., International Relations in Psychiatry (Rochester, NY 2010), 119–­40. 55. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power (New York 2008); Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA 2008), 90, 110. Giorgio Agamben identifies postwar proposals for the euthanasia of mental patients as signaling the emergence of the “fundamental bio-­ political structure of modernity.” Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford, CA 1998), 137; idem, on the shift from territory to population, 144. 56. Edward Ross Dickinson, “Bio-­politics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37 (2004): 1–­48. 57. Cited in Weber and Burgmair, 148. This charge was later echoed in the film Ewige Jude (1940). 58. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA 1999), 115–­82. 59. Recent scholarship has qualified the views of Foucault and Rose, raising questions concerning the extent to which the psy sciences actually exercise power over individuals. While these are important questions, my argument hinges on taking seriously the fact that these sciences were perceived as exercising power in new and significant ways in the interwar period. See K. Brückweh, R. Wetzell, B. Ziemann, and D. Schumann, eds., Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies 1880–­1980 (London 2012). 60. The two films are held at the Federal Film Archive in Berlin. Funktionell-­motorische Reiz-­und Lähmungszustände und deren Heilung durch Suggestion in Hypnose by Max Nonne (1917); Kriegslazarett Hornberg im Schwarzwald (1917) by Ferdinand Kehrer and Deutsche

Notes to Pages 38–42  213 Hygiene Museum, Dresden. See also Max Nonne, “Über Psychotherapie, mit Filmvorführungen und Lichtbildern,” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 64 (1918): 477–­78. 61. See BA 901/72086, 13.2.20–­31.3.20, for postwar exchanges regarding the status of both Nonne’s film and Kraepelin’s The Nervous System and the War. 62. Julia Barbara Köhne, Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale techniken (Husum 2009). On films as “positivist witnesses,” see also Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter, “Moving Images: Film in Science and Medicine—​­Science and Medicine in Film,” Gesnerus 66, 3 (2009): 121–­46. 63. Max Nonne “Therapeutische Erfahrungen an den Kriegsneurosen,” in Karl Bonhoeffer, ed., Handbuch der ärztliche Erfahrungen im Weltkrieg, 1914–­1918, v. 4, Geistes-­und Nervenkrankheiten (Berlin 1922), 114. On photography’s “special epistemic status,” see Daston and Galison. 64. Doris Kaufmann, “Science as Cultural Practice: Psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, 1 (1999): 124–­44; Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany (Ithaca, NY 2003). 65. Military-­psychiatric perceptions of war neuroses, Köhne argues, were themselves mediated by the discourses of mass and female psychology in ways that conditioned doctors to be skeptical of the reality of their patients’ disorders, a skepticism reflected in the designation “war hysteria.” 66. In certain respects, the therapeutic situation described by Nonne is already quasi-­ cinematic. He describes often performing the hypnotic cure in the presence of thirty to forty patients—​­“im Lichte der Öffentlichkeit”—​­and suggests that the atmosphere in the wing where the treatment was carried out, in its combination of both the barracks and Lourdes, formed a chapter in the history of mass suggestion. Nonne, “Therapeutische Erfahrungen,” 107. 67. Lerner; Köhne; Juliet Wagner, “Twisted Bodies, Broken Minds: Film and Neuropsychiatry in the First World War” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University 2009). 68. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 5–­7. For more on the performative elements of science see also Brückweh, Wetzell, Ziemann, and Schumann; Curtis, Shape of Spectatorship, 30. 69. Lerner; Wagner. 70. F. Muche, Die Macht der Suggestion im Weltkrieg (Leipzig 1916), cited in Jason Crouthamel, The Great War and German Memory (Exeter 2009), 41. 71. See Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company 1918–­1945 (Berkeley, CA 1999). 72. See Hans-­Georg Hofer, Nervenspräche und Krieg: Modernitätskritik und Krisenbewältigung in der österreichischen Psychiatrie (Böhlau 2004), 260. 73. See Anton Kaes, Shell-­Shock Cinema (Princeton, NJ 2010); Wagner. 74. Ramon Reichert, “Kinematographie der Objektivität: Zur Medienästhetik des Wissens um 1900,” in C. Wagner, M. Greenlee, and C. Woolf, eds., Aisthesis:Wahrnehmungsprozesse und Visualisierungsformen in Kunst und Technik (Munich 2013), 93–­105. 75. Caligari’s scenario invites comparison with a key account in the psychiatric case literature. Victor Tausk delivered his account to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society in January 1918, making it contemporaneous with Caligari’s release. It described a form of paranoid delusion he had encountered among some of his patients, who “saw pictures” as in a cinematograph and felt themselves to be under the control of a sinister figure, often a doctor. This delusion highlights

214 Notes to Pages 43–46 the ambiguous status of the physician and his relation to new technologies of influence and control. Viktor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (Cambridge, MA 1992), 542–­69. 76. Kaufmann, 141; Lerner. 77. E. Herz, “Allgemeine Bemerkungen zum Studium der Bewegungsstorungen bei Geisteskranken,” Medizin und Film 1 (1926/1927): 137, cited in Podoll, “Geschichte des wissenschaftlichen Films,” 127. On photography and the silencing of patients, see Gilman, “Image of the Hysteric.” 78. See Lerner; Boaz Neumann, “Psychoanalyse und Hypnose in der Weimarer Republik,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 32 (2004): 118. 79. Hermann Lemke, “Kinematograph als Heilmittel,” Pädogogische-­Psychologische Studien 10 (1910): 8–­14. 80. See Nichtenhauser; Paul Ries, “Popularise and/or Be Damned: Psychoanalysis and Film at the Crossroads,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995): 762; Mireille Berton, Le Corps Nerveux des Spectateurs: Cinéma et Sciences du Psychisme de 1900 (Lausanne 2015). The latter film, which opened in Germany in late 1912, includes images from a brochure that proclaims: “This remarkable invention, hitherto used by only a few physicians, will soon gain a prominent place in medicine. The vibrations of the cinematic light-­rays, transmitted to the brain by the optic nerve, produce effects of unbelievable power.” See Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk, “Die Anwendung der Kinematographie auf Gemütskranke,” in Psyche im Kino: Sigmund Freud und der Film (Vienna 2006), 41–­54. 81. Kaes, 49–­51, see also 8ff for discussion of the film Towards the Light (Dem Licht Entgegen, 1918); Veronika Fuechtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic (Berkeley, CA 2011). 82. Lou Andreas-­Salomé, The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-­Salomé (New York 1964), 101. Her reflections were echoed by Emilie Altenloh, whose sociological study on film audiences appeared on the eve of the war: “With the new demands that a century of work and mechanization have placed on humans, with the intensive exertion and consumption of energies . . . ​the other side of everyday life, engaging in a restful, aimless activity with no purpose in sight, offers an important counterweight.” Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino (Jena 1913). 83. BA R 1501/114033, 9.6.16, Bl. 105. Feldarzt Dr. J. Spier-­Irving, “Wert und Bedeutung des Frontkinos, namentlich auch vom medizinische Standpunkt.” This report was submitted in response to a call for a ban on popular films by a Reichstag representative who was identified as an anti-­Semite. 84. Weiser, 134–­35. This was echoed by Nonne, “Therapeutische Erfahrungen,” 118–­19. 85. See Schmidt, 45–­46; Klaus Podoll, “Geschichte des Lehrfilms und des populärwissenschaftlichen Aufklärungsfilms in der Nervenheilkunde in Deutschland,” Fortschritte der Neurologie und Psychiatrie 68 (2000): 523–­29. 86. Kathleen Canning, “Introduction,” Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York 2010), 4, 10. For more on the relation between the psy sciences and governmentality, see Rose. 87. Robert Gaupp, “Der Arzt als Erzieher seines Volkes,” Blätter für Volksgesundheitspflege 19 (1919): 77–­80. The psychiatrist Gaupp was a particularly sharp critic of popular film. 88. “We doctors must overcome our resistance to film drama in the interest of reaching a wide public.” Weiser, 135. 89. BA R 86, BFA to KGA 31.8.18 on “sanitärer Filme” and “Belehrung auf allen Gebieten der Volkshygiene.”

Notes to Pages 46–54  215 90. Waldemar Schweisheimer, Bedeutung des Films fur soziale Hygiene und Medizin (Munich 1920). 91. See Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality (London 1989). 92. Curt Thomalla, “Arzt und Film,” in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 222. 93. Bonah and Laukötter, 139; Podoll, “Geschichte des Lehrfilms,” 525. 94. Thomalla, 222. 95. Wilhelm Stapel, “Der homo cinematicus,” Deutsche Volkstum (1919): 319–­20. 96. See Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 165–­93; Eghigian, Killen, and Leuenberger; Rose; and Hacking. 97. See Canning; Kuhn; Anja Laukötter, “Measuring Knowledge and Emotions: American Audience Research on Educational Films at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” in C. Bonah et al., eds., Communicating Good Health: Movies, Medicine and the Cultures of Risk in the 20th Century (Rochester, NY forthcoming). 98. Naldo Felke, “Die Gesundheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos,” Die Umschau (1913): 254–­55. See also idem, “Die Gefahr der Modernität,” Die Umschau 43, 17 (1913): 889–­90. 99. BA R 86 Kinowesen, Felke, “Die Gesundheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos.” 100. Kuhn, 124. 101. See Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-­Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnisse Literatur und Film (Tübingen 1984); Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After (London 2000). 102. Jörg Schweinitz, “Psychotechnik, idealistische Ästhetik und der der Film als mental struktuierter-­Wahrnehmungsraum,” in Hugo Münsterberg, Das Lichtspiel, ed. Jörg Schweinitz, 13–­14. 103. Donald Fredericksen argues that Münsterberg used psychological knowledge to legitimize the film experience. See Fredericksen, “The Aesthetic of Isolation in Film Theory” (Iowa City 1973), 121ff. For more, see Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia 1980). 104. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 87, 90. 105. Ibid., 108. 106. Precisely this failure to correct the illusions of sight disqualified film as a means of scientific observation in Etienne-­Jules Marey’s view. 107. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 76. 108. It bears noting that Münsterberg helped debunk the mediumistic claims of several stage performers. 109. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 97. 110. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology: General and Applied (New York 1914), 454, cited in Langdale, “S(t)imulation of Mind,” 35. 111. Langdale, ed., “Interview with Hugo Münsterberg” [1916], 201. 112. Langdale, ed., Münsterberg, “Why We Go to the Movies” [1915], 172. 113. Langdale, ed., Münsterberg, “Peril to Childhood in the Movies,” [1917] 195. 114. As noted earlier, Münsterberg used quasi-­filmic apparatus to simulate road conditions in psychotechnical tests to determine drivers’ reaction times. Fredericksen, 21. Anticipating Curt Thomalla, he also called for a working alliance between psychology and motion pictures, arguing that directors should consult with experts to ensure that their films followed “mental logic.” 115. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 57. 116. Other films included Are You Fitted for Your Job? and Developing a Sense of Time. He

216 Notes to Pages 54–60 claimed that two million people saw Testing the Mind. These tests coincided with the U.S. Army’s implementation of a program of mass IQ testing to screen military recruits. 117. Langdale, ed., Münsterberg, “Speech on the Paramount Pictographs” [1916], 204. For more on this, see Jeremy Blatter, “Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892–­1916,” Science in Context 28, 1 (2015): 53–­76. 118. See Fredericksen, 326; Hale, 145. 119. Margarete Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York 1922), 149. 120. Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford 2008), 223. For evidence that German officials knew of Münsterberg’s writings on film, see BA R 901, 71942, Kiliani, “Auslands-­Filmpropaganda,” 22.4.19. See also Philip Osten, “Emotion, Medizin, und Volksbelehrung: Die Entstehung des ‘deutschen Kulturfilms,’” Gesnerus 66 (2009): 67–­102. 121. Boas, “Psychiatrie im Film,” 20.4.18. See also Albert Hellwig, “Hypnotismus und Kinematograph,” Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie 6 (1916): 310–­15. Hellwig was critical of the “false pictures” of psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions in popular film. 122. M. Krause and N. Pethes, eds., Mr. Münsterberg und Dr. Hyde: Zur Filmgeschichte des Menschenexperiments (Bielefeld 2007); Peter Weingart, “The Ambivalence towards New Knowledge.” 123. Kittler, 156. This film provided the inspiration for Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic study The Double (originally Der Doppelgänger) in Imago III.2 (1914): 97–­64. 124. See Lerner; Burleigh. 125. On scientific overreaching in Lang’s Metropolis, see Ludmilla Jordanova, “Science, Machines, and Gender,” in Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the 18th and 20th Centuries (Madison, WI 1989), 111–­33. 126. See Kaes, 63–­64. 127. Thomalla argued that feature films like Lang’s would benefit from relying on the advice of professional scientific-­medical consultants. C. Thomalla, “Medizin und Arzt im Spielfilm: Kritische Bemerkungen anlässlich des ‘Dr. Mabuse,’” Der Kinematograph, 23.7.22. 128. See Federn, cited in K. Fallend and J. Reichmayr, “Psychoanalyse, Film und Offentlichkeit: Konflickte Hinter die Kulissen,” in Siegfried Bernfeld oder die Grenzen der Psychoanalyse (Basel 1992), 132. This response was also motivated by Thomalla’s film, which was seen by Freud’s followers as suffering from serious defects of its own as a result of its failure to include any consultation by a trained psychoanalyst. 129. See Ries; Federn; Veronika Fuechtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond (Berkeley, CA 2011). 130. See Giuliana Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images,” Grey Room 36 (2009): 88–­113. 131. Simmel, cited in Kaes, 49. 132. Ann Friedberg, “An Unheimlich Maneuver Between Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: Secrets of a Soul (1926),” in Eric Rentschler, ed., The Films of GW Pabst (New Brunswick, NJ 1990), 42. 133. Emily Bilski, ed., Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–­1918 (Berkeley, CA 2000); see also Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany (Lincoln, NE 1995). 134. Irene Stratenwerth, ed., Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt (Berlin 2004). 135. Noah Isenberg, “Of Monsters and Magicians,” in idem, Weimar Cinema (New York

Notes to Pages 60–64  217 2000), 41; Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From the Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington, IN 2005). Isenberg makes the parallel between Rabbi Löw and Caligari. 136. Cited in Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001), 122. On the construction of the “Wandering Jew” as a psychiatric type at the turn of the century, see Ian Hacking, Mad Travellers: Reflection on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Cambridge, MA 2002); Gilman, “Image of the Hysteric,” 411. 137. Hans Buchner, Im Banne des Films (Munich 1927); René Fülop-­Miller, Die Phantasie-­ Maschine (Berlin 1931). 138. Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story, on Jews in Ufa, 134–­35; and purges, 209–­14; Eric Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA 1996); Thomas Elsaesser. 139. See NS 15/165, “Die Ufa”; R/8034/II/2804, “Der jüdische Einfluss im Film” (1935). 140. R/8034/II 2800, “Das Kino als Kampfmittel des Judentums.” See also R 901/72192, for documents on Oswald’s film project Anti-­Semiten. 141. See, e.g., Albert Hellwig, “Sexuelle Schundfilm und Revolution,” Konservative Monatsschrift (1919): 647–­53. 142. Weber and Burgmaier, 137, 152–­55. See Emil Kraepelin, “Psychiatrische Randbemerkungen zur Zeitgeschichte,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 16 (1919): 171–­83. 143. Stratenwerth, 181–­205. 144. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA 1988), 162–­66; Anne Harrington, Re-­Enchanted Science (Princeton, NJ 1999). 145. Klaus Kreimeier, ed., Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Bd. 2 Weimarer Republik 1918–­1933 (Stuttgart 2005); Hans-­Jürgen Brandt, “Vom Lehrfilm zum Kultur-­ und Propagandafilm,” in P. Zimmermann and K. Hoffmann, eds., Triumph der Bilder, 74–­104. 146. Detlev Peukert, Max Weber’s Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen 1989); Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 629–­56. 147. Atina Grossmann, “Magnus Hirschfeld,” (2004); Fuechtner, 3–­5, 88ff. See also Dickinson. 148. Bela Balazs, The Visible Human (1924), in R. McCormick and A. Gunther-­Pal, eds., German Essays on Film (New York 2004). 149. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar Germany (New York 1984). 150. As in Hirschfeld’s case, some of the criticism aimed at Steinach characterized him as “addicted to publicity.” On the combination of “film-­hostility” and anti-­Semitism in the reaction to this film, see Oskar Kalbus, “Das Steinach-­Film,” in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 226. 151. Curt Thomalla and Arthur Kronfeld, “Filmdokumente zur Sexualwissenschaft,” Archiv für Frauenkunde und Eugenik 9 (1923): 146–­48. 152. Podoll, “Geschichte des Lehrfilms”; Schmidt. 153. On continuities and discontinuities see Schmidt; Dickinson; Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (Amsterdam 2015). 154. Walther Gunther, “Kulturfilm und Jugend,” in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 48.

218 Notes to Pages 65–69

Chapter 2 1. BA 114033, Pfarrer Schneider, “Die Kino-­Seuche,” Die Kreuzzeitung 17.10.16, Bl. 170. 2. See BA 114033, RMdI, for list of such measures. Bl. 226–­28. 3. See BA 114033, Anfrage, Abg. Kuckhoff (Köln), 28.10.16, betr. Schutz jugendlicher personen in ihrer geistigen und sittlichen Entwicklung bezwecken, Bl. 176. 4. See Detlev Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge (Cologne 1986), 175–­91. 5. GStA Rep 76, Ve, Sekt 1, Abt. VII, Deutsch. Lichtspielbund to Zierold, MWKW, 2.10.33. 6. Margaret Stieg, “The 1926 Law to Protect Youth Against Trash and Dirt,” Central European History 23 (1990): 22–­56. 7. See Heide Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt 1990), 189–­243. 8. The most extensive and sophisticated treatment of this topic is that of Kaspar Maase, who argues that the Schundkampf played a key role in delegitimizing the Weimar Republic. See, especially, Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung: Die Regulierung von Film und Kino im duetschen Kaiserreich,” Archive für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 39–­77; idem, Die Kinder der Massenkultur: Kontroversen über Schmutz und Schund seit dem Kaiserreich (Frankfurt 2012); Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba, eds., Schund und Schönheit: Popülare Künste um 1900 (Cologne 2001). See also Sabine Hake, Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany 1907–­1933 (Lincoln, NE 1993). 9. In this regard, German film reform mirrored developments elsewhere. On film reform, censorship, and social hygiene in early twentieth-­century England, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality (London 1990); on film, Progressivism, and social hygiene in the United States, see Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early 20th Century America (Berkeley, CA 2004), esp. 106–­20. 10. Scott Curtis, “The Tastes of a Nation: Training the Senses and Sensibility of Film Audiences in Imperial Germany,” Film History 6 (1994): 445–­69. On the wider phenomenon, see Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism 1870–­ 1945 (Cambridge 1993); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History 1890–­1939 (Chicago 2003); Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity, 1890–­1914 (Cambridge, MA 2000). 11. Adolf Sellmann, “Das Geheimnis des Kinos,” Bild & Film 1 (1912): 65–­67; Robert Gaupp, “Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt,” [1912], in Andreas Kümmel and Petra Löffler, eds., Medientheorie 1888–­1933: Texte und Kommentare (Frankfurt 2002), 113. 12. Jochen Schulte-­Sasse, Kritik an Trivial-­Literatur seit der Aufklärung (Munich 1977); Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine geschichte des Körpers, 1765–­1914 (Frankfurt 2001); Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York 1993). 13. See HUB Bonhoeffer Nachlass, Program der IV. Europäische Vereinigung der psychische Hygiene, London, 5–­8.10.36. Offizieller Bericht: Psychisches Hygiene und Kino. On the history of hygiene discourse, see Sarasin; Alfons Labisch, Homo hygienicus: Gesundheit und Medizin in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt 1992); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York 1979), 173ff. On the medicalization of German social policy in the field of youth welfare, see Peukert, Grenzen; Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare (Cambridge, MA 1996).

Notes to Pages 69–75  219 14. Other participants included Albert Moll, Edmund Forster, Robert Gaupp, Theodor Ziehen, Arthur Kronfeld, Max Dessoir, and Curt Thomalla. 15. Alfred Döblin, “Das Theater der kleinen Leute,” in Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-­Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis vom Literatur und Film 1909–­1929 (Munich 1978), 37–­38. 16. It is worth also noting Döblin’s observation that the cinema was replacing the tavern as a central institution of working-­class life. For analysis of an attempt, influenced by Clifford Beers’s mental hygiene movement, to enlist film on behalf of temperance, see Anne Friedberg’s discussion of D. W. Griffith’s A Drunkard’s Reformation (1908), in which the drinker is cured, according to an intertitle, by seeing “his own shortcomings mirrored in a stage-­play.” Friedberg, “‘A Properly Adjusted Window’: Vision and Sanity in D. W. Griffith’s 1908–­9 Biograph Films,” in T. Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema (London 1990). This film underscores the medium’s place within early twentieth-­century reform agendas. 17. A Pr Br 030/05 1264. Lichtbild-­Theater 5, 29 (1912–­13). As this article put it, regulation involved questions of religion and morality as well as health risks (e.g., air, smoke, and safety). 18. Gary Stark, “Cinema, Society, and the State: Policing the Film Industry in Imperial Germany,” in G. Stark and B. Lackner, eds., Essays on Culture and Society in Modern Germany (Arlington, TX 1982), 122–­66. 19. R 1501/109005a, Aufzeichnung über die kommisarische Beratung, betreffend gesetzliche Massnahmen zur Bekampfung von Schundliteratur, 24.11.11, Bl. 1–­8. 20. For an excellent evocation of the spell cast by such tales of adventure and crime over the adolescent imagination, see George Grosz, An Autobiography (New York 1983), 15–­18. 21. The representative from the Justice Ministry summed up his objections to the Interior Ministry’s initial proposal: “The censorship of content threatened all of literature.” 22. BA R 1501/109005a, Kommisarische Beratung, betreff: Gesetzliche Massnahmen zur Bekämpfung von Schundliteratur, 8.12.11. Interior’s proposal to create an expert panel was rejected, but participants conceded the need for specialist expertise to judge whether a given image could overstimulate a child’s imagination and endanger his health. 23. See the files in BA R 86, Kinowesen. The locus classicus was sociologist Emilie Altenloh’s study Zur Soziologie des Kino (Jena 1914). Klaus Podoll stresses that the turn to scientific expertise was driven by officials; see Podoll, “Psychiatrische Beiträge zur Kinodebatte der Stummfilmära in Deutschland,” Fortschritte der Neurologie und Psychiatrie 66 (1998): 402. 24. Robert Gaupp, “Die Gefahren der Kino” [1912], in Jörg Schweinitz, ed., Prolog vor dem Kino (Leipzig 1992), 64–­69; idem, “Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt,” [1912], in Kümmel and Löffler, 100–­114; idem, Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmaterial (Munich 1912). 25. Gaupp, “Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt,” 100. 26. Gaupp, Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmaterial, 8. 27. Gaupp, “Gefahren der Kino,” 67. 28. Gaupp, “Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt,” 103–­4. 29. Gaupp, “Gefahren der Kino,” 68. 30. Sarasin. 31. Gaupp, “Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Standpunkt,” 113. 32. See Eric Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice (Ithaca, NY 2003); Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German

220 Notes to Pages 75–80 Criminology (Chapel Hill, NC 2000); Peter Becker, Verderbnis und Entartung: Eine geschichte der Kriminologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen 2002). 33. Peukert, Grenzen; Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare. Derek Linton shows that repeal of anti-­Socialist laws led to concern about moral and physical welfare of youth. See Linton, Who Has the Youth, Has the Future (Cambridge 1991). 34. Albert Hellwig, “Kind und Kino,” Beiträge zur Kinderforschung 119 (1914). 35. W. Conradt, Kirche und Kinematograph—​­Eine Frage (Berlin 1910). For related efforts in the United States, see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA 1991), 63 ff. 36. Friedberg. 37. Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare, 88. 38. Helenefriedericke Stelzner, Die psychopathische Konstitution und ihre soziale Bedeutung (Berlin 1911). Lunbeck defines psychopathy as “the abnormality that passed everywhere as normality.” Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Power and Gender in Modern America (Princeton, NJ 1994), 65. For more, see Greg Eghigian, The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine and the Convict in Twentieth-­Century Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 2015). 39. Gaupp, “Gefahren der Kino,” 68. 40. Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 102. In describing the conflict between moralizing and scientific approaches in British film policy, Kuhn offers the most convincing account of film censorship’s relation to the social question. On the shift from a moral-­ethical paradigm to a medical, legal, and scientific paradigm in social policy, see Becker. 41. She also warned of the problem of “mass contagion”: referring to twenty-­eight children she examined at the Charité polyclinic, she estimated that released into the city’s population these youth had the capacity to “infect” at least 1,500 other children. Stelzner, 128. 42. Stelzner, 65–­69. Ziehen’s case histories contain many examples of children acting out impulses (to run away from home, e.g.) under the influence of Nick Carter or Buffalo Bill stories. 43. Cited in Albert Hellwig, Die Schundfilms; ihre Wesen, ihre Gefahren, ihre Bekämpfung (Halle 1911), 461. See idem, “Die Schädlichkeit des Schundfilms für die kindliche Psyche,” Ärztliche-­Sachverständige Zeitung 17 (1912): 455–­61. 44. See Robert Gaupp, “Der nervöse Zusammenbruch und die Revolution,” Blätter für Volksgesundheitspflege 5/6 (1919): 43–­46; idem, “Der Arzt als Erzieher seines Volkes,” Blätter für Volksgesundheitspflege 9/10 (1919): 77–­80. 45. Albert Hellwig, “Der Kinematograph vom Standpunkt der Juristen,” Die Hochwart 3 (1911): 19. 46. See Becker; Wetzell. 47. Albert Hellwig, “Beziehungen zwischen Schundliteratur, Schundfilms und Verbrechen,” Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 15 (1913): 1–­33. 48. Ibid. Hellwig’s critique of Leopold Laquer’s account of the nexus between film and crime: “weak causality.” See Laquer, “Schundfilms,” Die Umschau 24 (1911): 488–­89. 49. See Alois Funk, Film und Jugend: Eine Untersuchung über die psychischen Wirkungen des Films im Leben des Jugendlichen (Munich 1934), 130. See also Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung,” 64. 50. Sources ranged from Archiv für Kriminal-­anthropologie and Monatsschrift für Kriminal-­ Psychologie to journals devoted to child psychology and youth welfare. 51. Albert Hellwig, “Aktenmässige Fälle über Schundliteratur und Schundfilms als Verbrechensanreiz,” Der Gerechtssaal 84 (1914): 402–­31.

Notes to Pages 80–83  221 52. Andriopoulos suggests that such cases served as the “pseudo-­empirical” basis for Hellwig’s conclusions. See Stefan Andriopoulos, “Spellbound in Darkness: Hypnosis as an Allegory of Early Cinema,” German Review 77 (2002): 102–­17. 53. Hellwig, “Aktenmässige Fälle über Schundliteratur,” 126. 54. Alois Funk’s frequently cited Nazi-­era study of the nexus between film and juvenile crime claimed that his investigations, which relied on extensive interviews with adolescents, pointed to conclusions that went beyond what he regarded as Hellwig’s rather cautious formulations. Funk, 154. 55. See Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in T. C Heller, M. Sosna, and D. Wellbery, eds., Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford, CA 1986), 222–­36; idem, “The Invention of Split Personalities,” in Alan Donagan et al., eds., Human Nature and Natural Knowledge (Dordrecht 1986), 63–­85. See also Michel Foucault on the “formation of objects” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (London 2002), 44ff. 56. See Hans Buchner, Im Banne des Films: Die Weltherrschaft des Kinos (Munich 1927); Funk. 57. On the growing importance of the human sciences in social affairs, see Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 165–­93; K. Brückweh, D. Schumann, B. Ziemann, and R. Wetzell, eds., Engineering Society: The Scientization of the Social in Comparative Perspective, 1880–­2000 (Basingstoke 2012). 58. Geoff Eley, “Cultural Socialism, the Public Sphere, and the Mass Form,” in D. Barclay and E. Weitz, eds., Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism 1840–­1990 (Oxford 1998), 30. 59. Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare; Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford 2008), 87–­89. As noted in Chapter 1, the first scientific study of film, Münsterberg’s 1916 The Photoplay, challenged the most hysterical claims of film reformers regarding the link between film and crime. Similarly, Hellwig distanced his own efforts from the “naïve” claims of some critics of trash in order to preserve the credibility of reformers’ discourse. 60. On the emergence of hygiene as a “magic formula” of the modern era, see Sarasin, 17. See also Labisch. 61. Schlüpmann, 59–­61. The self-­righteous reformer echoes Adolf Sellmann: “Thus are our people poisoned by the floods of immorality that the cinematograph spews out at its audience every night.” 62. On anxieties and legal debates surrounding the “unwanted insertion of one’s own image in a compromising sequence,” see Stefan Andriopoulos, “The Terror of Reproduction: Early Cinema’s Ghostly Doubles and the Right to One’s Own Image,” New German Critique 99 (2006): 161–­62. On protecting the public image of doctors, see Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung,” 63. 63. Funk, 121–­22. In G. W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) one “lost girl” refers to her erstwhile savior, Dr. Vitalis, as a man “who comes wanting to save us and winds up joining us.” Not surprisingly, this film was attacked in censor proceedings as a case of trash parading as a socially conscious film. See www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/zengut/189wa1x.pdf. 64. A Pr Br 030/05 1264, H. Häfker, Der Kinematograph, 14.1.14. 65. Cited in Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ 1947), 22. 66. See Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung,” 65; Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare, 113–­21; Andrew Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism and Authority in Germany 1914–­1918 (Cambridge, MA 2010), 103ff.

222 Notes to Pages 84–87 67. Landesarchiv Berlin 16985, Bd. 1 1915–­17. 68. R 8034/II/2799. “Ist unsere Jugend verwahrlost?” 69. A Pr. Br. 030/16985. See also Donson, 154–­75. 70. Landesarchiv Berlin 1265, Brunner to Polizeipräsidium, 1.11.15. 71. Stark, 160–­65; Ross; Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company 1918–­1945 (Berkeley, CA 1999). 72. BA R 901/71946, Altman, “Der Film als Politisches Werbemittel,” 4.8.16, Bl. 77–­85. 73. BA R 901/71951, Bufa, Okt. 1917, “Der Propaganda Film und seine Bedingungen,” Bl. 170–­81. 74. R 114035, “Reform des Kinos,” Vorwärts 5.11.16: “To compete with Schundkino, the masses’ completely legitimate need for entertainment cannot be ignored.” This article accompanied a letter to Bethmann-­Hollweg protesting calls for a total ban on Kino, along with a report by a field doctor attesting to cinema’s therapeutic value for soldiers in need of distraction. 75. On the risk of coercive measures backfiring, see Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare, 116–­17. 76. BA R 86/ 943, Deutschösterreichische Erlass des Staatsamts fur soziale Verwaltung, Betr. Kinopropaganda fur Jugendfursorge (19.6.19). “Denn es ist fur die Belange des Jugendfürsorge von der grossten Bedeutung, die Massen des Volkes, die zu den fleissigsten Kinobesuchern gehoren, uber die Aufgaben des Jugendschutzes aufzuklären.” 77. A. Lassally, “Kinogewerbe und Kinoreform,” Umschau 29.4.16. 78. BA R 901/71951, Kulturfilm-­Gesellschaft, “Denkschrift über die Verwendung des Films zu Regierungszwecken,” 19.11.17, Bl 209–­11. 79. Peukert, Grenzen, 176. 80. A Pr Br 030/16985. Brunner to MdI, 17.9.16. See Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung.” 81. Following the revolution and the abolition of censorship, he himself would become radicalized, and his attacks on Schund became openly anti-­Semitic. 82. A Pr. Br/ 030 16985. See also BA R 901/71944 AA to Pr MdI, 26.8.19 on pornography. Pornography excluded from list due to the problem of publishing titles that serve as both advertising and inducement. 83. See Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare, 117; Donson. 84. On the end of the “police-­state” approach, see Ernst Seeger, “State Control of Films in Germany,” International Review of Educational Cinema 1 (1929): 35. 85. Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford 2008), 79; Robin Lenman, “Mass Culture and the State in Germany 1900–­1926,” in R.J. Bullen et al., eds., Ideas into Politics (London 1984), 51, 57; Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity After Hitler (Chapel Hill, NC 1995), 12–­13, 20. 86. Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare, 118; Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung,” 73ff; Cornelie Usborne, Frauenkörper—​­Volkskörper: Geburtenkontrolle und Bevölkerungs­ politik in der Weimarer Republik (Münster 1994); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA 1998). 87. C. Ross, 223; Peter Holquist, “Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-­European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 426–­50. Holquist emphasizes the centrality of censorship among the techniques of modern governance. 88. See H. Drange, “Schuljugend und Kinematographen,” Pädagogische Zeitung 36 (1907):

Notes to Pages 88–90  223 737–­38; Naldo Felke, “Die Gesundheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos,” Die Umschau (1913): 254–­55; Albert Hellwig, Die Schundfilms (Halle 1911); idem, “Beziehungen zwischen Schundliteratur, Schundfilms und Verbrechen,” Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 15 (1913): 1–­33; idem, “Aktenmässige Fälle”; Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino (Jena 1914); Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay (New York 1916); F. X. Schönhuber, Das Kinoproblem im Lichte von Schulerantworten (Leipzig 1918). Alois Funk’s study of cinema’s psychological effects on youth, which served as a kind of appendage to the Nazi’s new RLG of 1934, summarized much of this literature. See Funk. On this larger development, see Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung”; Kuhn. 89. See Oskar Kalbus, “Abriss,” Der Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 6. 90. Just as military authorities had, in a concession to reality that horrified conservatives, sanctioned the creation of brothels at the front, so too it sanctioned the creation of educational films on venereal disease in response to the widespread problems of infection that were the inevitable result. 91. Burleigh describes Weimar’s health and welfare apparatus as a “generalized . . . ​and medicalized version of the 19th century’s sterner but more limited concern with policing contagious diseases or public morals.” Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–­1945 (Cambridge 1994), 28. 92. See Usborne; Peukert, Grenzen; Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare; Kathleen Canning, Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York 2010). 93. BA 114034, Arbeiter und Soldatenrat Dortmund, 12.3.19. 94. A. Hellwig, “Sexuelle Schundfilm und Revolution,” Konservative Monatsschrift (1919): 684. 95. On the seeming contradiction between democracy and censorship, see Stieg. 96. Ernst Seeger, “State Control of Films in Germany,” IREC 1 (1929): 37–­38. Within the category of films endangering public order and safety, Seeger included those that endangered the health of the spectator by, for instance, causing “excessive tension to the nervous system.” He also cited a ban on the cinematic representation of hypnotism. 97. See, e.g., Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare; Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford 1993), 23–­25, 246–­48. The RMdI’s extensive files on the problem of psychopathy contain repeated reference to the links between that problem and popular film. See, for example, BA R 1501/109384, Stenographischen Bericht des Reichstags, Abg. Fr. H. Dransfeld, 16.3.21, Bl 34. 98. BA R 901/71944, Filmliga, Allg. Vereinigung zur Forderung gutter Lichtspielkunst, Bl 231–­34. Its mission specified the need for Aufklarung and combating Schund. 99. BA R 901/72189. 100. BA R 901/71944, Film-­Kurier 29.10.1919. 101. Participants were also reminded of the need for uniformity with respect to the interests of the film industry, long plagued by contradictions in the standards prevailing among different Länder. On postwar rationalization and the search for new paradigms of technocratic expertise, see Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York 1989); Molly Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York 1994). 102. R 901/72189, RMdI, Aufzeichnung uber die Besprechung am 2. Dezember 1919 in Reichstags-­gebaude uber den Gesetzentwurf, betr. Die Zensur von Lichtspielen. See also R

224 Notes to Pages 90–95 901/71944, Brunner, which qualifies the view that the RLG was passed in response to Aufklärungfilms. 103. See Hellwig, “Sexuelle Revolution und Schundfilm.” 104. See James Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern,” Film History 11 (1999): 181–­203. 105. BA R 8034/II 2800, Lang, Parteisekretär des DNVP, “Wie treiben wir eine gesunde Bevölkerungspolitik?” 11.12.19, Bl. 59. 106. On the sharpening of the text, see Eva Sturm, “Von der Zensurfreiheit zum Zensurgesetz: Das erste deutsche Lichtspielgesetz,” in M. Hagener, ed., in Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino (Munich 2000), 69. 107. BA R 901/72189, RMdI, Aufzeichnung uber die Besprechung am 2. Dezember 1919 in Reichstagsgebaude uber den Gesetzentwurf, betr. Die Zensur von Lichtspielen. 108. Ursula von Keitz, Filme vor Gericht: Zur Praxis der Filmzensur in Deutschland 1920–­ 1938. Essay zu: Deutsches Filminstitut (Hg.): Die Entscheidungen der Filmoberprüfstelle Berlin 1920–­1938. Internet Publikation (http://www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/dt2jz02.htm); Sturm. 109. Von Keitz. 110. At heart, this warning reflected concerns about the mediality of hygiene discourse—​­i.e., the at once warning and exciting effects of hygiene manuals. See Sarasin; von Keitz. 111. Waldemar Schweisheimer, Bedeutung des Films für soziale Hygiene und Medizin (Munich 1920), 76–­77. 112. See Anon., “Moderne Geist in der Filmzensur,” Film-­Kurier 21.7.20. This article stresses the introduction of modern, progressive views and expertise into censor practice. 113. Hellwig’s writings of the period prior to the RLG’s passage attest to the psychologization of trash discourse. See, especially, “Volkstum, Kunst, Moralische Massenverseuchung durch Theater und Kino,” in Soziale Kultur Aug./Sept. (1918): 369–­72; “Zur Psychologie der Schundlitera24; “Zur Psychologie der tur und ihrer Bekämpfung,” Soziale Kultur Jan. (1919): 22–­ Lichtspielvorföhrungen,” in Deutsche Revue Bd. 4 Oct./Dec. (1919): 163–­70. 114. See BA R 86 943, “Gefahren des Kino im Urteil des Arztes,” Vorwärts. On the “right to entertainment” as a form of therapy and social hygiene, see Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung.” Such recognition was frequently criticized by those who felt that censors made too many concessions to the audience’s need for “Nervenspannung” and “Zerstreuung.” 115. BA R 86, 943, Anon., “Aufklärungsfilme—​­ Animierfilme,” Deutsche Tageszeitung 31.7.19. 116. Previous efforts to ban the film were stymied by the fact that, as the Interior Ministry noted, its hands remained tied as long as censorship was not in force. 117. Steakley, 192. 118. BA R 8034 II, 2800, Hedwig Dransfeld, “Zum Kinoproblem,” Der Tag 26.3.20, Bl. 97. On the violence that disrupted screenings of this film, see Alice Kuzniar, Queer German Cinema (Stanford, CA 2000), 27–­30. 119. See Kuhn, 124. 120. For one dispute on how to apply this concept, see BA R 1501, 11804, RGA to RMdI, 29.11.24. 121. BA R 86/943 “Volksgesundheit und Filmgesetzgebung,” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 26.6.20. 122. See list of expert advisers in Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung, 74–­75.

Notes to Pages 95–102  225 123. In fact, evidence suggests that Weimar censors adopted a relatively lenient line and that Germany compares well with other European nations of this period; perhaps, as critics did not fail to suggest, a sign of official concession to the fact that the German film industry was one of the few thriving sectors in an economy still reeling from the war’s aftershocks. 124. Hellwig classified films that depicted the authority of figures from the medical, legal, and other professions in compromising ways as a special form of Schund. 125. See censor proceedings for Weg ins Verderben at www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut. de/zengut/df2tb717z.pdf. 126. On conservatives’ criticism of the “Berlin line,” see Jan-­Pieter Barbian, “Filme mit Lücken: Die Lichtspielzensur in der Weimarer Republik,” in Uli Jung, Der deutsche Film (Trier 1993), 63–­68. 127. See BA R 43/I/2498, Zentrum Party Rep. Hampel, 22.1.24; RMdI to Reichkanzlei, 15.2.24; letter from Darmstadt to Reichkanzlei, 5.2.24. On concerns about the influence of the churches, see BA R 43/I/2498, “Film und Gesetzgebung.” 128. Stieg; Peukert, Grenzen. 129. BA R 4901/2476, Bekämpfung der Schmutz und Schund, RMdI 20.8.29. 130. GStA Rep 76, Ve, Sekt 1, Abt. VII, Deutsch. Lichtspielbund to Zierold, MWKW, 2.10.33. 131. Rep 77 B 1774, Bekämpfung der Schmutz und Schund. 132. BA R 901/2476, Aufbaumassnahmen. The need to observe the principles of mental hygiene was frequently stressed in this text. 133. BA R 1501/109410, Gesundheitsschaden der Nachkriegszeit. Dr. Sellmann, “Der Kampf gegen Schmutz und Schund,” Das Volk 14.7.27, Bl. 271. 134. BA R 86/943, Werner Mahrholz, “Geistige Volkshygiene. Die Verschlechterungen des Schund und Schmutzgesetz,” Vossische Zeitung, 24.6.26. In linking the concepts of the “Normal-­ mensch” and the “normal book” or “normal film,” Mahrholz also implicitly pointed to the opposing category, thus begging the question of where he would draw the line in the case of the so-­called anormale—​­whether this was a given film or an audience member. 135. On the “unstable discursive relations” of popular hygiene, see Sarasin. 136. On Nazism’s coupling of biological motifs of degeneration and purification with religious motifs of redemption, see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York 2009). 137. Rainer Herrn, “Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft und die Bücherverbrennung,” in J. Schoeps, ed., Verfemt und Verboten: Vorgeschichte und Folgen der Bücherverbrennung 1933 (Hildesheim 2010), 149, 156. See also Peukert, Grenzen. 138. Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity,” Central European History 37 (2004): 1–­48. 139. Cited in Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism. Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (Princeton, NJ 2005), 43–­44. 140. Funk, 35–­36. 141. See Willibald Sauerländer, “Vom Heimatschutz zur Rassenhygiene: Über Paul Schultze-­ Naumburg,” in S. Gilman and C. Schmölders, eds., Gesichter der Weimarer Republik (Cologne 2000). See also Hau, regarding the life-­reformer Ungewitter’s comments on human Schund. 142. Funk, 10. 143. Lenman, 67–­68. 144. See Herzog, ch. 1. 145. See BA R 4901/2476, letter 27.8.34, for one expression of discontent in the form of an angry denunciation of the “pornographer” Julius Streicher’s “Schund-­publication” Der Stürmer.

226 Notes to Pages 103–107 The letter accuses Streicher of “infecting . . . ​the thinking of 1000’s of German boys and girls” through his “Schmutzblatt.” More generally, see documents on “filth and trash” in BA R 4901/2476.

Chapter 3 1. See GStA Rep 76 1324, RMdI to PMVW, Betrifft: Verbot der Ausübung und Vorführungen der Hypnose durch nicht approbierte Personen, und hypnotischer Darstellungen im Film, 14.1.25, Bl. 374–­85. See also BA R1501, 111804, RGA to RMdI, Betrifft: Hypnotische Vorführungen, 30.6.26. 2. BA R 1501/125685, 29.3.33, Bl. 39. 3. Doris Kaufmann, “Science as Cultural Practice: Psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, 1 (1999): 125–­44. See also idem, “‘Widerstandsfähige Gehirne’ und ‘kampfunlustige Seelen’: Zur Mentalitäts-­und Wissenschaftsge­ schichte des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Michael Hagner, ed., Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns (Göttingen 1999), 205–­23. 4. On the implications of this scene, see Anton Kaes, Shell-­Shock Cinema (Princeton, NJ 2012), 62. See, e.g., “Fort mit Brunner!,” Film-­Kurier, 19.11.21; “Freiheit geistiges Schaffens,” Film-­Kurier, 25.11.21; “Die Filmzensur muss fallen!,” Berlin am Morgen, 9.12.30, all cited in Bruce Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic (Austin, TX 1990). Freud’s image of the internal censor as a “fortified garrison” is germane here, as is his reference to the lifting of prohibitions that accompany the carnival. See his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York 1959 [1921]), 81. 5. The phrase “hypnosis epidemic” was invoked by numerous authorities. See BA R 1501/111804, Schrenck-­ Notzing, “Die Wachsuggestion auf der öffentliche Schaubühne,” 22.10.19. 6. Nicolas Pethes and Marcus Krause argue that all horror films encode references to the medium’s origins in experimental science. See their “Einleitung,” in Nicolas Pethes and Marcus Krause, eds., Dr. Münsterberg und Mr. Hyde: Zur Filmgeschichte des Menschenexperiments (Bielefeld 2007). 7. See Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writings on Film in Germany, 1907–­1933 (Lincoln, NE 1993). 8. Hermann Duenschmann, “Kinematograph und Psychologie der Volksmenge” [1912], in Andreas Kümmel and Petra Löffler, eds., Medientheorie 1888–­1933: Texte und Kommentare (Frankfurt 2002), 93. 9. Ibid., 89. 10. Ibid., 91, 95. 11. See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA 1968); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago 2000); Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (London 1991). 12. See Georges Didi-­Hubermann, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA 2004); Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York 1982), 194–­204. 13. This cultural motif, as well as its specifically Jewish features, are explored in Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT 2000). 14. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York 1960 [1895]), 39, 65.

Notes to Pages 107–111  227 15. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-­Twentieth-­Century America (Berkeley, CA 2004), 63. I have been unable to find confirmation of this. 16. Ruth Harris, “Murder Under Hypnosis in the Case of Gabrielle Bompard: Psychiatry in the Courtroom in Belle Epoque Paris,” in W. F. Bynum et al., eds., The Anatomy of Madness, vol. 2 (London 1985), 199. See also Paul Lerner, “Hysterical Cures: Hypnosis, Gender and Performance in World War I and Weimar Germany,” History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 79–­101. 17. BA R 1501/11803, RGA to RMdI, 5.1.20, Bl 122. Reference is made here to a ban on lay hypnosis dating from 25.6.95. 18. BA R 1501/111803, KGA, Dr. Engelmann, Betrifft: Hypnose und Suggestion, 28.5.95, Bl 2–­15. 19. In Austria, a ban on public hypnosis went into effect in 1896, based on an opinion submitted by Krafft-­Ebing. See BA R 1501, 111804, Wagner-­Jauregg Gutachten, n.d. 20. Albert Moll addresses these issues, including the Czynski affair, in his Ärztliche Ethik (Stuttgart 1902). 21. Jörg Schweinitz, “Der hypnotisierende Blick: Etablierung und Anverwandlung eines konventionellen Bildes,” in Thomas Koebner and Thomas Meder, eds., Bildtheorie und Film (Munich 2006), 426–­43. 22. Stefan Andriopoulos, “Spellbound in Darkness: Hypnosis as an Allegory of Early Cinema,” Germanic Review 77 (2002): 102–­17; idem, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago 2008). See also Harris, “Murder Under Hypnosis.” 23. On the citation of literary texts by medical experts and Charcot’s criticism of the “unscientific” reliance on such texts, see Andriopoulos, Possessed, 33–­34. 24. GStA Rep 76, 1324. See also Andriopoulos, Possessed. 25. Hans-­Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire (Dover, NH 1985); Detlev Peukert, Max Weber’s Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen 1989); idem, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York 1993); Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York 1981); Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture and the State in Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 1997). 26. Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 165–­93; Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore 1997); G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago 1991); K. Brückweh, D. Schumann, R. Wetzell, and B. Ziemann, eds., Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–­1980 (London 2012). 27. These notions found echoes in German debates as well, even while sociologists in Germany sought an epistemology appropriate to the human and social sciences. See, for instance, Georg Simmel, “Über Massenverbrechen,” Die Zeit (2.10.97). For a later rejoinder to Simmel by Germany’s self-­described foremost disciple of Le Bon, see Walther Moede, Die Experimentelle Massenpsychologie (Leipzig 1920). See also Brückweh et al. 28. On the role of psychoanalysis in breaking the hold of degenerationist thought, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York 1990). More generally, see Greg Eghigian, Andreas Killen, and Christine Leuenberger, eds., “The Self as Political and Scientific Project,” Osiris 22 (2007): 8–­9. 29. See Andreas Mayer, Mikroskopie der Psyche: Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse im Hypnose-­ Labor (Göttingen 2002). 30. See Andriopoulos, Possessed; Pick, Svengali’s Web. On fin de siècle crises of agency and the role of hypnosis in “will-­rehabilitation,” see Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park, PA 2008).

228 Notes to Pages 111–116 31. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” [1919], in Sigmund Freud, Studies in Parapsychology (New York 1963), 49. 32. BA R 1501/111803, König. Sächs. Min. des auswärtigen Angelegenheiten to RMdI, 21.1.98, with Abschrift 08.01.98, Bl. 156. 33. See, for instance, GStA Rep 76 1324, Markwitz case, 1898. 34. BA R 1501/111803, Kaiserliche Statthalter in Elsass-­Lothringen an den Reichskanzler Fürsten von Hohenlohe Durchlaucht, 19.3.98. These files contain numerous exchanges between provincial officials and Prussian interior ministry officials concerning defendants’ claims that their crimes were out under the influence of a posthypnotic spell. 35. GStA Rep 76 1324, report of Commission with response by Auguste Forel. 36. GStA Rep 84a 10992, “Ein Deutscher” to Justiz-­Ministerium, 2.11.03, Bl 112–­13. Aware of the eccentric-­sounding nature of his views, the author explained his need to feign madness in order to elude the suspicions of his Beeinflusser, who had him under constant observation. The pamphlet was The Philosophy of Personal Influence: A Scientific Treatise on Personal Magnetism, Hypnotism, and Suggestion, written by one Dr. X. LaMotte Sage of the “New York Institute of Science.” 37. The locus classicus of such paranoid systems is Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Viktor Tausk locates the source of such delusions in a situation of uncertain agency: it “originates in the need for causality inherent in man.” Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (Cambridge, MA 1992), 542–­69. See also Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York 1992), 18ff. 38. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NB 1993 [1892]). For another account of a persecutory system with cinematic elements, see the memoir of Clifford Beers, the founder of the mental hygiene movement, A Mind That Found Itself (Boston 1908), 18–­22. 39. See BA R 1501, 111804, FOPS to RMdI, Betrifft: Die Frage des ursachlichen Zusammenhangs vom im Film dargestellter Hypnose and strafbaren Handlungen, 4.8.22. These proceedings are included in a set of documents assembled during the Weimar period. 40. Albert Hellwig, “Hypnotismus und Kinematograph,” Zeitschrift fur Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie 6 (1916): 314. See also Andreas Killen, “The Scene of the Crime,” in Klaus Kreimeier and Annemone Ligensa, eds., Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (Indiana 2009), 99–­112. 41. The same concern is expressed by the prosecutor in Das Andere (1913), who seeks to take concepts like “split personality” out of circulation. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA 1999), 115–­82. 42. See Killen, “The Scene of the Crime.” I draw heavily here on Andriopoulos, Possessed. 43. See, e.g., Emilie Altenloh, Soziologie des Kinos (Jena 1914), 56, 92. 44. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York 1968), 237. See also Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/Modernity 4 (1997): 1–­29. 45. Albert Hellwig, Die Reform des Lichtspielrechts (Langensalza 1920), 7. 46. On the theory that Forster treated Hitler with hypnosis, see Kaes, 78. 47. See www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/filme/f017992.htm. 48. See www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/zengut/df2tb960z.pdf. Dessoir claimed here that “medical science does not see lay-­hypnosis as a threat to social order.”

Notes to Pages 117–125  229 49. BA R 1501/111804, Schrenck-­Notzing, “Die Wachsuggestion auf der öffentlichen Schaubühne,” 22.10.19. 50. See Lerner, “Hysterical Cures,” 79–­101; idem, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany 1890–­1930 (Ithaca, NY 2003), 88–­102. 51. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 81. 52. BA R 1501/11804, Dresden LGA to MdI, 21.8.24. 53. BA R 1501/11804 RAHV, “Warnung vor scheinbar nicht hypnotischen Experimenten.” 54. See Kurt Eissler, Freud as an Expert Witness: The Discussion of War Neuroses Between Freud and Wagner-­Jauregg (Madison, CT 1986). For a more balanced treatment, see Kaufmann. 55. BA R 1501/111804, Gutachten des deutschen vereins für Psychiatrie über gesetzliche Massnahmen gegen hypnotische Schaustellungen, erstattet über ersuchen der Polizeidirektion München. 56. He noted that, whereas they had once been labeled hypnotic, such performances were now identified as experiments in “waking suggestion” or as “psychological experiments”—​­both to avoid bans and to satisfy the public’s need for novelty. 57. Writing in 1918, Emil Kraepelin had hailed the progress of psychiatric knowledge as a victory of science over charlatanism. See Lerner, Hysterical Men, 122. 58. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 86–­124. 59. Max Nonne, “Therapeutische Erfahrungen an den Kriegsneurosen in den Jahren 1914–­ 1918,” in Karl Bonhoeffer, ed., Geistes-­und Nervenkrankheiten, vol. 4 (Leipzig 1922), 107. For more on this, see Juliet Wagner, “Twisted Bodies, Broken Minds: Film and Neuropsychiatry in the First World War” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University 2009). 60. Lerner, Hysterical Men. 61. Kaes, 54. See also Kittler. 62. “The known about come to behave in the way that the knowers expect them to. But . . . ​ sometimes the known take matters into their own hands.” Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ 1995), 38. See also idem, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in D. Sperber et al., eds., Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford 1995), 351–­83. 63. GStA HA Rep. 76/1325, Breslau response to survey, 6.6.25, Bl. 60–­65. 64. Robert Gaupp, “Krieg und Seelenleben,” Deutsche Revue 43, 1 (1918): 168. 65. BA R 1501, 111804, FOPS to RMdI, Betrifft: Die Frage des ursachlichen Zusammenhangs vom im Film dargestellter Hypnose und strafbaren Handlungen, 4.8.22. 66. Ibid. The case of Rieding ties into several important postwar narratives, including the thematization of psychopathy in relation to popular film; for more on this, see Chapter 2. 67. BA R 1501, 111804, FOPS to RMdI, Betrifft: Die Frage des ursachlichen Zusammenhangs vom im Film dargestellter Hypnose und strafbaren Handlungen, 4.8.22. 68. Ibid. 69. BA R 1501 111804, Leiter der Film-­Oberprüfstelle, to Reichsminister des Innern, Abt. II, 25.1.22. 70. BA R 1501 111804, Reichsminister des Innern to Preuss. Justizminister and RGA, 8.2.22. 71. BA R 1501 111804, RGA to RMdI, 7.4.22, with opinions by Kraepelin and Bonhoeffer. See also Bonhoeffer Nachlass and Wagner-­Jauregg report 9.8.22. 72. The RGA retorted at one point that the absence of examples did not contradict the fact of the existence of a threat. See BA R 1501/111804, RGA to RMdI, 10.10.22. 73. See www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/filme/f000071.htm.

230 Notes to Pages 126–132 74. See the reviews collected in Günther Scholdt, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler: Roman, Film, Dokumente (St. Ingbert 1987). 75. Fritz Lang, “A propos du Docteur Mabuse,” Eibel 21 (1953): 36, reprinted in Scholdt, 175. 76. BA R 1501 111804, Sächsische Gesandschaft to RMdI, 7.12.22. 77. BA R 1501 111804, Landesgesundheitsamt Dresden to RMdI, 21.8.24. 78. GStA Rep 84a, 10992, RMdI 22.10.20. See previously issued medical opinion by experts, including Bonhoeffer, on Muskellesen (“muscle-­reading”). GStA Rep 76 1324, Wissenschaftliche Deputation fur das Medizinal-­Wesen, 10.3.20. 79. GStA Rep 76, 1324, PMV to RMdI 8.1.26, summary of results of survey of Länder. 80. GStA Rep 76, 1324, RGA to RMdI, 18.8.22. In one letter, the Verband deutscher Heilkunde (2.2.23) wrote to cite the 1869 law on Kurierfreiheit, a key piece of liberal legislation. 81. GStA Rep 76 1324, Dietrich (Göttingen), 10.2.24, Bl 355–­56. 82. See Lerner, Hysterical Men. 83. BA R 1501/111804, PMVW to RMdI, 8.1.1926. See also Lerner, Hysterical Men. 84. BA R 1501/111804, RGA to RMdI, 30.6.26. Hesse. Betreff: Hypnotische Vorführungen. 85. Julius Wagner-­Jauregg, Telepathie und Hypnose im Verbrechen (Vienna 1919), 16. 86. Lerner, Hysterical Men. 87. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 49. 88. Lang claimed documentary status for this film in his essay “Kitsch, Sensation-­Kultur, und Film,” in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 28–­31. On Mabuse as the “grand enunciator,” see Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang (London 2000). 89. Schweinitz, 430. 90. Andriopoulos, Possessed, 115–­16. It bears mentioning that while the cinema constitutes a crucial site for the demonstration of this mythic power, it is not the only one: another key scene depicts Mabuse’s skill at manipulating prices on the stock exchange, thereby bringing about a full-­scale financial panic. Lang’s film here connects the “ominous power of suggestion with hidden economic forces.” Andriopoulos, Possessed, 124. 91. Bernd Widdig includes a chapter on Mabuse in his Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001), citing the Jewish coding of the many guises assumed by Mabuse: psychoanalyst, financier, revolutionary, peddler. 92. “Dr. Mabuse der Spieler,” Völkische Kurier 1.9.25, in Scholdt. It bears mentioning here that Charcot saw the tale of the wandering Jew as a prototype of the modern neuropath; he recast the tale of Ahasverus as a psychiatric case history. See Pick, Svengali’s Web, 143–­45. 93. See Daniel Pick, “Racial Hypnosis,” in Svengali’s Web, 127–­65; Michael Berkowitz, “Unmasking Counter-­history: An Introductory Exploration of Criminality and the Jewish Question,” in P. Becker and R. Wetzell, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge 2006), 81–­82. 94. Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 40–­41; on the “opaque nature” of the Weimar system’s crisis, 245. 95. For “deep reservoir of existential anxiety,” see Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich (New York 2000), 255; on modernity and crises of agency, see Cowan. For “agency panic,” see Seltzer; see also Anson Rabinbach’s discussion of this notion in connection with the conspiracy theories surrounding the Reichstag fire, in “Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror,” New German Critique 103 (2008): 102–­3. 96. Though there is an obvious relation between the two, Kracauer’s nuanced account of the plight of the salaried masses should be separated from the more problematic argument of his

Notes to Pages 132–139  231 From Caligari to Hitler, whose “psychological history of German film” combines great insight with sweeping generalization and bad teleology. On the more open-­ended, emancipatory features of the Weimar period, see Rüdiger Graf and Moritz Foellmer, eds., Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt 2005); Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 629–­56. 97. Psychiatrists like Eugen Kahn and Emil Kraepelin depicted the actions of postwar revolutionary leaders and their followers in precisely such terms. 98. Fritz Lang, “The Artistic Composition of the Film Drama,” 62. In 1932, film critic Rudolf Arnheim described the 1920 RLG as a form of “martial law,” implying that it should be overthrown, in ibid., 134; both in R. McCormick and A. Gunther-­Pal, eds., German Essays on Film (New York 2004). 99. Otto Kriegk, “Der Deutsche Film”, in Scholdt, 150. 100. BA R 1501/125685, 29.3.33, Bl. 39. 101. BA R 1501/125685, “Dr. Mabuse Verboten!” Die Kreuzzeitung, 89, 30.3.33, Bl. 42. This Catholic paper greeted the ban as an essential step in the “cleansing” of German film: “In the new Germany there can be no place for such misbegotten products of mass-­fantasy!” 102. See BA R 1501/125685, Bl. 48–­55. 103. Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, 148. 104. See BA R 1501/125685, Bl. 48–­55. After screening Testament at Lang’s request, Joseph Goebbels concurred with the decision to ban the film, yet in subsequent months he oversaw discrete efforts to find a way to circumvent the ban. Though these efforts ultimately failed, they appear to confirm stories that despite the seemingly egregious nature of Lang’s offense against the cultural standards of the new regime, Goebbels hoped to enlist him for the cause of National Socialist cinema. See Andreas Killen, “Weimar Cinema Between Hypnosis and Enlightenment,” in Michael Laffan and Max Weiss, eds., Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ 2012), 111–­13. 105. For more on this shift, see Kittler, 146–­49. 106. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power (New York 2008); “Dr. Mabuse der Spieler,” Völkische Kurier 1.9.25, in Scholdt. 107. See Jonathan Crary, “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison,” in Kerry Brougher, ed., Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (Los Angeles 1996), 262–­79; Kittler; Gunning.

Chapter 4 1. Das Erbe is in the holdings of the Federal Film Archive in Berlin. 2. Karl-­Heinz Roth, Filmpropaganda für die Vernichtung der Geisteskranken und Behinderten im Dritten Reich (Berlin 1985); Ludwig Rost, Sterilisation und Euthanasie im Film des “Dritten Reiches” (Husum 1987); U. Benzenhofer and W. Eckart, eds., Medizin im Spielfilm des Nationalsozialismus (Tecklenburg 1990); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany 1900–­1945 (Cambridge 1994); Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics, and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany (Husum 2002). 3. Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–­1914 (Frankfurt 2001). 4. I have adopted the notion of “internalization of the censor” from Heide Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt 1990), 61. 5. See Schmidt; Malte Hagener, ed., Geschlecht in Fesseln: Sexualität zwischen Aufklärung und Ausbeutung im Weimarer Kino (Munich 2000).

232 Notes to Pages 139–142 6. Cited in Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?,” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 632–­33. 7. Magnus Hirschfeld, “Aus der Bewegung,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufe 1/2 (1919): 4. 8. Ludendorff also created “enlightenment divisions” to maintain troop morale. See J. Verhey, “Some Lessons of the War: The Discourse on Propaganda and Public Opinion in Germany in the 1920s,” in B. Hüppauf, ed., War, Violence, and the Modern Condition (Berlin 1997), 100. 9. BA R 43/I/2490 Reichkanzlei, 1919; Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserrinerungen (Berlin 1919), 296–­303; Cory Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford 2008), 225. 10. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–­1978 (New York 2007); G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago 1991). 11. See Kathleen Canning, “Introduction,” in K. Canning et al., eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York 2010), 10; Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York 1978), 143–­44, 139. 12. BA R 901, 71941, Kiliani, “Denkschrift über Film-­Propaganda im Ausland,” 24.9.18, Bl. 134–­45. 13. BA R 901, 71942, Kiliani, “Auslands-­Filmpropaganda,” 22.4.19, Bl. 266–­326. 14. Kiliani, 22.4.19. 15. These projects also included plans to deploy the so-­called Tagfilm, a kind of cinematic billboard that Kiliani saw as ideal for mobilizing “mass emotions” in the interests of political Beeinflussung, and approaching the composer Richard Strauss to enlist his participation in a monumental, Griffith-­like film project. See documents in BA R 901/71951; BA R 901/71942; and BA R 901/71943. 16. See BA R 901, 72199, “Hungerblockadefilm.” Production was marred by disputes about the need to strike the right balance between purely scientific and more propagandistic methods. 17. BA R 901, 71943, Kiliani to Troeltsch, Kultusministerium, 23.6.19, Bl. 75. One Dutch official drew the Foreign Office’s attention to local protests against German Schund and erotic Aufklärungsfilms, stressing in particular the need to ban foreign distribution of Hirschfeld’s film. See R 901, 72087, “Die Gefahr des deutschen Films,” n.d., Bl. 140. 18. A growing body of scholarship has documented the degree to which nonfiction film in a variety of forms flourished in the postwar era. See Hagener; K. Kreimeier, ed., Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Bd. 2 Weimarer Republik 1918–­1933 (Stuttgart 2005); P. Zimmermann and K. Hoffmann, eds., Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Bd. 3 “Drittes Reich,” 1933–­1945 (Stuttgart 2005); idem, Triumph der Bilder: Kultur-­und Dokumentarfilme vor 1945 im Internationalen Vergleich (Stuttgart 2003); U. von Keitz, Im Schatten des Gesetzes: Schwangerschaftskonflikt und Reproduction im deutsch-­sprachigen Film 1918–­1933 (Schüren 2005); R. Reichert, Im Kino der Humanwissenschaften (Bielefeld 2007), 193–­206; R. Reichert, ed., Kulturfilm im “Dritten Reich” (Vienna 2006); C. Bonah and A. Laukötter, “Moving Images: Film in Science and Medicine—​­Science and Medicine in Film,” Gesnerus 66, 3 (2009), 121–­46; Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann: The Cinema of Multiplicity (Amsterdam 2014). 19. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis 1995). On film’s relation to the representational practices that Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston identify with “mechanical objectivity,” see their “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992): 81–­128; idem, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA 2010).

Notes to Pages 142–146  233 20. On False Shame, see Klaus Podoll, “Geschichte des Lehrfilms und des popularwissenschaftlichen Aufklärungsfilms in der Nervenheilkunde in Deutschland 1895–­1929,” Fortschritte in der Neurologie und Psychiatrie 68 (2000): 523–­29; Ulf Schmidt, “‘Der Blick auf dem Körper’: Sozialhygienische Filme, Sexualaufklärung und Propaganda in der Weimarer Republik,” in Hagener, 23–­46. I am especially indebted to Schmidt’s discussion. 21. See Hagener; von Keitz, In Schatten des Gesetzes; Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 1992); Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform 1920–­1950 (New York 1995); Lutz Sauerteig, Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft: Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland (Stuttgart 1999). 22. BA R 1501/109370, RMdI to Landesregierungen, Bl. 22. 23. Detlev Peukert, Max Weber’s Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen 1989). 24. On the context for this ambivalence, see Eve Rosenhaft, “Lesewut, Kinosucht, Radiotismus: Zur (geschlechter-­)politischen Relevanz neuer Massenmedien in den 1920er Jahren,” in A. Ludtke et al., eds., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum in Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart 1996), 119–­43. 25. On the dialectical relation between the Schundfilm and the Kulturfilm, see H.-­J. Brandt, “Vom Lehrfilm zum Kultur-­und Propagandafilm,” in P. Zimmermann and Hoffmann, eds., Triumph der Bilder, 74–­104. 26. BA R 8034 II 2799, “Aufklärung durch den Film,” Vossische Zeitung, 26.2.17, Bl. 107. 27. See, for instance, BA R 8034 II 2800, Dransfeld, “Massenaufklärung—​­Gefährdung,” Der Tag. 28. Curt Thomalla, “Aus den memoiren des deutschen Lehrfilms,” Film-­Kurier, 18.10.27. 29. See BA R 86, 943, “Aufklärungsfilm als Schundfilm,” 31.7.19. 30. Albert Hellwig, Das Lichtspielgesetz vom 12. Mai 1920 (Berlin 1921), 105. 31. Dietmar Jazbinsek, “Vom Sittenspiegel der Grossstadt zum Sittenfilm,” in Hagener, 91. 32. See James Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern,” Film History 11 (1999): 181–­203. For more on the reinstatement of censorship, see Eva Sturm, “Von der Zensurfreiheit zum Zensurgesetz,” in Hagener, 63–­80. 33. GStA Rep. 76, VIII B. “Eine homosexuelle Hochburg,” Staatsburger Zeitung, 10.8.19. See also the attached report of a visit by a municipal health official, along with opinions by two medical experts. 34. GStA Rep. 76, VIII B. Abschrift Karl Bonhoeffer to PMVW, 26.1.21. 35. Sturm, 69–­71. 36. See HUB Bonhoeffer Nachlass, for exchanges between Bonhoeffer and the Reichoberprüfstelle. 37. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality 1909–­1925 (New York 1988), 30. 38. See BA R 1501, 1110658, PMVW Gottstein, 25.2.22, with Abschrift from UFA, for a sense of the crisis surrounding the Kulturfilm and its offshoot the hygienic Aufklärungsfilm. By the mid-­1920s, financial difficulties had forced the closure of UFA’s medical film archive. 39. See C. Thomalla, “Medizin und Arzt im Spielfilm: Kritische Bemerkungen anlässlich des ‘Dr. Mabuse,’” Der Kinematograph, 23.7.22. For Thomalla’s career, see Schmidt; Podoll. 40. On the history of UFA’s cultural film department, see Klaus Kreimeier, “Ein deutsches Paradigma: Die Kulturfilmabteilung der UFA,” in Kreimeier, Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films, 67–­86. 41. For more on the use of scientific imagery and rhetoric in such films, see Brandt, 88ff.

234 Notes to Pages 146–150 42. See Andreas Killen, “Accidents Happen: The Industrial Accident in German History,” in Andreas Killen and Nitzan Lebovic, eds., Catastrophe: A History of a Concept (Berlin 2015), 75–­92. 43. Curt Thomalla, “Zum Unbewussten im Leben und Alltag,” in idem, Gesund Sein—​ ­Gesund Bleiben (Berlin 1936), 309–­406. 44. Curt Thomalla, “Ein psychiatrisch-­neurologisches Filmarchiv,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 45 (1919): 87–­97; Thomalla, “Memoiren.” 45. Kuhn, 53. Thomalla’s role as scientific adviser to Friedrich Porges’s Film im Film (1924), a behind-­the-­scenes depiction of several of Germany’s most eminent directors at work on their films, can also be seen as part of a wider endeavor to distance the medium from the “cinema of attractions” and thus redeem its authentic cultural mission. 46. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-­ Garde,” Wide Angle 8, 3/4 (1986): 63–­70. 47. Sarasin, 17. 48. See www.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/filme/f017675.htm. On concerns over the consequences of unintended readings of particular films, see the censor proceedings for Thomalla’s film Hygiene der Ehe (1924): www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/filme/f035210.htm. 49. See letter, Dr. Adam to Thomalla, in Curt Thomalla, Falsche Scham (Berlin 1926), 5–­7. 50. On the potentially inciting qualities of the enlightenment film, see U. von Keitz, “Disziplinierung der Bilder: Der dokumentarische Film und seine Zensoren,” in Kreimeier, Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films, 292–­93. 51. Peter Jelavich’s account of late Weimar film culture treats self-­censorship as part of a negative strategy of depoliticization. In the case of the enlightenment film, I argue that it was more productive. See Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley, CA 2006). 52. The initiative for this film came from the PMVW and the Deutsche Bund für Volksaufklärung und Erbkunde (DBVE). See BA R 86/943, letter to RGA from DBVE, 19.3.27. See also BA R 1501/109373, RAHV, invitation to Fluch der Vererbung, 11.8.27, Manuskript: Thomalla, Bl. 59, with review from Film-­Echo, 28.8.27. 53. Curt Thomalla, “The Development of the Medical Film in Germany,” International Review of Educational Cinematography 1 (1929), 450–­51. 54. Thomalla, “Memoiren.” 55. Curt Thomalla, “Hygiene und Sozialmedizin im Volksbelehrungsfilm,” Zeitschrift für Medizinalbeamte 35 (1922): 591. 56. On the wider context for this, see Eve Rosenhaft, “Lesewut, Kinosucht, Radiotismus: Zur (geschlechter-­)politischen Relevanz neuer Massenmedien in den 1920er Jahren,” in A. Ludtke, ed., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum in Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart 1996), 119–­43. 57. On film and its relation to Weimar crowd discourse, see Andreas Killen, “Weimar Cinema between Hypnosis and Enlightenment,” in M. Weiss and M. Laffan, eds., Facing Fear (Prince­ton, NJ 2012). On the emergence of a science of audience reception in relation to hygiene films, see Kuhn, 122ff; von Keitz, Im Schatten, 68ff; Anja Laukötter, “Measuring Knowledge and Emotions: American Audience Research on Educational Films at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” in C. Bonah et al., eds., Communicating Good Health: Movies, Medicine and the Cultures of Risk in the 20th Century (Rochester, NY forthcoming).

Notes to Pages 150–153  235 58. O. F. Scheuer, “Kino,” in M. Marcuse, ed., Handwörterbuch der Sexualwissenschaft (Bonn 1926), 360. 59. This problem is also thematized in False Shame, in a scene in which a young woman with syphilis seeks treatment from a medical charlatan. 60. H. Berger, “Neue Wege für die Erforschung und Bekämpfung der Kurpfuschertums,” Zeitschrift für psychishe Hygiene 5 (1932): 6. See also Heinrich Zerkaulen, Die Deutsche Hygiene Museum (Dresden 1930). 61. BA R1501/109371, “Trügerische Aufklärung,” Freie Presse, 27.4.22, Bl. 154. See Cornelie Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (New York 2007). 62. BA R 86/937, RAHV “Ärzte an der Front! Gesundheitsfeldzug 1927.” 63. On the ineffectiveness of the 1926 law, see, e.g., BA R4901/2476, RMdI to Reichstag, 20.8.29. 64. Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ 1999), 48–­51. 65. National Archives (NA) RG 242, T70, Organizational Plan for RMVP. See also his files at the BDC. 66. Curt Thomalla, “Die biologische Revolution marschiert,” Beamten-­Blatt (Dresden) 3 (1933): 111–­13. 67. See Thomalla’s Gesund Sein—​­Gesund Bleiben, 309–­406. 68. Goebbels, cited in Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion (Cambridge, MA 1996), 54. In late 1932, one critic of intensifying censorship brought on by fear of the radical right referred to it as a form of “castration.” Cited in Jelavich, 240. 69. See NA BDC A3345-­DS-­J005, Hess to Reichs-­und Gauleiter, 15.5.34, on renaming of office under Gross’s direction; Hess to Gauleiter, 31.10.34 on the RPA’s tasks. For more on Gross and the RPA, see Rost, 37–­47; Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge 2003), 105–­30. 70. See BA NS 22/905, RMVP to Gauleiter on release of Victims of the Past, with distribution instructions. See also Koonz, 126. 71. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilization im Nationalsozialismus (Opladen 1986). On the role played by psychiatrists, see Burleigh; M. Weber, Ernst Rüdin: Eine kritische Biographie (Berlin 1993); Götz Aly, “Pure and Tainted Progress,” in G. Aly, et al, eds., Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, MD 1994), 156–­237. 72. On the necessity of “Aufklärungsarbeit” to combat religious opposition, see documents in USHMM, RG 14.074 M; see also RG 14.087, for memo from future Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti on “racial-­political training of medical personnel,” screening of the film Erbkrank, and lecture “Sterilization and Its Opponents,” 8.1.37. 73. Engaged in an intensive study of the French Enlightenment during the Nazi period, Viktor Klemperer noted: “If you accuse Enlightenment thinkers . . . of fanaticism, they will deny it, claiming that their own zeal is simply a battle against the enemies of reason fought with the weapons of reason.” The Nazis, he saw, were far from being the first to turn fanaticism in the name of enlightenment into a virtue. Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (London 2000), 53. 74. Peter Holquist, “Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-­European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 415–­50. Holquist suggests that the Bolsheviks saw enlightenment and propaganda as pragmatic tools for managing populations. 75. See Grossmann.

236 Notes to Pages 153–156 76. See Walter Gross, “Filme bringen Aufklärung,” Ärzteblatt für Berlin 44 (1939); idem, “Der Rassen-­und Sippengedanke im deutschen Filmschaffen,” Völkischer Beobachter, 29.8.37. 77. Walter Gross, “Drei Jahre rassenpolitische Aufklärungsarbeit,” Volk und Rasse 11 (1936): 331–­37. 81/9, RPA Arbeitstagung, 6.20–­ 29.35; NA/T-­ 81/22, Pressebericht der RPA, 78. NA/T-­ 28.1.36. 79. Fritzsche, 652; Dickinson argues that interwar bio-­politics encompassed multiple positions, few of which could be identified with National Socialism, and stresses the need to attend to other trajectories. The field of mental hygiene, which prior to 1933 included Jewish sexologists and proto-­Nazi racial hygienists, offers one illustrative case. Edward Ross Dickinson, “Bio-­ politics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37 (2004): 23ff. 80. Proctor, 49. 81. Detlev Peukert, “The Genesis of the Final Solution from the Spirit of Science,” in D. Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society (New York 1994), 274–­99. 82. On the limits of the thesis of total Gleichschaltung of film policy, see Peter Zimmermann, “Zwischen Sachlichkeit, Idylle, und Propaganda: Der Kulturfilm im Dritten Reich,” in Zimmermann and Hoffmann, Triumph der Bilder, 63ff. 83. BA NS 15/165, “Was wünscht das Publikum?” Rheinisch-­Westfalische Zeitung, 5.2.38. Goebbels called this film a piece of “shocking trash” and wrote that “film production . . . ​was still greatly in need of reform.” Felix Moeller, The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich (London 2000), 76, 82. 84. Noted one report in 1938, “Film degenerates more and more into the mindless eroticism of the Weimar period.” Cited in Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company 1918–­1945 (Berkeley, CA 1999), 293, 310. Such issues were all the more awkward given the increasing difficulty of invoking the specter of “Jewish influence” to explain them away. See BA NS 15/165, “Die UFA,” for continuing efforts to calculate the scale of “Jewish influence” over UFA and its consequences. 85. M. Johannes, “Film und Rasse,” Volk und Rasse V (1934): 155–­56. 86. Anon., “Sünden der Vergangenheit in der gesundheitlichen Volksaufklärung,” Volk und Rasse IX (1934). 87. See Jörg Becker, “Völkische Visionen vom Burokratie und Schönheit: Rassenselektion im NS-­Kulturfilm,” in Reichert, Kulturfilm, 60. On “cultural eugenics,” see Willibald Sauerländer, “Vom Heimatschutz zur Rassenhygiene: Über Paul Schultze-­Naumburg,” in S. Gilman and C. Schmölders, eds., Gesichter der Weimarer Republik (Cologne 2000), 32–­50. 88. Koonz argues that by 1938, the spread of public opposition to the sterilization program made clear the limits of the regime’s public education campaign. Koonz, 127–­28. 89. On Goebbels’s anxiety about viewer response, see Rentschler, 11; Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London 2002), 74. 90. Schmidt, Medical Films, 150ff. 91. Alois Funk, Film und Jugend: Eiene Untersuchung über die psychischen Wirkungen des Films im Leben des Jugendlichen (Munich 1934), 154ff. See Walther Freisburger, “Der Jugendliche zwischen Unterrichtsfilm and Spielfilm,” Film und Bild 2, 8 (1936): 247–­49. 92. Robert Sommer, “Der medizinische Unterrichtsfilm,” Film und Bild 1 (1935): 45–­47. See Schmidt, “‘Der Blick auf dem Körper.’” 93. See HUB Karl Bonhoeffer Nachlass, Program der IV. Europäische Vereinigung der

Notes to Pages 156–165  237 psychische Hygiene, London, 5–­8.10.36. Offizieller Bericht: Psychisches Hygiene und Kino. A key issue discussed at this conference was that of the popular cinema’s effect on juvenile delinquency and crime, along with the problem of young offenders’ tendency to cite its influence as an extenuating circumstance. The International Journal of Educational Cinematography also paid much attention to questions of censorship. 94. Zimmermann, Triumph der Bilder, 70. 95. Gertrud Koch, “Der phobische Blick: Zur Körper-­und Stimmeninszenierung im ‘Euthanasie’-­Propagandafilm,” Zeitgeschichte 28, 4 (2001): 228–­35. 96. Cited in Rost, 69. 97. BA R8034/II/2805, Rudolf Frercks, “Opfer der Vergangenheit.” 98. Carol Poore, Disability in Twentieth Century German Culture (Ann Arbor, MI 2007), 97. On the debate over whether to include shots of the actual patient, and on the mixed public reaction to this film, see Burleigh, 213, 217–­19. 99. On Goebbels’s concern over this issue, see Rentschler; Hake, 74. 100. See Peter Zimmermann, “Propagandafilme der NSDAP,” in Zimmermann and Hoffmann, Triumph der Bilder, 505–­29; David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London 2002). 101. Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema (New York 1974), 157–­58; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–­1945 (New York 2009), 189. 102. For the announcement of the film’s release, see BA R 8034/II 2804, Das Erbe, 6.3.36, Bl. 147. See also BA R 8034/II 2804, “Ein lang erwartete Kulturfilm: Das Erbe,” Landpost, 6.3.36. This review praises it as the first film to present the new knowledge of racial hygiene to the public. The film was commissioned by the Verwaltungsamt des Reichsbauernführers. 103. Rost, 81. 104. Brandt, 79. 105. Zimmermann, Triumph der Bilder, 65. 106. Bonah and Laukötter, 137. 107. Sarasin, 250.

Chapter 5 1. Joseph Goebbels, cited in Felix Moeller, The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich (London 2000), 18. 2. NS 18, 211, Bormann to Goebbels, Betrifft: Aufklärung über den Okkultismus, 30.6.41; Goebbels to Bormann, 3.7.41. See also Monica Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore 2004), 240. 3. For earlier measures against occultists, see R 43 II/1650, RMVP Schnellbrief, 15.5.41. On results of this research, see Konrad Zucker, Psychologie des Aberglaubens (Heidelberg 1947). 4. See H. J. Brandt, “Walter Ruttmann: Vom Expressionismus zum Faschismus,” FilmFaust 49 (1985): 38–­46; ibid., 50 (1985): 45–­54; ibid., 51 (1986): 42–­54; Barry Fulks, “Walter Ruttmann, the Avant Garde Film, and Nazi Modernism,” Film and History 14 (1984): 26–­46; Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (Amsterdam 2015). 5. The scenario in Aberglaube conforms in many ways to the pattern described by Cornelie Usborne, in which pregnant women sought out unlicensed healers who performed abortions but also offered fortune-­telling. See Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (New York 2007), 110. 6. On the indexicality of photography, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, The Invention of

238 Notes to Pages 165–169 Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA 2004), 33ff. See also Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York 1968), 226. On the role of visual media in criminology, anthropology, and racial science, see Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–­64; Michael Hau and Mitchell Ash, “Der normale Körper—​­seelisch erblickt,” in S. Gilman and C. Schmölders, eds., Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (Cologne 2000), 12–­31. 7. See Albert Hellwig, Weltkrieg und Aberglaube (Leipzig 1916). 8. Cited in Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–­1930 (Ithaca, NY 2003), 122. 9. Hellwig, 159. See also Hermann Berger, “Neue Wege für die Erforschung und Bekämpfung des Kurpfuschertums,” Zeitschrift für psychische Hygiene 5 (1932): 69–­76. 10. Treitel, 218–­20. Kemnitz later played a key role in Nazi campaigns against occultism. 11. On the history of the psy sciences, see Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London 1999); on “ethnocrats,” see Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge MA 2009). See also Ulfried Geuter, Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany (Cambridge 1992); Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich (New Brunswick, NJ 1997). 12. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–­1945 (Cambridge 1994), 38. 13. Hellwig, 56, 142. 14. Ruttmann’s own early, experimental Lichtspiel Opus 2 was given a Jugendverbot by the censors in 1922, likely as a result of its possible “hypnotic” effects. See Jeanpaul Goergen, “Walter Ruttmann—​­ein Porträt,” in idem, Walter Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin 1989), 23. Thanks to Noam Elcott for this reference. 15. Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine geschichte des Körpers, 1765–­1914 (Frankfurt 2001), 17. 16. Claudia Huerkamp, Der Aufstieg die Ärzte im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom gelehrten Stand zum professionellen Experten (Göttingen 1985); Alfons Labisch, Homo hygienicus: Gesundheit und Medizin in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt 1992); Cornelie Usborne, Frauenkörper—​­Volkskörper: Geburtenkontrolle und Bevölkerungspolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Münster 1994); Sarasin. 17. Sarasin, 137–­38; and, more generally, on charlatanism, 125ff. 18. Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History 1890–­1939 (Chicago 2003). Histories of the “life reform” movement generally tend to stress the antagonisms between it and prevailing natural scientific trends in modern medicine. On life reform, see Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism 1870–­ 1945 (Cambridge 1993), ch. 2. 19. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich (New York 2000), 1–­23. Rudolf Olden estimated that there were 3,000 “wizards” operating in Berlin alone. See Olden, Propheten in deutschen Krisen (Berlin 1932), 19. 20. Alfred Haug, “‘Neue Deutsche Heilkunde’—​­Naturheilkunde und ‘Schulmedizin’ im Nationalsozialismus,” in J. Bleker and N. Jachertz, eds., Medizin im “Dritten Reich” (Cologne 1993), 130. On antiquackery campaigns, see Reinhard Spree, “Kurpfuscherei-­Bekämpfung und ihre sozialen Funktionen”; Usborne, Cultures of Abortion, ch. 4. 21. On the regulation of lay medicine and hypnotism in imperial Germany, see Jens-­Uwe Teichler, “Der Charlatan strebt nicht nach Wahrheit, er verlangt nur nach Geld”: Zur

Notes to Pages 169–173  239 Auseinandersetzung zwischen naturwissenschaftlicher Medizin und Laienmedizin im Deutschen Kaiserreich am Beispiel von Hypnotismus und Heilmagnetismus (Stuttgart 2002). 22. Fraenkle, in Heinrich Zerkaulen, Deutsche Hygiene Museum (Dresden 1930), 19, 22. See BA R 1501/126345, International Hygiene Ausstellung, 1930, “Aberglaube und Gesundheit.” 23. Oskar Kalbus, “Das Übersinnliche im Film,” in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin 1924), 235–­37. 24. Curt Thomalla, “Hypnose und Suggestion im Bild,” Die Gartenlaube 26 (1923): 510–­11. Thanks to Sophie Ledebur for pointing me to this article. 25. Writing about Nosferatu, Kaes notes how practices of spirit photography “inscribed themselves into the film”: “The supposedly hyper-­realistic medium of photography turned out to be (like film) an uncanny phenomenon that not only created a parallel world of spectral doubles but was also put into the service of the supernatural and the occult.” Anton Kaes, “Return of the Undead,” in Kathleen Canning et al., eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York 2010), 37. 26. Kalbus, 243. Such dualities surfaced in the censor proceedings for several films that seemed to respond to Kalbus’s call for debunking occultism. The film Betrügerische Medien (1926), advertised by its makers as an enlightenment film on spiritism, used elaborate test protocols to investigate occult practices, but the film failed to convince the censor board of its claims to “scientificity.” Stressing that the formal properties (“Beeinflussungsmittel”) specific to film posed in and of themselves a danger to audiences, the board banned the film. See Andreas Killen, “Weimar Cinema Between Hypnosis and Enlightenment,” in M. Laffan and M. Weiss, eds., Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ 2012). 27. See Hellwig, Weltkrieg und Aberglaube, 159; idem, Okkultismus und Verbrechen (Berlin 1929). In 1924 he joined the German Society for Combatting Quackery. Hellwig Nachlass, Cologne. See also See BA R 1501/126345, International Hygiene Ausstellung, 1930, “Aberglaube und Gesundheit.” 28. Albert Hellwig, “Cinema as Important Factor in the Investigation of Occult Phenomena,” IREC (1930): 1173. 29. See documents in GStA Rep 84a, 10993. According to the Vossische Zeitung (1925), Hellwig gave the opinion that Drost did not believe his own claims, an opinion that clearly overstepped his competence and showed him to be a “poor psychologist.” 30. On the medicalization of occult practices, see also Berger. 31. Andreas Sommer, “Policing Epistemic Deviance,” Medical History 56, 2 (2012): 265, 272–­73. 32. Hellwig himself conceded that “[t]he concept of superstition is thoroughly relative.” Hellwig Nachlass, 585/3, undated/untitled document. 33. Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (New York 2000), 72. 34. See Jonathan Crary, “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison,” in K. Brougher, ed., Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (Los Angeles 1996), 262–­79. 35. Leo Alexander, medical adviser to the Nuremberg doctors’ trial, cited this precedent. See Ulf Schmidt, Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial (London 2004). See also Daniel Nadav, “The Death Dance of Lübeck: Julius Moses and the German Guidelines for Human Experimentation, 1930,” in V. Roelcke et al., eds., Twentieth Century Ethics of Human Subjects Research (Stuttgart 2004), 129–­35. 36. HUB Nervenklinik, Niederschrift über die Sonderberatung des RGA, 14.3.30.

240 Notes to Pages 174–176 37. HUB Nervenklinik, Niederschrift über die Sonderberatung des RGA, 14.3.30. 38. For the earlier history, see Heather Wolffram, “‘An object of vulgar curiosity’: Legitimizing Medical Hypnosis in Imperial Germany,” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67 (2012): 149–­76. Andreas Mayer suggests that Freud renounced hypnosis in part to distance his methods from the culture of popular hypnosis. Mayer, Mikroskopie der Psyche: Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse im Hypnose-­Labor (Göttingen 2002), 89–­92. 39. Stauder, the head of two leading medical associations, had long used his influence to campaign against lay healers. Convinced that his profession had adequate safeguards in place, he argued that the worst abuses were committed by such healers. In the outcry following yet another major scandal, the Health Council issued new guidelines spelling out the principle of voluntary informed consent—​­guidelines quickly repudiated by the Nazis in 1933. With the passage of laws legalizing involuntary sterilization of the handicapped, the systematic violation of patient’s rights became institutionalized under the medical profession, whose Nazification Stauder played a key role. See Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill, NC 1989). 40. Robert Gaupp, Wahn und Irrtum im Leben der Völker (Tübingen 1916). See also Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA 1999), 115–­82. 41. Officials prevented hypnotists from using the word “experiment” on their placards. Treitel, 203. 42. BA R 1501, 111804, Schrenck-­Notzing, 22.10.19. 43. BA R 1501/109384, “Amt für seelischen Wiederaufbau,” Vorwärts, 16.12.21. 44. Charges of charlatanism were frequently lobbed at the psychoanalytic community, and the problem of lay analysis precipitated a major crisis within that community. See George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York 2008), 325, 412. 45. Detlev Peukert, Max Weber’s Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen 1989); Peter Fritzsche, “Landscape of Danger, Landscape of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany,” in T. Kniesche and S. Brockmann, eds., Dancing on the Volcano: Essays in the Culture of the Weimar Republic (New York 1994), 29–­46. Fritzsche extends the notion of modernist experimentation to all realms of society, stressing the zeal for “renovation” that gripped Weimar reformers across the political spectrum. In his paper “Nazi Modern,” he extends this argument to the Nazi era. 46. See Bernd Hüppauf, “Langemarck, Verdun, and the Myth of a New Man in Germany After the First World War,” War and Society 6 (1988): 70–­103; Jochen Hellbeck and Peter Fritzsche, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in M. Geyer and S. Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York 2009), 302–­44; Cornelius Borck, “Soundwork and Visionary Prosthetics: Artistic Experiments in Raoul Haussmann,” Papers of Surrealism 4 (2005): 1–­25; G. Eghigian, A. Killen, and C. Leuenberger, eds., “Introduction,” Osiris 22 (2006): 1–­25. 47. See Michael Kater, “Die Medizin im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und Erwin Liek,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 440–­63; Hau. On the thematization of “Jewish medicine,” see Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA 1988), 162–­66; Cocks, 56ff. 48. See Kathleen Canning, “Introduction,” in Canning et al., eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects. See, among other examples, Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York 1959 [1921]). On hypnotism’s relation to debates about Victorian social reform, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago 2000). 49. Elsaesser, 72. See also Boaz Neumann, “Psychoanalyse und Hypnose in der Weimarer Republik,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 32 (2004): 107–­34.

Notes to Pages 176–183  241 50. See the chapter on Mabuse in Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001). On the concept of “agency panic,” see Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York 1992). See also Anson Rabinbach’s discussion of this notion in connection with conspiracy theories surrounding the Reichstag fire, “Staging Antifascism,” New German Critique 103 (2008): 97–­126. 51. See Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park, PA 2008). Cowan borrows this formulation from Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York 1983). 52. See, for instance, BA R 76, 1324, Saxon LGA. 53. BA R 1501 111804, Verband der Heilkündiger Deutschlands to RMdI and PMVW, 2.2.23. For other such petitions, see the documents in this collection. 54. GStA Rep 76, 1325. For more see Usborne, Cultures of Abortion, 94–­126. 55. GStA Rep 84a, 10993, Vossische Zeitung, 1925. See also Treitel. 56. H. Schultze, “Das Verbot hypnotischer Schaustellungen,” Berliner klinische Wochenschrift 47 (1919). 57. BA R 1501 111804, RGA to RMdI, 7.4.22, with opinions by Kraepelin and Bonhoeffer. 58. See the censor proceedings at www.difarchiv.deutsches-­filminstitut.de/zengut/dt2tb00398i .htm. 59. Ibid. 60. Archiv des IGPP 1014, III, 5t, Dr. Ueberhorst, “Filmoberprüfstelle contra Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsenzeitung, 15.1.29. 61. GStA Rep 84a, 10992. Generalstaatsanwalt Kiel to Justizminister Berlin, 16.1.31, Betr. Strafverfahren in welchen die Beeinflussung der Vorstellungen oder des Willens einer Person durch Hypnose behauptet wird. The experts included Albert Moll and Max Dessoir. 62. GStA Rep 84a, 10992, Bl. 201. 63. This formulation echoes Freud’s statement, in his expert testimony in the trial of Wagner-­ Jauregg on charges of having abused shell-­shock victims, that “all neurotics are malingerers; they simulate without knowing it, and that is their illness.” Cited in Kurt Eissler, Freud as an Expert Witness: The Discussion of War Neuroses Between Freud and Wagner-­Jauregg (Madison, CT 1986), 62. See BA R 76, 1324, report of Saxony’s LGA, which claims that many of the “charlatans” using hypnosis were war neurotics who had been treated by means of hypnosis. 64. IGPP 10/4, III, 5s. Hellwig, “Was aus dem Günther-­Geffers Film geworden ist,” Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung, 5.2.29 65. The head of Germany’s censorship apparatus noted that films depicting hypnosis had been banned by 1929. See Ernst Seeger, “State Control of Films in Germany,” International Review of Educational Cinema 1 (1929). 66. Ulf Schmidt, Medical Film, Ethics and Euthanasia in Germany (Husum 2002), 163–­67. See also Sophie Ledebur, “Ein Blick in die Tiefe der Seele: Hypnose im Kultur-­und Lehrfilm (1920–­1936),” Berichte zur Wissensschaftsgeschichte 37 (2014): 363–­78. 67. Ludwig Mayer, Das Verbrechen in Hypnose und seine Aufklärungsmethoden (Leipzig 1937). 68. Ludwig Mayer, “Zur forensischen Bedeutung der Hypnose,” Veröffentlichung der RfdU zu dem Hochschulfilm Nr. C 101 (1937): 11. 69. Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago 2008). 70. Schmidt, Medical Film, 378.

242 Notes to Pages 183–186 71. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ 1947). The original study is included as the appendix. See author’s note, 274, in that appendix. See also Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in idem, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London 1991), 132–­57; idem, ed., The Authoritarian Personality (New York 1982). Superstition was one of the categories measured by the F-­Scale devised in the latter text. 72. Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (Oxford 2012). Hess’s delusions merely expressed, in a particularly extravagant form, beliefs widely shared by Nazi elites. His paranoia about the Jews’ hypnotic powers found its ultimate expression in Hitler’s highly cinematic final testament: “I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle, exhibited by the Jews, to divert his hysterical masses.” See Hugh Trevor-­Roper, Last Days of Hitler (New York 1952), 177. 73. Treitel. See also Anne Harrington, Re-­enchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ 1996); Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” AHR 111 (2006): 692–­716. 74. This is to say nothing about the fact that the Allies did not hesitate to exploit some of the most unsavory results of Nazi research. On the science question under Nazism, see Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ 1999), 56–­57. On the relation of Nazi science and medicine to broader trends see Detlev Peukert, “Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in D. Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society (New York 1994), 274–­99; Edward Ross Dickinson, “Bio-­politics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37 (2004): 1–­49; Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York 2002). On the persistence of “normal” science under the Nazis, see Richard Wetzell, “Criminology in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in P. Becker and R. Wetzell, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge 2006); Kristie Makrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York 1993); Greg Eghigian, The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine and the Convict in 20th Century Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 2015). 75. USHMM, RG 15007.M, “Okkultistische Schrifttum,” 1937. 76. Ibid. 77. Treitel, 223, 232–­34. 78. National Archives (NA) RG 242, T70, Organizational Plan for RMVP, 1941. 79. Hau, 132; Proctor, Nazi War on Cancer, 22–­27. 80. Streicher’s Der Stürmer ran a regular column on the “Jew in Medicine,” and its first edition contained a vicious attack on psychoanalysis, condemning it as a form of charlatanism. See Cocks, 59. Adorno commented ironically on this tendency in noting that for the Nazis the elimination of the Jews signified a kind of “natural cure.” See Theodor Adorno, “Theses on Occultism,” in idem, The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (New York 1994), 172–­80. For more on the thematic coupling of Jews, charlatans, money, and propaganda, see caricatures in Volksgesundheitswacht 7 (1936). The demonization of Magnus Hirschfeld was another recurring feature of health propaganda. 81. Haug, 129–­36. 82. Treitel, 236. 83. Haug; Cocks, 204. 84. Proctor, Nazi War on Cancer, 55. 85. Curt Thomalla, Gesund Sein—​­Gesund Bleiben (Berlin 1936), 92–­94.

Notes to Pages 186–191  243 86. For “ethnocrats,” see Fritzsche, Life and Death. 87. The highly racist brand of anti-­occultism propagated by Kraepelin’s student, the psychiatrist Mathilde Ludendorff, played a key role at this juncture. See Treitel, 225. 88. NS 18, 211, Bormann to Goebbels, 30.6.41. 89. Götz Aly, “Medicine Against the Useless,” in G. Aly, P. Chroust, and C. Pross, eds., Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore 1994), 80. 90. NS 18, 497, RPL, Betrifft: Aberglaube und astrologie als Mittel das feindlicher Propaganda, n.d. On the regime’s interest in identifying clairvoyants to assist them in debunking spiritist activity, see the documents in this collection. See also Treitel. 91. Proctor, Nazi War on Cancer, 257; Haug. 92. Evidence of such a crisis was recorded as early as mid-­1934 by a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funded German psychiatric research for several years: “In Freiburg new hospitals are beginning to show a rapid decrease in the number of cases of epilepsy and other nervous diseases because fear of sterilization drives such diseases away from physicians.” RG 1.1 Series 717A, Alan Gregg diary, 6.19.34. See also Proctor, Nazi War on Cancer, 253. 93. Burleigh, 38. 94. See, for instance, Conti’s memo on “racial-­political training of medical personnel” and public enlightenment in connection with the T4 program. USHMM, RG 14.087. 95. Anxieties about the claims of this field found their way into the pages of party publications well into the 1930s, where Erbkunde, the “youngest branch of the sciences,” as one article put it, continued to be tainted by the label of “Erbkurpfuscherei.” See Dr. W. Friese, “Wisenschaftliche Erbpflege oder Erbkurpfuscherei?” Volk und Rasse VII (1936): 298–­301. 96. Cowan, 172. 97. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 192. 98. See Karl-­Heinz Roth, “Filmpropaganda fur die Vernichtung der Geisteskranken und Behinderten im Dritten Reich”; idem, “‘Ich klage an’—​­Aus der Enstehungsgeschichte eines Propaganda-­Films”; Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 206–­19. 99. Aly, 92. 100. Ibid., 211. 101. Christine Teller, “Carl Schneider: Zur Biographie eines deutschen Wissenschaftlers,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16, 4 (1990): 470. For more on Schneider, see Ernst Klee, Euthanasie, 396–­401. The text for the psychiatric section of the Dresden Hygiene Exhibit of 1930 that Schneider coauthored stressed that a “purposeful and comprehensive population policy” was incompatible with allowing essential functions like marriage counseling to be performed by “astrologists or fortune-­tellers.” Paul Nitsche and Carl Schneider, Einführung in die Abteilung Seelische Hygiene (Berlin 1930), 14. 102. NA T-­1021, Roll 12, 127460, Carl Schneider, 19.11.42. 103. See Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 330, 26n. 104. Schneider, cited in Schmidt, Medical Films, 267. See NA T-­1021, Roll 12, 12735–­39, Schneider, 13.3.42. 105. NA T-­1021, Roll 12, 127591, Schneider, “Schlussbemerkungen: Wissenschaftliche, wirtschaftliche, und soziale Bedeutung und Zukunft der psychiatrischen Therapien.” 106. NA T-­1021, Roll 12, 127878-­83, Schneider, “Bericht über Stand, Möglichkeiten, und Ziele der Forschung an Idioten und Epileptikern im Rahmen der Aktion,” 24.1.44. 107. Aly, 196, 210. 108. Konrad Zucker, Psychologie des Aberglaubens (Heidelberg 1947), 294.

244 Notes to Pages 191–196 109. Ibid., 311, 257. 110. See Leo Alexander, CIOS, Imperial War Museum, information from Dr. Bumke (Munich), 29–­30. Alexander reported that the regime’s euthanasia program generated widespread unease among Germans. For SS reports documenting the damage that the T4 program was inflicting on the image of psychiatry and for the related problems this posed for the regime, see Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 164, 263; on combating public mistrust of the psychiatric profession, see also Aly, 198, for instance. 111. The regime’s treatment of the problem of the charlatan bears some resemblance to the pattern of disavowal and incitement that Dagmar Herzog finds in the Nazi discourse about sex. See Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (New York 2007). 112. On Nazi medical experimentation, see Alexander Mitscherlich, Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit; Schmidt, Justice at Nuremberg; Michael Grodin et al., The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code (Oxford 1995). 113. See Treitel, 157. 114. See Sarasin, on the role of “discursive immunization” with popular hygiene. 115. Michael Cowan has recently offered a brilliant analysis of the links between Ruttmann’s films of the 1930s and the Nazi regime’s bio-­political project. Already in his 1931 film Enemy in the Blood, a contribution to the campaign against venereal disease, Ruttmann anticipates the themes of Superstition: this depiction of a highly rationalized, almost Taylorized medical system includes a brief scene in which one of the characters visits a medical charlatan. See Cowan’s Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity. 116. Goergen, “Walter Ruttmann,” 23. 117. Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT 2000); idem, Pursuit of the Nazi Mind. See also Michael Berkowitz, “Criminality and the Jewish Question,” in Becker and Wetzell, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists. Berkowitz notes long-­standing associations among mesmerism, Jews, and crime, and cites a turn-­of-­the-­century author’s views regarding Jews’ “special insights” into hypnosis, which allowed them to “obtain influence over the masses” (81–­82). Such views, as we saw in Chapter 3, were repeatedly recycled during the Weimar period by nationalistic writers like Buchner and Fülop-­Miller.

Conclusion 1. On the continuity between wartime and postwar techniques of “total mobilization,” see Anton Kaes, “The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity,” New German Critique 59 (1993): 105–­17. 2. Joseph Goebbels, cited in Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA 2008), 281. 3. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York 2004), 103. 4. Goebbels, cited in Felix Moeller, The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich (London 2000), 82. 5. The nudist and eugenicist Richard Ungewitter invoked this term in reference to “hopeless degenerates,” alcoholics, the insane, and venereal disease cases. See Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History 1890–­1939 (Chicago 2003), 122. See also Willibald Sauerländer, “Vom Heimatschutz zur Rassenhygiene: Über Paul Schultze-­Naumburg,” in S. Gilman and C. Schmölders, eds., Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (Cologne 2000), 32–­50.

Notes to Pages 197–202  245 6. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (New York 2007). 7. BA R 901/71951, Bild-­und Filmamt October 1917, “Der Propagandafilm und seine Bedingungen, Ziele und Wege,” Bl. 170–­81. 8. BA R 910/71942, Kiliani, n.d., Bl. 52a–­52b. 9. See, e.g., Friedrich Schönemann, Die Technik der Massenbeeinflussung in den USA (Munich 1924). 10. As Michel Foucault notes with respect to sex, “[R]ather than a massive censorship . . . what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.” Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York 1978), 34. 11. Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?,” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 652. 12. Peter Zimmermann, “Zwischen Sachlichkeit, Idylle, und Propaganda: Der Kulturfilm im Dritten Reich,” in Peter Zimmermann and Kay Hoffmann, eds., Triumph der Bilder: Kultur-­ und Dokumentarfilme vor 1945 im Internationalen Vergleich (Stuttgart 2003); Geoff Eley, “Hitler’s Silent Majority? Conformity and Resistance Under the Third Reich,” Michigan Quarterly Review 42, 2 (2003): 389–­425 and ibid., 42, 3 (2003): 550–­83; Ian Kershaw, “How Effective Was German Propaganda?,” in D. Welch, Nazi Propaganda (New York 1983). On loss of trust in media and leadership, see, e.g., “Special Report by SD to Chancellery,” 29.11.43, in David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London 1993), 201–­12. 13. In their postwar trial appearances, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and Adolf Eichmann all alluded to this aspect of Hitler’s rule. 14. Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford 2008). 15. Emil Kraepelin, “Psychiatrische Bewegungsbilder,” Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Neurology und Psychiatrie 85 (1923): 610–­11. 16. HUB, 271 Kinematographische Institut, 1921–­35. Kultusmin to Med Fak in Berlin, Bonn, etc, 18.6.32, Bl. 30–­31, betreff. Das Film-­und Bildamt der Stadt Berlin. 17. On the racial publicist Gunther’s relation to this shift, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA 2007), ch. 6. See also Mitchell Ash, “Weimar Psychology: Holistic Visions and Trained Intuition,” in P. Gordon and J. McCormick, eds., Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton, NJ 2013), 48–­49; Sauerländer, on Paul Schultze-­Naumburg. 18. M. Weber and W. Burgmair, “Ein Gutachten Emil Kraepelins zu dem Film ‘Anders als die Andern,’” in J. Steakley, ed., Anders als die Andern (Hamburg 2007), 146, 150–­51. See also Schweisheimer on the discrediting of doctors who lent their names and authority to sexual enlightenment films. Waldemar Schweisheimer, Bedeutung des Films für soziale Hygiene und Medizin (Munich 1920), 74–­75. 19. Kaspar Maase, “Massenkunst und Volkserziehung: Die Regulierung von Film und Kino im deutschen Kaiserreich,” Archive für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 63. Censors banned films that allegedly undermined the authority of medical and other professionals as a threat to public order. 20. Victor Klemperer noted with reference to Hitler that “experience has shown that the most powerful and lasting suggestion is brought into play by those conmen who have already conned themselves.” Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (London 2006), 105. 21. Rudolf Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York 1976); Bernard Horstmann, Hitler in Pasewalk: Die Hypnose und ihre Folgen (Düsseldorf 2004). 22. Curt Thomalla, Gesund Sein—​­Gesund Bleiben (Berlin 1936), 309–­406. 23. Schmitt, cited in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London 2002), 180. Theodor Adorno cast doubt on such tropes, suggesting that “[i]t is highly

246 Notes to Pages 202–204 doubtful whether actual mass hypnosis takes place at all in fascism.” Adorno, “Stars Down to Earth,” in idem, The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (New York 1994), 164–­65. 24. See Gerd Albrecht, “Medizin und Mediziner im Filme des Dritten Reiches,” in U. Benzenhöfer and W. Eckart, eds., Medizin im Spielfilm des Nationalsozialismus (Tecklenburg 1990), 4–­21. 25. Regine Friedman, “Ecce Ingenium Teutonicum: Paracelsus,” in Eric Rentschler, ed., The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ 1990). 26. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York 2004), 12, 267–­69. 27. Zimmermann, 36; Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA 1996), 159. 28. On “mad science,” see Jakob Tanner, “Populäre Wissenschaft: Metamorphosen des Wissens in Film,” Gesnerus 66 (2009): 15–­39; Ludmilla Jordanova, “Science, Machines, and Gender,” in idem, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine (Madison, WI 1989), 111–­33.

B ib l i o g r a ph y

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Index

Abraham, Karl, 57 Adorno, Theodor, 10agency, 19, 136; agency panic, 113, 131–­32, 176 Aktion T-­4. See euthanasia All Quiet on the Western Front (film), 4 Altenloh, Emilie, 140 alternative medicine, 17, 127–­28, 151, 166–­69, 173–­74, 176–­77, 185–­86 Andreas-­Salomé, Lou, 44 Andriopoulos, Stefan, 19, 82, 109, 126, 130 anti-­Semitism. See Jews audience: and gender, 149–­50, 158, 160; psychology of, 150; audience response, 9–­10, 48–­50, 64, 80, 85, 87–­88, 91, 140, 150, 155, 157, 184, 190 Augen (film), 116, 121, 125 Balazs, Béla, 62, 64 Beeinflussung (influencing), 41, 61, 85, 106, 116, 127, 141, 151, 170, 172, 197, 202; and the “influencing machine,” 3. See also hypnosis Benjamin, Walter, 5, 19, 30, 115 Bergson, Henri, 28 Bernheim, Hyppolite, 107, 109 bio-­politics, 13, 15, 36, 87, 102, 139–­40, 154, 186, 188 The Blue Angel (film), 82–­83, 155Boas, Kurt, 33, 54–­55 Bonah, Christian, 17, 162 Bonhoeffer, Karl, 69, 89–­90, 116, 121, 124–­25, 144, 150 Borck, Cornelius, 175 Bormann, Martin, 164, 186 Brunner, Karl, 84, 86–­87, 89–­90 Bruno, Giuliana, 7

Buchner, Hans, 60 Burleigh, Michael, 188 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film), 10, 42, 55–­56, 103–­5, 118, 120–­22, 123, 135, 166, 172, 176 Canning, Kathleen, 13, 45 censorship, 2–­3, 10, 13, 61, 66, 77–­78, 85, 65–­102; the “cut,” 97, 155, 192, 194; and Different from the Others, 144; Film Appellate Board, 122–­25; end of “police-­ state” approach, 69, 85, 87–­89; “internalization of the censor,” 82, 95, 96, 139, 148, 163, 194; killing the censor, 104, 135; and Mabuse films, 104, 132; medicalization of, 92–­94, 139; the “normal viewer,” 91, 94, 96, 100; and occultism, 178–­80; passage of RLG (1920), 89–­91; and public health, 114; rationalization and centralization of, 90–­91; representation of act of censorship in When the Film Splicer Day-­Dreamed, 97; shift in focus from taste to effects, 91–­92, 94, 179; suspension of, 47, 61, 135. See also Reich Motion Picture Law Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 27–­28, 32, 56, 107, 109, 120, 199, 202 charlatanism, 12, 18, 46, 109, 118–­19, 128, 136, 150, 164–­67, 169, 174, 177, 181, 187, 191–­92, 201–­2 clairvoyance. See occultism Conti, Leonardo, 164, 186–­88 Coubertin, Pierre de, 30 Cowan, Michael, 176, 188 crime and film, 78–­81, 155 crowd psychology, mass psychology, 9, 11, 15, 70, 106–­7, 110, 149, 176, 202. See also Le Bon, Gustave

262 Index cultural eugenics, 155, 158 Curtis, Scott, 28 Darwin, Charles, 5 Daston, Lorraine, 14, 27 Dessoir, Max, 116 Dickinson, Edward Ross, 36, 154 Didi-­Hubermann, Georges, 26 Döblin, Alfred, 70, 139, 154 Doyen, Eugene-­Louis, 29–­30, 32, 55 Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (film). See Lang, Fritz Dransfeld, Hedwig, 93 Duchenne de Boulogne, 5–­6, 27 Duenschmann, Hermann, 105–­6, 113 Effects of the Hunger Blockade on National Health (film), 9, 141, 145. See also Thomalla, Curt Elsaesser, Thomas, 172, 176 emotion, 58; emotion studies, 5–­7; mass emotions, 1, 4, 13, 15, 51–­52, 140, 197 Enlightenment, 18, 68, 81, 153, 190–­91 enlightenment film (Aufklärungsfilm), 8, 9, 16–­17, 45–­48, 84, 90, 92, 94, 101, 132, 137, 200; contestations surrounding, 144–­45; and “discursive immunization,” 148, 168, 192–­94; on occultism, 165, 167–­69, 184; origins and definition of, 139–­40; revival and meaning of under Nazis, 151, 152–­54, 162–­63. See also Inheritance (film); Superstition (film) The Eternal Jew (film), 62, 157 eugenics, 62, 149, 152, 174 euthanasia, 18, 151, 157, 161, 167, 186–­87, 192; Aktion T-­4, 188–­90. See also I accuse (film) experimentation. See medicine Expressionism, 42, 57 False Shame (Falsche Scham, film), 142–­43, 145–­51. See also Thomalla, Curt Faust (film), 8 Felke, Naldo, 49–­50 film: ambivalence of film imagery, 7; evidentiary value of, 7, 29; frame analysis, 26–­27, 31; and hypnosis, 105; hypnotic properties of, 70, 167, 193–­94; and mass suggestion, 84; and “mechanical objectivity,” 14; medical filmmaking, 37–­42, 181–­83; objectivity of, 182, 200; and occultism, 169–­72, 178–­80, 184, 201;

popular film as research medium into mass behavior, 5, 35, 121, 183; relation of filmmaking to social policy, 14–­15, 20; relation between scientific and popular film, 16–­17, 24, 40, 45, 47, 56; scientific film, 5–­7, 169, 182; and self-­knowledge, 30; self-­reflexivity in, 12, 20, 42, 60, 126, 130, 136, 138–­39, 147–­48, 158–­62, 168, 172; superiority to photography, 5, 8; therapeutic properties of, 43–­44. See also audience response; enlightenment film; film reform; human science film reform, 48, 65–­102, 143, 196–­97; and hygiene, 67–­69, 93 Forster, Edmund, 116, 125 Foucault, Michel, 28, 39, 199; on governmentality, 13, 140; on psychiatric power, 20, 36–­37 Frercks, Rudolf, 156–­57 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 57, 62, 77, 111, 115; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 10, 118Fritzsche, Peter, 20, 36, 153, 177, 197 Fülop-­Miller, René, 60 Funk, Alois, 83, 102, 155 Galison, Peter, 14, 27 Gauger, Kurt, 181 Gaupp, Robert, 68, 74–­78, 90, 121–­22, 174 Giedion, Siegfried, 26, 30 Giese, Fritz, 4–­5, 35–­36 Gilbreth, Frank, 30 Gilman, Sander, 26 A Glimpse into the Depths of the Soul (film). See Thomalla, Curt Goebbels, Joseph, 134, 152–­53, 155–­57, 164, 184–­86, 195–­97 The Golem: How He Came into the World (film), 60, 130 “grand enunciator,” 8, 95, 130, 158, 162, 200 Griffiths, D. W., 141 Gross, Walter, 152–­53, 162 Grosz, George, 3, 141 Gunning, Tom, 134 Günther-­Geffers, Elsbeth, 178–­80 Hacking, Ian, 34, 81, 121 Häfker, Hermann, 83, 86 Hanussen, Erik Jan, 185 Hellwig, Albert: on film and crime, 78–­81,

Index 263 90–­91, 95, 122, 155; and hypnotic properties of film, 80, 113–­15; on occultism, 171–­72, 177, 180 Herzog, Dagmar, 158, 197 Hess, Rudolf, 184, 186 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 101, 154; Different from the Others (film), 37, 61–­62, 140–­42, 144–­45, 199–­200; and RLG, 90–­91, 92–­93, 95; Institute for Sexual Science, 144, 152 Hitler, Adolf, 67, 101–­2, 133, 138, 151, 154, 184–­85, 198, 202; hypnotic qualities of, 198, 201 Hoche, Alfred, 4 homo cinematicus, 2, 4, 19, 48–­50, 53, 68, 91, 132, 149, 157, 195 homosexuality. See Hirschfeld, Magnus Hörmann, Bernhard, 164, 187 How the Cinema Takes Revenge (film), 82–­83, 96 human economy (Menschenökonomie), 5, 7, 14, 35–­36 human sciences, 4, 13–­18, 175; ambivalence of, 59, 111, 129, 135–­36, 166–­67; birth of, 14, 24, 110–­11; epistemology of, 29; and film, 8, 24–­25, 35–­36, 45, 48–­49, 59, 138–­39, 184, 198–­99; mobilization of in wartime, 35–­36, 183; and social policy, 36, 93. See also film hygiene, 13, 15–­16, 75, 82, 88, 145, 163, 167–­68; and “discursive immunization,” 148, 192–­94; film reform and, 94–­95, 101–­2, 138–­39; hygienic imaginary, 16, 18; as incitement, 148, 151 hypnosis, 10–­11, 170, 180, 198; counter-­ hypnosis, 19–­20, 113–­14, 115, 192–­94; defendant’s claim “I was hypnotized,” 116, 121–­22, 125, 128–­29, 132; hypnotic crime (criminal suggestion), 11, 19, 108, 109, 113, 116, 122–­24, 127, 132, 134, 182; hypnotic properties of film, 70–­71, 103–­5, 126, 167; public hypnosis, 104, 107–­8, 116–­19, 129, 164, 173–­74; representations of in popular film, 52, 103, 120, 123, 127, 167; scientific films on, 37–­42, 181–­83; as treatment for war neurosis, 38–­43, 52, 56–­57, 118, 120, 129, 166, 176, 202 hysteria, 7, 9, 27–28, 32, 107, 111, 125, 127 I accuse (Ich klage an, film), 138, 151, 157, 188, 192

Inheritance (Das Erbe, film), 137–­39, 142, 147, 152, 158–­63 International Hygiene Exhibition, 169, 171 Jews, 36, 152, 165, 186; anti-­Semitism, 2, 37, 59–­62, 88–­89, 101, 112, 132, 141, 154, 184, 185, 204; mass psychology, 61, 130, 132, 167, 194, 196. See also The Eternal Jew; The Golem Kaes, Anton, 118, 121 Kalbus, Oskar, 169–­72 Kallikak family, 137, 160 Kaufmann, Doris, 40, 121 Kehrer, Ferdinand, 38–­42 Kemnitz, Mathilde, 166 Kessler, Harry Graf, 3 Kiliani, Richard, 1, 3–­4, 8, 140–­41, 197 Kittler, Friedrich, 55 Klemperer, Viktor, 201 Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler, 20, 183, 198 Kraepelin, Emil, 32, 36–­37, 61, 64, 69, 90, 93, 95, 121, 124–­25, 144, 150, 165, 167, 178, 199–­200 Kriegk, Otto, 132 Kuhn, Annette, 77, 95, 147 Kutner, Robert, 29 Lang, Fritz: on censorship, 132; Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, 4, 10, 20, 55–­59, 60, 123–­26, 129–­30, 132, 135, 169–­70, 196; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 104, 133–­36 Latour, Bruno, 40 Laukötter, Anja, 17, 162 Le Bon, Gustave, 2, 106–­7, 110 Lerner, Paul, 129 Lersch, Philipp, Face and Soul, 5–­8 Liek, Erwin, 185, 192 life reform (Lebensreform), 83, 167, 168, 175, 185 Londe, Albert, 27 Ludendorff, Erich, 41, 61, 132, 140, 153, 166, 197 Maase, Kaspar, 101 mad science, 17–­18, 24–­25, 46, 55, 95, 167, 188, 200 “malice of objects,” 29, 40, 198–­201 malingering (simulation), 39–­40, 42–­43, 199, 201

264 Index Mann, Heinrich, 82 Marey, Etienne-­Jules, 25–­26, 74, 169 mass media, 19, 81, 194, 204 mass society, 81, 107, 132 mass suggestion, 12, 41, 48, 84, 106, 114, 120, 130, 132, 136 Mayer, Ludwig, hypnosis films of, 181–­83 “mechanical objectivity,” 14, 27–­29, 32, 40, 200 medicine: epistemology of, 14, 29; and experimental ethics, 108, 172–­74, 177, 192; medical narrative of postwar disorder, 117–­18, 121, 129–­30; under the Nazis, 184–­87, 192; and regulation of unlicensed practitioners, 118, 166–­69, 174, 176, 185; use of film in producing clinical pictures, 9, 26–­29, 32–­35, 38–­39, 198. See also mad science mental contagion, 63, 108, 117, 144, 148, 150, 185, 187 mental hygiene, 31–­32, 36, 100, 101, 111, 156, 178, 185mentally handicapped, 32, 147, 161–­62, 188 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 18 Moses, Julius, 173–­75, 192 Münsterberg, Hugo, The Photoplay, 1–­2, 4, 25–­26, 51–­54, 82, 141 neurology, 9, 23, 26, 28–­29, 31, 37–­40 Nonne, Max, 31, 37–­42, 56, 120, 181–­82, 202 Nordau, Max, 113 occultism (and clairvoyance), 112, 117, 128, 164, 171, 178–­80, 184–­85 Office of Racial Policy (RPA), 137, 152–­53, 155–­57 Oswald, Richard, 93, 142–­43 Paracelsus (film), 202 The Path to Ruin (film), 96 Peukert, Detlev, 62, 131, 143, 154, 175 photography, 5, 8, 27, 32, 39, 58, 107, 165, 194 Pick, Daniel, 184 Poppelreuter, Walther, 23, 30, 34–­35, 37, 43 Proctor, Robert, 151, 153 propaganda, 1, 41, 84, 101, 140–­41, 157, 197 psychiatry, 7, 12, 17–­18; and “anti-­ psychiatry,” 18, 190; and censorship, 104, 144–­45, 150; inflationary use of psychiatric terminology, 55, 122, 174; poor public

image of, 41–­42, 44–­45, 55–­56, 121, 187, 189, 191–­92, 200; psychiatric power, 17, 19, 104, 121, 135; role in racial policy of Third Reich, 152, 187, 189–­93. See also Bonhoeffer, Karl; Gaupp, Robert; Kraepelin, Emil; Schneider, Carl; Wagner-­Jauregg, Julius psychoanalysis, 36, 56–­59, 62, 111, 175psychology, 34, 51–­54; experimental, 1, 31, 140–­41; industrial (psychotechnics), 2, 4–­5, 23, 35–­36 psychopathy, 76–­8, 80, 89, 93, 99, 119, 174 public health, 8, 139, 143, 145, 185, 200 Rabinbach, Anson, 131 racial hygiene, 32, 36, 204; propaganda on, 137–­38, 152–­53, 165, 168, 187, 188 Raphael, Lutz, 14, 81 Reich Committee for Hygiene Education (RAHV), 143, 146, 148, 150 Reich Health Council, 173 Reich Health Office (RGA), 50, 73, 104, 108, 124–­25, 128, 143, 148, 178 Reich Motion Picture Law (RLG), 66, 69, 89–­93, 96, 98, 101, 103, 115, 123, 155, 203. See also censorship Rieding, Willi, case of, 122–­23, 125 Rüdin, Ernst, 152, 156 Ruttmann, Walter, 165, 167, 193–­94. See also Superstition (film) Sachs, Hanns, 57 Sarasin, Philipp, 13, 15, 101, 148, 163, 168Schlüpmann, Heide, 82 Schmidt, Ulf, 8, 181, 190 Schmitt, Carl, 202 Schneider, Carl, 18, 189–­91 Schrenk-­Notzing, Albert von Freiherr, 117, 119, 127, 130, 171 Schultze-­Naumburg, Paul, 102 Schund. See trash Schuster, Paul, 30 Schweinitz, Jörg, 108 Schweisheimer, Waldemar, 46, 92 science: contested status of, 95; and film, 25–­30; and observation, 9, 14, 27–­28, 115, 200; policing of “claims to scientificity,” 37, 93–­95, 200–­201 “scientization of social phenomena,” 14, 19, 81

Index 265 scopophilia, 150 Sebald, W. G., 195–9­6 Secrets of a Soul (film), 56–­59 Seeber, Guido, 50 Seeger, Ernst, 89 Sellmann, Adolf, 65, 68, 96, 99, 101–­2 sexology, 36, 110–­11, 175 sexual enlightenment, 3, 9, 77, 142–­43, 145. See also enlightenment film Sicherheitsdienst (SD) (Security Service), 154, 164 Simmel, Ernst, 43, 58, 120 social engineering, 14, 64 Sommer, Robert, 31–­32, 156 Somnambul (film), 178–­80 St. Vitus’s Dance, 202–­3 Stapel, Wilhelm, 2, 4, 20, 48. See also homo cinematicus Stauder, Alfons, 173–­74, 176 Stelzner, Helenefriedericke, 33, 76–­78, 93 sterilization, 9, 62, 64, 137, 149, 153, 174; Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, 138–­39, 152, 162. See also Das Erbe (film) Streicher, Julius, 185 The Student of Prague (film), 50–­51 superstition, 17–­18, 164, 169, 189–­91 Superstition (Aberglaube, film), 165, 167–­68, 187, 192–­94, 196 Tarde, Gabriel, 107 Tausk, Viktor, 3. See also Beeinflussung testing, and film, 5–­6, 32–­34, 49, 54, 190; “expansion of the field of the testable” (Benjamin), 19, 30 Thomalla, Curt, 62–­64, 144, 198; appointment to Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, 13, 64, 151, 186; Curse of Heredity, 13, 62, 64, 149; False Shame, 142–­43, 145–­51; on film and disease pictures, 8; films on industrial accidents, 11, 29, 35; Glimpse into the

Depths of the Soul, 10–­12, 56, 170–­71; and self-­reflexivity of, 12; as head of UFA’s Medical Film Archive, 9, 46–­48, 63, 146; and “mass psychology,, 9–­12, 149; response to Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, 11, 56; synthesis of scientific and popular film, 63–­64, 146, 149; The Steinach Film, 63; views on hygienic enlightenment, 9; views on censorship, 146–­47, 149, 151; views on superstition, 17–­18, 186; views on the unconscious, 9, 13, 146, 151, 170trash (Schund), 1, 61, 66, 74, 115, 141, 149, 155, 171–­72, 196–­97; as cause of crime, 78–­81; difficulty of defining, 71–­72, 85, 99–­100; medicalization of, 67–­69, 73–­78; protection of youth against, 73, 75–­78, 88, 99–­100, 102; wartime campaign against, 83–­88; 1926 law against, 66, 99, 151. See also censorship Treitel, Corinna, 184, 185, 186 Trilby (novel), 107, 108, 116 UFA, 9, 41, 45, 57, 61, 63, 143, 171; and Cultural Film Department, 158 unconscious. See Thomalla, Curt unlicensed doctors, 108, 118 viewing norms, 15, 64, 82, 92, 149, 163 Völkischer Beobachter, 60 Wagner-­Jauregg, Julius, 69, 118–­19, 120, 121, 122, 127, 129, 200 war neurosis, 9, 11, 14, 18, 118, 129, 176–­77, 180, 201; treatment of in film, 27–­28, 32, 37–­44, 45, 56, 120, 181, 183, 198, 200. See also malingering Weber, Max, 14 Weiser, Martin, 45 When the Film Splicer Day-­Dreamed (film), 96–­98 Wundt, Wilhelm, 75 Ziehen, Theodor, 32–­33, 76, 78, 93 Zucker, Konrad, 191

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Ack n o w l e d g m e n t s

It is a great pleasure to pay tribute to the many people and institutions who have helped me with this project. Much of the research was made possible by grants from the CUNY Research Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Mellon Foundation, the City College of New York (my home institution), the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Rifkind Center. Those to whom I owe the deepest gratitude are the many librarians and archivists who assisted me in my quest for documents and films. During a stay at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, I benefited enormously from the efforts of the librarians there and, during that and subsequent visits to Germany, from those of archivists at the Bundesarchiv, the Bundesarchiv-­ Filmarchiv, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, the Humboldt University Archives, the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, as well as, prior to its closure, the Institute for Scientific Film. Heartfelt thanks go as well to the following people for giving me opportunities to present my work, as well as for their feedback: Kathryn Olesko, Mary Terrall, Klaus Kreimeier, Annemone Ligensa, Eve Rosenhaft, Julia Moses, Sam Moyn, Jörg Schweinitz, Stefanos Geroulanos, Gyan Prakash, Anson Rabinbach, Kathleen Canning, and Jennifer Kapczynski. Numerous people read or commented on parts of my work or otherwise offered help or encouragement in this undertaking. I’m deeply indebted to Nitzan Lebovic, Greg Eghigian, Christine Leuenberger, Anson Rabinbach, Stefan Andriopoulos, Paul Lerner, Kathy Pence, Henning Schmidgen, Andreas Mayer, Dagmar Herzog, Rüdiger Graf, Moritz Foellmer, Rainer Herrn, Noam Elcott, Tony Kaes, Scott Curtis, Michael Cowan, Andreas Huyssen, Juliet Wagner, Sophie Ledebur, Jan Plamper, Deborah Coen, Eva Horn, Allan Young, Klaus Podoll, Liz Lunbeck, Alexandra Bacopoulos-­Viau, Stefanos Geroulanos, Uwe Schellinger, Yuval Neria, and the late Alison Winter. I’d also like to express my gratitude to three groups of people: my colleagues (both present

268 Acknowledgments

and former) in the History Department at the City College of New York, who formed an excellent writing group that I was fortunate to take part in; the members of the New York Area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, led for many years by Sam Moyn; and Jesse Prinz and the other participants in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies seminar on “Natural Kinds.” My students Faye Haun and Ye Zhou helped me with research. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I was very fortunate to find my way to Damon Linker, who has been an excellent editor. I would also like to thank an anonymous reader for extremely valuable suggestions. Last but not least, I owe a tremendous debt of thanks to the members of my family. My mother, Margrith, helped me decipher handwritten documents and answered numerous translation questions. My brother, Stefan, helped me enormously with the images. And to those nearest and dearest to me, my two sons, Henry and Nicholas, and my wife, Marie, it is to you that I dedicate this book. • • • Parts of Chapter 3 appeared as “Weimar Cinema Between Hypnosis and Enlightenment,” in M. Laffan and M. Weiss, eds., Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ 2012), 91–­113, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in “The Scene of the Crime,” in K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa, eds., Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (Bloomington, IN 2009), 99–­112. Much of Chapter 4 appeared as “What Is an Enlightenment Film? Cinema and the Rhetoric of Social Hygiene in Interwar Germany,” Social Science History 39, 1 (2015): 107–­27, which is reprinted here by permission of Cambridge University Press.