justice through knowledge
by Douglas Messerli
Richard Oswald and Magnus Hirschfeld (screenplay), Richard Oswald (director) Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) / 1919
This film stars the later noted actor Conrad Veidt, who soon after
performed in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and
years later in Hollywood productions of Casablanca
and even The Thief of Bagdad). Veidt
plays a handsome German violinist, with whom his younger student, Kurt Sivers
(Fritz Schultz) falls in love, the two of them walking arm in arm through the
Berlin parks.
It
is there that they are spotted by Körner’s former college acquaintance, Franz
Bolleck (Reinhold Schünzel), who, as we witness in a flashback, waits in gay
bars to be picked up before blackmailing his would-be partners by threatening
to turn them into the police.
Bollack
again threatens blackmail, and Körner, to protect himself and his younger
student, pays; but when Bollack demands more, he refuses, and a trial ensues.
The
judge gives Bollack three years and Körner only a
week in prison. Yet the violinist’s career is ruined, and eventually, in a fit
of despair, he takes poison and dies, his young student, rushing to his side,
poised to also commit suicide.
When this film first appeared, it drew large audiences, but it also
quickly found social critics, and after a few months it was banned, soon after
to be shredded with only a few copies intact to be used as teaching aids.
Today,
restored by the Outfest-UCLA Legacy Project, many of the most remarkable scenes
of the film no longer can be found, including a cameo by Oscar Wilde. Yet the
film specialists at UCLA have, through documents and reviews of the day, pieced
together much of the original, filling things in with literate intertitles and
even speeches by co-writer Magnus Hirschfeld, which helps to give us a larger
sense of the amazing excitement of this text. And the film does provide us with
some of the first documentary scenes of gay and lesbian bar-dancing of the day,
along with some fairly sensual if not sexually revealing scenes.
Different from the Others is not at all
a great movie, and was, perhaps, meant to be more of teaching tool than a piece
of film literature all along. Yet its deep-felt convictions and its poignant
presentation of gay and even heterosexual love cannot be ignored.
Of particular interest is Hirschfeld’s own statements, expressed to
Körner’s sister (Ilse von Tasso-Lind) and in a lecture to a general audience of
the day. I could do without Hirschfeld’s likening of homosexuality to a
male-feminine response, but his early recognition of a great many possible
sexualities is radical for its time and still has immense meaning for today’s
society.
As
he cautions Körner’s parents early in the film:
“You
must not condemn your son because he is a homosexual, he is not to blame for
his orientation. It is not wrong, nor should it be a crime. Indeed, it is not
even an illness, merely a variation, and one that is common to all of nature.”
And
his later advice to the suicidal young Sivers is a monumentally brave statement
for 1919, just a short while before the rise of Hitler’s party:
“You have to keep living; live to change the
prejudices by which this man has been made one of the countless victims. ...
You must restore the honor of this man and bring justice to him, and all those
who came before him, and all those to come after him. Justice through
knowledge!”
We
can perceive just how true, despite so many years it took, Hirschfeld’s words
were. And despite whatever one may think of the corrupt Weimar Republic, it was
far ahead in much of its sexual concepts, which might have shifted all European
thinking long before if it hadn’t, like this film, been wiped out by the Nazis.
Finally, in Kino Videos short disk, we can hear once more what had been so long
silenced. Maybe out there, somewhere, we may eventually find a true original
recording of that banned film. Meanwhile, we have an excellent restoration of
many of its scenes.
Los Angeles, March 29, 2015
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2015).
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