Magnus Hirschfeld | Gesetze der Liebe (Laws of Love) / 1927

censoring the science of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Magnus Hirschfeld (screenwriter and director, using portions of Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern [Different from the Others]), Gesetze der Liebe (Laws of Love) / 1927

 

One of the most significant of sexual researchers, definers of and exponents of what has become the LGBTQ+ community, the German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld produced and directed Gesetze der Liebe (Laws of Love) in 1927 primarily as a tool to educate and effect a wider acceptance in Germany of homosexuality, transgender, and transsexual behavior, and in particular to force the government to remove §175, the provision of the German Penal Code which prohibited sex between men (the so-called sodomy law).

    In that sense, although the films at first appears to be a documentary purporting to be the expression of a scientist to other members of the community while covering in six chapters the mating habits of animals and plants, the methods of sexual attraction, reproduction, intersex species of plants, animals, and humans, and the various differences between transgender, transsexual, hermaphroditic, and homosexual conditions in plants, animals, and humans, in all of these instances his emphasis is on the differences between heteronormative behavior and the vast number of exceptions.* And the film’s quite blatant argument is revealed in the sixth part when he recontextualizes scenes from the 1919 film Ander als die Anderen (Different from the Others) directed original by Richard Oswald with Hirschfeld’s help.

     By the time of this new Hirschfeld film, Oswald’s work had been highly distributed throughout Europe with highly mixed reactions, along with antisemitic attacks against Oswald and Hirschfeld, particularly in the South of Germany in München, Karlsruhe, and Stuttgart, where the film was banned. In May 1920 the introduction of the Reichslichtspieigesetz (Reich Motion Picture Act) which by October 16th of that year brought about a ban of the film throughout Germany.

     Laws of Love, accordingly, must have been perceived as the last attempt to bring awareness to the German populace of the injustice of not only §175 but of all sexual difference. By recontextualizing elements of the film within the structure of what pretended to be a series of scientific educational lectures, it’s clear that Hirschfeld hoped to allow the drama of Different from the Others to convince at least the Berlin audiences of the righteousness of his views.

     The original film began after the central figure of the film, the violinist Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt) studying the daily newspaper obituaries which reveal inexplicable and oddly worded male suicides, the result, Körner recognizes of  §175 that hangs, so the movie makes clear, over German homosexuals “like the Sword of Damocles.” Oswald’s earlier version then begins with the central plot where a young fan and admirer of the violinist, Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz) approaches him and a few days later asks him to become his teacher. The two become enamored with one another, and both experience the disapproval of their families, not because they recognize the relationship as a homosexual one, but because of the large amount of attention he focuses on his violin studies and his seeming infatuation with his teacher. Körner’s parents, in turn, cannot comprehend why their son has shown no interest in finding a wife and starting up a family. In response, Körner sends his parents to see his mentor, the Doctor (Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld). He serves throughout the film as the scientific apologist for the naturalness of homosexuality throughout the film, and in this instance advises them:

 

“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.”

     In short, in one of the first on-screen occurrences Körner comes out, he and his young student spending even more time together even openly walking together, arm in arm, in the park. It is there that they encounter the evil Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) who mocks the couple and later confronts Körner for hush money. It is at that point that Oswald’s original weaves its way back into Körner’s original meeting with Bollek at a gay party and Bollek’s long involvement with him as he begins to blackmail the noted artist, a tactic that lasts over a long period of time and ends with nearly bankrupting Körner. Peering in that terrifying corner, the movie also unwinds the violinist’s childhood, the continued attacks against him as a school youth for simply befriending his roommate and the criticism of him during his college days as he attempts to escape his sexual desires in reading and study before it returns us to the present where Sivers, also now fearing for his own homosexuality leaves his master/lover and home. The original ends with Körner finally taking Bollek to court which punishes the blackmailer with several years of imprisonment. But Körner himself, despite the judge’s desires, is sentenced to one week in jail.

      It is not the jail time but the loss of his reputation that finally leads Körner, as part of a long line of famous homosexuals before him, many like Da Vinci and Wilde openly named in the film, brings him to despair. At the end of the film the violinist commits suicide, joining the many others who was begin the film reading about. The film ends with a plea to the young Sivers to try to come to terms with his sexuality and a demand that §175 be wiped from the book.

      Given Hirschfeld’s didactic and scientific approach, the film is reconstructed into basically a linear story, the end description of the variations between homosexuals, transgender, and transexual men and women linking the more artificed tale to the scientific studies, and beginning with the young boy Körner’s childhood encounters with the authoritarian heteronormative values in grammar school, college, and beyond. His movement to become an artist appears almost as a result of the lifetime of rejection, an attempt to find inner beauty that he might share with others. And his meeting with Kurt seems totally innocent, despite his fondness for the boy.

     In this version, without any previous context, Körner’s sudden appearance at the gay bash, is first meeting up with Bollek seems far more startling and unexpected. And Bollek’s almost immediate attempt to blackmail the man he has gone home with seems almost like something that had Körner immediately confronted he might have been somewhat better off.

   But in this transformed chronological version, which cuts both Körner’s and his student’s interchanges with their family and, accordingly, does not make it appear that the violinist is actually “out,” suggests he is far more conflicted than he ought to be, his relationship to Sivers still seemingly to be only at the level of a deeply-caring mentorship. So when the couple are confronted in the park by Bollek, the shock of the boy suddenly being swept up in the “scandal” leads Kurt to seemingly immediately reject Körner, serving as yet another nail in the man’s foreboding coffin.

     And it is only at this moment when the artist, fully cognizant of the seriousness of his situation, begins reading the obituaries, making it all the more inevitable that he would finally give himself up to the society who has fought against his existence from birth.

      Having erased, accordingly, any hints of a pedophilic relationship, and suggesting that the boy himself, in his rejection of his teacher, has contributed to Körner’s sense of having no access to others, argues at the end of the film, not for the youth’s survival but for all men like Körner, fashioned by nature simply as “different.”

      The film, produced by Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research, was banned from public screenings by the Berlin supervisory office of the Film Review Board on October 27, 1927, declaring that the film’s intent “to explicate the nature of homosexuality is in no way executed with scientific objectivity,” and that because of its depiction of “anomalies and abnormalities based on living persons precludes displaying the film, due to general principles of decency and proper morals. The last statement rings familiar even for such controversial works today: “the film lacks any educationally deterrent message steering youth in a healthy direction,” once again arguing against the very argument that the film itself put forward that indeed homosexuality was not unhealthy or abnormal. 

      The film was allowed to be shown only to “certain circles of people, namely physicians, medical experts and at educational or scientific institutions.”

      At the end of October 1927 the film was submitted again in a revised version that shortened the work to only 4 chapters, the final and crucial chapter having been cut. And even that, after a demand that the section devoted to “the depiction of human anomalies and abnormities” be deleted, was approved for adult audiences only. It was screened at the Berlin Beba-Palast Atrium along with a lecture by Hirschfeld supplemented with the forbidden portions presented “in static photographs.”

      Just six years later, in 1933, Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was sacked and had its books and films burned by Nazis, forcing him into exile in France where he died in 1935.

      Is it any wonder then that the film was long believed to have been lost. Eventually a copy with Ukrainian intertitles of the second version was discovered. In 2019 Munich Film Museum attempted to reconstruct that version with pictures from the booklet sold in 1927 at the screenings. In 2020 several other short shots of the first chapters were found and along with a previous reconstruction from the original version of Different from the Others was restored into the version that I saw in writing this essay.

      It’s so very sad “the laws of love” for which this film argued way back in 1927 are still today being ignored by countries such as Hungary, Russia, and others and still being challenged around the world. This film, Hirschfeld’s brave last attempt to fight the heteronormative world in which he lived profoundly failed, despite the seeming openness of Berlin itself to various sexualities for the brief years before the Nazis completely took control.

 

*As some critics have noted, Hirschfeld and his colleague’s notions of transgender, bigender, and hermaphroditic individuals, along with their argument for male and female sexualities are highly disputed today. Even though the film claims, for instance, that some homosexuals do not appear to describe themselves as male or female—and even here we have to ask what are their definitions for those variations—it argues that most lesbians and homosexual men take on the traditional roles of male or female in their relationships. Not so in my experience and that of a great many others, at least as they might traditionally be defined. That myth continues, of course, in the “top and bottom” dichotomy.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).