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).
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