The enduring appeal of a century-old German film about queer love

• When the silent German movie Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) premiered on May 28, 1919, in Berlin, it was an instant audience success.
• Through its public enlightenment campaign, the film made a case to abolish Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which criminalized male homosexuality.

Box office hit

• The film’s box office success pleased its Austrian director, Richard Oswald.
• Anders als die Andern’s gripping story about the innocent romance between two men succumbing to anti-queer hostility served Oswald’s business model.

Queer rights and film censorship

• The institution, which was the first of its kind, became the headquarters for major scholarship on and advocacy for homosexual and trans rights.
• The latter concerns about the film indeed fed into a longstanding anti-queer trope about the threat of queer people seducing the youth into homosexuality.

Conservative pushback

• Public debates about Anders als die Andern coincided with ongoing conservative pushback against Hirschfeld’s broader work, his background as homosexual Jew, and debates about film censorship in the aftermath of World War I.
• Read more:
  The early 20th-century German trans-rights activist who transformed the world's view of gender and sexuality

  For a brief period after the war, censorship had been abolished.

Mourning with fictional characters

• However, most important for the audience appeal was the gripping melodramatic story.
• A loving relationship between two men succumbs to the effects of a blackmail campaign involving Paragraph 175.
• Based on my analyses of historical material about the reception of the film, I make a case that the film facilitates for viewers a type of mourning for the protagonist’s fate.

105th Anniversary

• The legal code would take different forms throughout the 20th century, but would not disappear from Germany’s basic law until the 1990s.
• For its 105th anniversary in 2024, viewers will be able to watch a new restoration available on DVD through the film museum in Munich, Germany.