Weimar Origins and Debates

What was an enlightenment film? By the mid-1930s filmmakers, censors, public health officials, and others had been grappling with this question for close to twenty years, and 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 The Inheritance we must therefore look at the history of film in the public health campaigns of the Weimar period, when, as Ulf Schmidt and others have shown, the Aufklärungsfilm first emerged as an instrument of public health discourse (Hagener Reference Hagener2000; Schmidt Reference Schmidt2002). 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.

The Weimar enlightenment film arose out of a convergence of developments dating from the end of the war. Partly to counteract perceived deficits in the field of propaganda, the war's final stages were marked by a flurry of efforts by the German High Command to develop a concerted approach to the problem of influencing opinion both at home and abroad. Officials placed particular stress on the possibilities of the moving image and on what General Erich Ludendorff extolled as the medium's “exceptional power” as a means of enlightenment and of “influencing of the masses in the interest of the state.”Footnote ² This interest carried over into the postwar period, when discussions were held between various ministries in the new government concerning the possibility (which remained unrealized until 1933) of creating an office of enlightenment (Aufklärungsamt) (Ludendorff Reference Ludendorff1919: 296–303; Ross Reference Ross2008). One feature of these initiatives was the close attention paid by officials to scientific questions of audience response that had first been posed during the war. In a talk delivered in April 1919, Richard Kiliani of the Foreign Office's Press Department spoke at length on film's power to arouse “mass emotions.” Invoking the findings of experimental psychology, Kiliani advocated a strategy that avoided direct propaganda and relied instead on what he called an indirect or “associative technique” (Kiliani Reference Kiliani1919).

Precisely this interest in the possibilities of mobilizing “mass emotions” and in calibrating the dynamics of audience response, however, reveals the extent of official unease about the medium's relation to its public. 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”—anticipate the ambivalent course of subsequent Weimar-era debates (Reference Kilianiibid.: Bl. 266). Such concerns, whose origins date back to the so-called film reform movement of the Wilhelmine era, intensified greatly amid the political and social upheaval marking the empire's collapse. During this fluid moment of intense official interest in exploiting new means of “mass enlightenment,” countless private initiatives and commercial filmmakers also emerged to lay claim to this term. The fact that this period of ferment coincided with the repeal of censorship ensured that the enlightenment film came to be seen in many quarters as symptomatic of the moral anarchy that had allegedly followed the empire's collapse.

What exactly did the makers of enlightenment films hope to accomplish?Footnote ³ In the most general sense they used the medium to popularize scientific and medical knowledge and as a means to convey their faith in the possibility of finding scientific solutions to social problems. The embrace of film was one expression of this. As it had been since its origins in late-nineteenth-century motion studies, the moving image was privileged as a means for capturing and representing natural and scientific phenomena with unrivaled objectivity and truthfulness (Cartwright Reference Cartwright1995; Daston and Galison Reference Daston and Galison1992). Amid the multiple crises facing the war-torn nation, filmmakers espoused the medium as an ideal means of 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—a picture often fleshed out in graphic detail—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. “In the work of enlightenment that film performs so well,” the film Different from the Others addressed its audience in an intertitle, “science has found a powerful ally in its fight for justice” (Oswald Reference Oswald1919).

No area of human behavior received more attention in these films than that of sex. Other topics, ranging from tuberculosis and alcoholism to the dangers of workplace accidents, were 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. The majority, however, adopted a darker tone, stressing, on the one hand, the dangers to traditional values and individual well-being and, on the other hand, 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. 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 (Podoll Reference Podoll2000; Schmidt Reference Schmidt and Hagener2000).Footnote ⁴ False Shame explored the topic of venereal disease in a series of case studies combining both instructional and fictional elements. As the Nazi film The Inheritance would later do, this film used footage of psychiatric patients as a form of evidence to document the terrible consequences of disease (in this case, syphilis and gonorrhea). Despite its shocking images False Shame played to great acclaim both in Germany and abroad, receiving praise for its skillful combination of scientific sobriety 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 a postwar crisis in morals, health, and population policy opened the door to an unprecedented public airing of matters that had formerly remained taboo (Grossmann Reference Grossmann1995; Hagener Reference Hagener2000; Usborne Reference Usborne1992). 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 out 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 (RMdI to Landesregierungen 1919).

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.Footnote ⁵ 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 in the 1920s (Peukert Reference Peukert1989). But insofar as 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 (Rosenhaft Reference Rosenhaft and Lüdtke1996).

Throughout the early 1920s the claims made for the enlightenment film continually ran up against older concerns about the relation between the medium and its audience. These concerns dated back to the Wilhelmine era, when film reformers had first begun to condemn popular film and to demand stricter regulation, while espousing, as an alternative, the so-called Kulturfilm as a medium of education and moral uplift (Schlüpmann Reference Schlüpmann1990: 189–243). Such ambivalence continued to shape Weimar film policy. Some commentators were prepared to take the claims of the sexual education film at face value. One review in the liberal Vossische Zeitung, for instance, praised Oswald's Let There Be Light for its message concerning the need to cultivate a sense of responsibility for one's own body (Anon., February 26, 1917). But for many, the enlightenment film became synonymous with the period of perceived moral collapse following the war's end, when German theaters were flooded by sexually themed films. As Curt Thomalla later lamented, this period had subsequently burdened the enlightenment film with a deeply suspect pedigree (Thomalla Reference Thomalla1927). Most conservatives and film reformers flatly condemned the enlightenment films of the immediate postwar era as a form of Schund (trash) masquerading as science. Critics singled out Different from the Others as, in the words of one, a form of “repulsive propaganda in favor of homosexuality” (Hellwig Reference Hellwig1921: 105). This film in particular, writes one scholar, seems to have awakened an “anxiety of infection,” an anxiety rooted in “the phantasm of psychic contagion” (Jazbinsek Reference Jazbinsek and Hagener2000: 91).

Combating such phantasms required the judgment of qualified specialists. 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. Their negative opinion of the film lent scientific validity to the censor board's decision to ban public screenings of it (Steakley Reference Steakley1999). The presence of these experts at the scene of what is in many ways the inaugural act of Weimar censorship points to the critical role played by psychiatrists in the regulatory practices surrounding film, both commercial and popular-scientific. What was at stake in these practices was spelled out by Bonhoeffer, who served as part of a wider investigation into Hirschfeld's newly created Institute for Sexual Science prompted by criticism in the conservative press. Critics regarded the institute's scientific trappings as a smokescreen for deviant sexual activities and its department for scientific cinematography as the thinly veiled expression of a form of pseudo-scientific voyeurism (Anon., August 10, 1919).Footnote ⁶ 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, that of 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 be considered “harmful” on “reproductive-hygienic grounds” (Bonhoeffer Reference Bonhoeffer1921: 2).

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 homosexuality or abortion). Film policy became a semantic battleground and a site of both enormous possibility and risk. Many scientists, 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 corrupting effects became a central front in the larger Weimar public health campaign, a development evidenced by the fact that the proposal for reinstating film censorship was debated in the Reichstag's Committee for Population Politics (Sturm Reference Sturm and Hagener2000: 69–71). As the case of Different from the Others illustrates, physicians played a key role in this process, gaining a quasi-institutional function in Weimar's film censorship apparatus.

The project of extending hygienic behavioral norms—long part of the presumed 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 impulse control or discrimination? While some commentators welcomed venereal disease films, others saw them as “a moral risk” and a direct incitement to sexuality (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1988: 30). 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. 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 Enlightenment Film between Deterrence and Incitement

Seen in this light, the issue was cast as one of properly calibrating effects, as Curt Thomalla, the scriptwriter for False Shame, stressed. Trained as a neurologist, Thomalla became a highly influential filmmaker who over the course of a 20-year career repeatedly pushed the frontiers of cinematic enlightenment into new terrain (Podoll Reference Podoll2000; Schmidt Reference Schmidt and Hagener2000). As part of an ongoing process of experimentation, he returned again and again to the question of the medium's relation to the “mass psyche” and how best to regulate it.Footnote ⁷ His entry into the field occurred at the end of the war, when, after serving in a wartime nerve station, he was put in charge of the medical archive of the newly created UFA's Cultural Film Department. He later went on to head the RAHV's film archive (Kreimeier Reference Zimmermann and Hoffmann2005a). From the early 1920s onward he collaborated on a series of films on venereal disease, tuberculosis, accident prevention, and other topics. Many of these early films followed a straightforward format emphasizing didactic instruction, and relying heavily on the visual conventions of the scientific instructional film: x-ray and microscopic images, charts, graphs, and statistical information. Over time, however, Thomalla increasingly turned to a format that allowed him to incorporate dramatic or narrative elements.

As part of this process, Thomalla also developed strategies for preempting criticism of his films. These are well illustrated in the case of False Shame. As the film The Inheritance would later do, this film included as one of its central dramatic elements a representation of the didactic process, a representation deliberately contrasted with the risky behaviors of its characters. At the very outset of the film two of its 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 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 point 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 the consequences of venereal disease in graphic detail. Microscopic preparations, slides, and magnifying lens 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 scientific modes of representation that encompasses charts, graphs, and optical devices, including quasicinematic “light boxes.” Other forms of evidence are subsequently introduced: pathological specimens in formaldehyde and—most disturbing of all—a parade of asylum patients with advanced and probably incurable cases of syphilis. Through means such as this, argues Annette Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1988), hygiene films chronicle the passage from ignorance to knowledge.

False Shame frames the enlightenment process not least as a necessary antidote to the very dangers that reformers had identified in popular cinema. If at the film's outset we find ourselves in the space of the “cinema of attractions,” the medium's wild youth as a common attraction of traveling fairs, then film—so we are reminded—has another, scientific lineage as well and it is part of this particular film's work to recover it (Gunning Reference Gunning1986). What is especially noteworthy here is that cinematic enlightenment incorporates a representation of both the dangers and possibilities of film as a medium of public address. Through its disqualification of certain forms of seeing, and authorization of others, the film enacts, as a crucial part of the work of enlightenment, the “internalization of the censor” (Schlüpmann Reference Schlüpmann1990: 61). This lays the groundwork for a later segment depicting a young couple that, prior to obtaining the doctor's approval for their marriage, attend a film on venereal disease. These sequences illustrate popular hygiene's function as, in Sarasin's words, a “discursive immunization system” (Sarasin Reference Sarasin2001: 17).

In a text accompanying False Shame, Thomalla issued a disclaimer, warning that “Viewers who expect lewd pleasures and nerve-tingling sensations behind the facade of science” would be disappointed (Thomalla Reference Thomalla1926: 5). In this gesture of disavowal he sought to distance his film from the protest lodged against many enlightenment films, namely that hygienic discourse frequently 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” (Filmoberprüfstelle 1926: 5) 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: “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” (ibid.: 6–7).Footnote ⁸

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 (Thomalla Reference Thomalla1926: 7). The RAHV offered a ringing endorsement, predicting that the film would “bring enlightenment to millions of viewers” (Adam in Reference Thomallaibid.: 5–7). Yet while 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 Falsche Scham, consulted medical experts and welfare agencies in bringing their films to the public.Footnote ⁹

Viewed in this context, it becomes clear that Thomalla's disclaimer represented one side of a complex strategy: both a form of preemptive self-censorship and a gesture of authorization, it served as a means of claiming a mandate to advance new, and in some cases, transgressive forms of knowledge, one that functioned on a formal level as well. This 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 employed the format of a popular crime film to advocate sterilization of those afflicted with allegedly hereditary diseases like alcoholism and epilepsy (Schmidt Reference Schmidt and Hagener2000). With reference to it, Thomalla espoused a hybrid film practice based on the necessity of “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” (Thomalla Reference Thomalla1929: 450–51).

Yet Thomalla, confronted with persistent conservative opposition as well as his own doubts, 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 filmmakers like himself faced in addressing the public. According to Thomalla, 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 blamed on filmmakers. Rather, he wrote in what would become a familiar refrain, the main problem lay with the public, whose tastes remained all too fixated on trash and sensationalism (Thomalla Reference Thomalla1927). Changes in behavioral norms therefore necessitated changes in viewing norms. As both a medium for combating risk and a medium itself entangled in risk, film must be made subject to the rules of the hygienic paradigm.

In stressing this aspect of the problem, Thomalla invoked a broader Weimar discourse about the relation between film and its audience. While in many of his writings Thomalla extolled the medium's ability to influence the “psyche of the masses,” his faith in public enlightenment remained in uneasy tension with his view of those same masses as deeply impaired in their judgment. Drawing on nineteenth-century crowd discourse, and fueled by the impact of wartime and postwar social transformations in Germany's traditional gender order, such concerns were often framed in highly gendered terms. The taste for melodrama and sensation as well as 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 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 of this period; 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 mental illness.Footnote ¹⁰

Another of the specters haunting popular hygiene concerned the problem of false or dangerous forms of knowledge, most often identified with the quack or lay practitioner, a disturbing figure who was alleged to prey upon the public's credulity and ignorance concerning sexual matters.Footnote ¹¹ In the eyes of medical officials, the dangers to public health posed by sexually transmitted diseases were matched by those posed by fraudulent lay healers, who, in public performances and in films strove to win a public for their dubious ideas (homeopathy, hypnotism, the occult), while cloaking these in a pseudo-scientific rhetoric. Exploitation of the public's desire for sensation in the guise of knowledge remained a constant theme of official communiqués, illustrated, for instance, by a report in Leipzig's Freie Presse titled “False Enlightenment” conveying 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 (Anon., April 27, 1922).

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 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 administering to a passive populace; it assumed some degree of popular mobilization: “Along 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 populace on all kinds of health-related topics, often for the purpose of winning them for their natural healing and alternative medicine associations (RAHV 1927).

Prompted by such concerns, the Weimar state succeeded in passing new laws against “trash and filth” (1926) and against lay healers (1927). This legislation proved, however, ineffective in stemming both problems. By the late 1920s the writings of Thomalla and like-minded figures conveyed 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 quacks, pornographers, and pseudo-enlighteners fueling this thirst. Thomalla spoke for many in arguing that the solution was clear: greater centralization and stricter censorship. Without more vigorous regulation—in effect, a form of hygiene for the cinematic public sphere—efforts to promote education and prevention in public health–related matters would, perversely, produce new dangers.

Enlightened Totalitarianism

The sense of doubt 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 (Proctor Reference Proctor1999: 48–51). Curt Thomalla was appointed to a post within Goebbels's Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, charged with overseeing propaganda in the fields of public health, welfare, and population policy. This position afforded him great latitude in advancing what he called the regime's “biological revolution” (Thomalla Reference Thomalla1933). Though his False Shame was withdrawn from circulation in 1933, its hybrid formula proved influential in the Nazi era. It may be seen as a precursor of 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” decreed by Hitler to instruct Germans in the necessity of strengthening and purifying the Volkskörper. Before the medium could be harnessed to this purpose, however, it first had to undergo its own process of cleansing. In 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” (Goebbels in Rentschler Reference Rentschler1996: 54). 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 treated as part of a larger process of enlightenment: in Goebbels's eyes, the book burning of May 10, 1933 represented a “campaign of enlightenment” 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, previously 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.Footnote ¹² The RPA worked closely together 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 the churches. In addition to countless lectures, exhibits, and publications, this campaign resulted in the production of seven films, including The Inheritance, Victim of the Past, Hereditarily Ill, and Sins of the Father, all made between 1935 and 1937. According to Claudia Koonz, more than 20 million Germans saw these films each year (Koonz Reference Koonz2003: 126). Meanwhile, up to 400,000 people were sterilized, the majority of them women (Bock Reference Bock1986). As was foreseen by Ernst Rüdin, the psychiatrist and racial hygienist who helped author the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny, a broad program of eugenic enlightenment would be necessary both to prepare the medical personnel required for the law's implementation and to counter criticism by the clergy. Under Rüdin's leadership, psychiatrists assumed a crucial role in all areas of racial policy (Burleigh Reference Burleigh1994; Weber Reference Weber1993).

Do continuities in personnel as well as genre and format point to deeper continuities between the Weimar-era and the Nazi-era 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? 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 so much as escape from authoritarian tutelage but as the path to proper party doctrine (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2002; Holquist Reference Holquist1997)? Or, did the concept instead refer to the “enlightenment officers” whom Ludendorff commissioned to maintain morale among troops in the Great War's final stages? Finally, was 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 (Dickinson Reference Dickinson2004; Grossmann Reference Grossmann1995)?

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 (Gross Reference Gross1937, Reference Gross1939). 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” (Gross Reference Gross1936: 335).

RPA communiqués appealed to the notion of a new, specifically “völkisches conscience,” whose growing strength, 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 blamed in part on the subversive activities 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) of the clergy (Dunkelmänner) (Pressebericht der RPA 1936; RPA Arbeitstagung 1935). 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 seem to confirm Proctor's view concerning the Nazis' intention to recast relations between those responsible for formulating race hygiene doctrine and the German public. Among other things, this meant closing down that space that, during the Weimar period, had allowed heterogeneous views to flourish, including those associated with “Jewish sex criminals” like Hirschfeld and Freud.Footnote ¹³ Enlightenment was no longer conceived of as something arrived at on one's own, but as something imposed from above by the state (Proctor Reference Proctor1999: 49). Perhaps it is thus necessary to speak here of a form of “enlightened totalitarianism”: of a regime carrying to its most radical conclusion a distinctively modern conception of human and social engineering (Dickinson Reference Dickinson2004; Fritzsche Reference Fritzsche1996; Peukert Reference Peukert and Crew1994).

The “gigantic educational task” decreed 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 biopolitics and its cultural politics, now predicated on the goal of racial purification. 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 anxieties 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.Footnote ¹⁴ In the trade press and other publications of this period, one finds a surprisingly variegated picture: for every confident claim regarding the service motion pictures was performing on behalf of the cause of public education, another can be found stressing the German public's low threshold of boredom and standards of taste, its deplorable preference for entertainment and 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 (1937) and dwelled on its “nerve-wracking stimuli” and its “orgy of effects” (Anon., February 5, 1938). 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 interests. Well into the war years, the Sicherheitsdienst's (SD) secret reports were recording that German youth remained in the grip of an “addiction” to trashy films (Kreimeier Reference Kreimeier1999: 293).

Racial specialists repeatedly voiced similar concerns. In 1934 the RPA's journal Volk und Rasse published an article titled “Film and Race,” whose author argued that the medium's role in promoting enlightenment on racial matters 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 (Johannes Reference Johannes1934: 155–56). The point was echoed in an article titled “Sins of the Past in Health-Related Popular Enlightenment,” which suggested that the popular media continued to be burdened by a suspect cultural pedigree and needed to be treated accordingly (Anon. 1934). Some critics argued for tests, on a case-by-case basis, of each film's “aesthetic hereditary health” (künstlerische Erbgesundheit). This form of “cultural eugenics” posited a close equivalence between film censors and the medical specialists who staffed the hereditary courts that oversaw sterilization cases (Becker Reference Becker and Reichert2006: 60; Sauerländer Reference Sauerländer, Gilman and Schmölders2000).

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 (Koonz Reference Koonz2003: 127–28). Goebbels's own shifting views are indicative of the difficulty the Nazis faced in measuring the effectiveness of their efforts at public enlightenment (Rentschler Reference Rentschler1996:11). Stricter regulation aside, officials recognized that an effective film policy called for a reliable analysis of audience response. As Ulf Schmidt has written, the basis for this had been earlier laid in psychological experiments on the effects of film on schoolchildren (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2002: 150). The results of these tests, however, were highly equivocal. Some figures, like the prominent psychiatrist Robert Sommer, completely rejected the sensational character of most film production. The founder of the German branch of the international mental hygiene movement, Sommer had integrated scientific cinematography into his research from the turn of the century on. He had close ties to Rüdin and, like him, advocated a major campaign of public enlightenment on questions of racial hygiene. Yet in regard to medical films he stressed the need for careful assessment of their psychological effects, and identifying this as a special task of the field of mental hygiene (Sommer Reference Sommer1935: 45–47). Such claims, already implicit in early Weimar censorship debates, reflected a broader international development that crystallized in the 1930s. The 1936 London Congress of Mental Hygiene, attended by German delegates, included a panel on mental hygiene and film.Footnote ¹⁵

Yet complaints by theater owners and distributors that the public found most purely educational films tedious could not be ignored (Zimmermann and Hoffmann Reference Zimmermann and Hoffmann2003: 70). 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 (Koch Reference Koch2001). 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, images meant to shock and disturb, melodramatic narratives, or 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 many of the RPA's films showed deeply disturbing images of asylum patients. At the same time, careful steps were 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 Victim 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” (Rost Reference Rost1987: 69). Echoing Curt Thomalla's earlier disavowals, one RPA official noted 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 (Frercks Reference Frercks1938). Yet in contrast to early film reformers, who feared film's capacity to incite audiences to sexual deviance or crime, this official's disclaimers represented merely the flip side of an open inducement to disgust and fear of the racial other.

Sensationalism was central to reformers' critique of popular film since its origins. Did enlisting it for state-sponsored propaganda validate it as part of the filmmaker's repertoire? 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) (Poore Reference Poore2007: 97).Footnote ¹⁶ 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 of the fact that the filmic image was hardly a simple or unequivocal signifier.

Few were more sensitive to the possibility of “dangerous forms” of reading than Joseph Goebbels (Hake Reference Hake2001: 74). In debates about how best 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 marked as the propaganda minister grew 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 (Zimmermann Reference Zimmermann, Zimmerman and Hoffman2005). Just as it had been for Weimar-era filmmakers of popular-scientific films, 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 (Friedländer Reference Friedländer2009: 189; Leiser Reference Leiser1974: 157–58). 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” (Poore Reference Poore2007: 112). Such formulations are reflected clearly in the making of I Accuse, the euthanasia film in which Goebbels took a close interest, whose didactic content is embedded within a highly melodramatic narrative.

Cultural Eugenics and the Enlightenment Film

Viewed in the context sketched in the preceding text, the film The Inheritance, despite its modest dimensions, can be recognized as occupying a crucial position in the corpus of National Socialist race hygienic propaganda. The Inheritance was one of two films (along with Victim 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” (Rost Reference Rost1987: 81). 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 the RPA's campaign.

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 accentuates this gesture by directly evoking what was arguably UFA's first Kulturfilm, The Stag-Beetle (1920). Once these establishing shots have set the stage, the film then—in a brief close-up—takes care to align the camera's gaze directly with that of the head doctor, thus integrating the hereditary health specialist's perspective directly into the filmic address. No film of this genre goes further in thematizing the film experience or in stressing the conditions of its own reception. The format of a film-within-a-film functions here in an explicitly prophylactic sense: by drawing attention to its own making and reception, the film stages as part of its content the didactic process that is its raison d'être. By thematizing the filmic medium The Inheritance attempts to ensure its correct reading by audience members.

It is not incidental that The Inheritance makes the female assistant (“Fräulein Volkmann”) the addressee of its message, given long-standing tendencies 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. In the film, footage of animals fighting for survival rolls in the background while Volkmann's main interlocutor, Dr. Lang, provides commentary. He observes at a key point that, in some cases, animal mothers sacrifice their weak offspring for the sake of the healthy. Earlier in the narrative, Volkmann's face expressed troubled concern over the fate of the stag beetles, but now, awareness dawning on her features, she draws the necessary conclusion: “Then animals have their own racial politics as well?'

The semicoquettish undertones of the interaction are further drawn out in the next scene, which establishes Volkmann as an object of desire. As Lang stresses the importance of spousal selection, the camera cuts away to a shot of her blond-tressed head, which is framed by the heads of the two doctors, one on either side. The visual point made here is further reinforced by scientific data, supplied in graphical form by an image of the Kallikak family tree, which traces the results of the progenitor's mating with 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 that normally remains behind closed doors: the asylum. 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 (Zimmermann and Hoffmann Reference Zimmermann and Hoffmann2003: 65).

While 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. The heads of the patients seem to float in an almost disembodied space that is unlike anything else in the film. At the same time, words identifying the institutions are flashed across the screen—“insane asylum,” “sanatorium,” “institution for the mentally disabled”—in a bold script evoking commercial film advertising. This crucial piece of evidence is presented in a peculiarly nondocumentary or even antirealist fashion. It is as though, in crossing the threshold into this disturbingly other 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.

The film ends by returning to the visual iconography of the healthy Volk, working, playing, marching. 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.” In his writings, the RPA's 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 Progeny—mediates the ambiguous power of the moving image with the authority of the written word.

By turning the laboratory into a film studio, The Inheritance asks its audience to see Dr. Lang as both scientist and as film director. For her part Fräulein Volkmann is treated as student, as object 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 men). Crafting a mode of address that takes the viewer behind the scenes—both of the film's making and of the asylum—The Inheritance doubly initiates its audience into a new state of enlightenment, one that entails awareness not merely of the risks relating to heredity but of those surrounding the very means of communicating about those risks.