Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others)

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

“…As much existing scholarship has shown, reform-oriented sexual scientists often relied upon case studies to demonstrate that individuals who were labelled as, for instance, sexually inverted or homosexual could be highly successful and productive members of society even if they did not reproduce biologically (Crozier, 2008a(Crozier, , 2008bOosterhuis, 2000). Sexual Inversion (1897), co-authored by Ellis and British historian and poet John Addington Symonds, and the film Anders als die Andern (Different From the Others, 1919), co-written by and starring German physician and founder of the Institute of Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) Magnus Hirschfeld, strategically presented white, middle-class, Western European homosexual men as socially responsible, professionally respectable, and often artistically gifted (Crozier, 2008a;Linge, 2018). This model of what Heike Bauer calls the 'super invert' was fed by different intellectual traditions (Bauer, 2009: 127-33), including the Platonic notion that men who desired other men might not reproduce biologically, but excelled at the even more important production of intellectual and artistic works or 'offspring you might expect a mind to bear' (Plato, 1998[ca.…”

Epistemology and Mediation in Historical Film and Television: How the Gendered Past is Constructed in Knowledge and Representation

“…Contributor Ina Linge also reflects on what can and cannot be put into representation on film, focusing specifically on the positive representation of male homosexuality in an early 'social hygiene' film from Germany, Different from the Others (Richard Oswald, 1919), produced in reaction to a German law that unjustly criminalised homosexuality. 68 Mixing melodrama and activist fervor, this difficult-to-categorise film, funded by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, was initially successful with popular audiences, but eventually censored, restricted for showing only to medical and legal professionals, for educational and other 'useful' purposes. Although the Nazis sought to destroy every copy of this 'decadent' ninety-minute film, fifty minutes have been recovered and restored, offering contemporary viewers a glimpse of an historical past wherein 'unrepresentable' sexuality finds its way into moving image representation for the first time.…”