The devastating effects of Germany’s Paragraph 175 endangers the relationship between Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt) and Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz)
DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS (ANDERS ALS DIE ANDERN) (Richard Oswald, 1919)
Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Pl.
Thursday, September 10, $12, 7:00
646-437-4202
www.mjhnyc.org
In 1871, Germany adopted Paragraph 175, an antihomosexual provision in the criminal code that called for the imprisonment of any “male who commits lewd and lascivious acts with another male or permits himself to be so abused for lewd and lascivious acts.” For decades, it led to blackmail, suffering, and often suicide for German homosexuals. In 1919, Austrian writer-director Richard Oswald (Tales of Hoffman, The Picture of Dorian Gray) teamed with noted sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (The Homosexuality of Men and Women, Sex in Human Relationships) to make Different from the Others, one of the first films to treat the subject of homosexuality with sympathy and compassion. Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Casablanca) stars as Paul Körner, a violin virtuoso who falls for his young student, Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz), while Kurt’s sister, Else (Anita Berber), falls for Paul. But when the conniving Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) sees the two men together, he blackmails Paul, who struggles against ever-growing odds. Written by Oswald and Hirschfeld, who also plays the doctor in the story, the film explores the social and psychological impact of homosexuality and gender identity with care and intelligence, which was among the reasons why the movie was banned in Germany; copies of it were later burned by the Nazis, and today it exists only in a partial fifty-minute version to which text has been added to fill in the destroyed footage. In 2012, flutist and composer Yael Acher Modiano performed an original live score accompanying the film at the Spectacle theater in Brooklyn, and she’ll be at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on September 10 for an encore performance, held in conjunction with the exhibition “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945” and the related film series “The Legacy of Paragraph 175,” which concludes September 30 with a free fifteenth-anniversary screening of the 2000 documentary Paragraph 175, preceded by a discussion with Dr. Dagmar Herzog.