“2019 marked the centennial for the German hygiene film melodrama Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), which premiered at the Apollo-Theater in Berlin, Germany, May 24, 1919. In film history, it is heralded as the first feature-length moving picture depicting explicit queer love. The film was a collaboration between Richard Oswald (who directed the film), one of the leading genre filmmakers of the 1910s, and the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld’s queer rights advocacy and scholarship transformed Berlin of the 1910s and 20s into a center for early queer studies. The film’s main message calls for the abolishment of the criminalization of male same-sex love, which the sexologist pursued for decades. Its subject mater and call for reform started a series of public scandals that led its ban. Despite the public critique and harsh censure, the film became an instant hit, frequently showing to sold-out theaters. As a result of the ban and the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s, when it was re-released (and since restored). For contemporary audiences, it became a widely known artefact capturing queer love of the late-1910s. Recent rekindled interest in the sexual politics of the Weimar Era among the broader public (most prominently expressed in the success of the Netflix series Babylon Berlin), as well as extensive scholarly interest in early German sexology and queer rights advocacy surrounding Hirschfeld and his circle, have amplified broader interest. Malakaj’s book situates Anders als die Andern within broader trends in international queer film history, drawing in part on the film’s reception and exhibition history after 1933 and in the history of sexology and queer rights by exploring the queer rights and advocacy work underway in Germany in the three decades leading up to its production. His understanding of the contemporary significance of a hundred year old flm is in informed by recent work in queer affect theory, notably Heather Love’s discussion of “feeling backward,” which describes a mode of engagement with recognizes the painful homophobia that burdens queer history as a basis for sustained political action.”–
