Emotion, Medizin und Volksbelehrung: die Entstehung des «deutschen Kulturfilms»

Abstract

This article describes the process of professionalisation of medical films in Germany between 1910 and 1920. At the beginning of this decade, government institutions showed a growing interest in hygiene campaigns and started to cooperate with medical experts as well as with professional advertisers. When the German film industry was nationalised at the end of World War I, these informal structures were strengthened. New theories described the film as a most powerful tool for propaganda purposes. This profoundly changed the expectations towards medical films. Now their content had to be bedded into the dramatised form of a photoplay. After 1918, in anticipation of the reprivatisation of the German film industry, government officials of the Weimar Republic developed complex measures to obtain and keep control over a new genre of documentary film which was now called “Deutscher Kulturfilm”. Some of the political expectations linked to the Kulturfilm can be exemplified in the first documentary of feature length released by the Berlinbased Universal Film Corporation in 1920. It contained elements of medical films that had been shot during the last decade of the German Empire, and it was newly composed in 1919 to meet the presumable needs of a broader public in an uncertain democratic future.