Ulf Schmidt – Gizli Bilim (2023)

However nebulous the basis for Schneider’s reference to an antipsychiatry movement, it underscores the existence of deep anxieties about the field’s professional status. To allay such concerns, he sought to use the T4 program both to deepen scientific knowledge of the disease pictures associated with certain incurable conditions—knowledge recorded in the form of several medical films that he produced—and to communicate this knowledge to the public. At the same time, he saw this as an opportunity for research of a more anthropological kind, suggesting that it would be valuable to test audience response to the cinematic propaganda campaign that accompanied the program. In connection with the latter aim, he proposed a two-pronged strategy. As Ulf Schmidt has shown, Schneider suggested that the 1942 film Existence Without Life, which promoted euthanasia by demonstrating the incurability of certain diseases, be screened first for women and lay audiences to measure the emotional impact of its images. In the event that the material proved too disturbing, he proposed that it be shown only to medical students, having first carefully prepared them in advance: “One should then screen a purely therapeutic film approximately 8 or 14 days before. Then the audience is ‘pre-trained,’ so to speak, and it will be immune to certain emotional shocks. Furthermore one has then introduced more forcefully the necessity for the ‘Aktion T4’ logically and psychologically [into the minds of the audience].”

What was an enlightenment film? By the mid-1930s, when Das Erbe was released, filmmakers, censors, public health officials, and others had grappled with this question for close to twenty years. 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 Das Erbe we must begin by retracing the history of film in the public health campaigns of the Weimar period. As Ulf Schmidt and others have shown, it was at this time that the Aufklärungsfilm first emerged as an instrument of health-related discourse. 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. Precisely the absence of “operating instructions” that author Alfred Döblin identified as Weimar’s signature feature led to a proliferation of blueprints for social and personal change. Many of these blueprints stressed the need for vigilance and awareness regarding the many risks of modern life, risks greatly amplified by the war and its aftermath: venereal disease, tuberculosis, alcoholism, workplace accidents, mental illness, and so forth.