Schwules Museum* (Gay Museum*): Anders als die Andern movie

The Schwules Museum is one of the most famous Berlin’s museums thanks to its interesting exhibitions, library and archives. Another thing you have to know is that this museum is one of the world’s biggest institutions for researching, preserving and communicating the history and culture of queer communities. Indeed, one of the nicest things you can see here in the educational movie “Anders als die Andern movie”, which translated means “Different from the Others”. The film is intended as a polemic against the then-current laws under Germany’s Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense. It can be considered to be the first pro-gay film in the world. “Anders als die Andern” is one of the first sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals in cinema. The film’s basic plot was used again in the 1961 UK film, Victim starring Dirk Bogarde. Censorship laws enacted in reaction to films like Anders als die Andern eventually restricted viewing of this movie to doctors and medical researchers, and prints of the film were among the many “decadent” works burned by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933. Only the national Moscow film archive was in possession of an incomplete copy of the movie. The copy was used by the Munich film museum to reconstruct the movie. To prepare the exhibition, Eldorado at the Berlin Museum- which was the first museum presentation about homosexuality worldwide, and sparked the initiative to form the Schwules Museum- curator Wolfgang Theis dealt with the forgotten movie. To mark the 100th anniversary, the Schwules Museum is cooperating with the museum for film and TV Berlin and Museum for Film and Television Munich to dedicate a big show to “Anders als die Andern”.