Different from the Others

Different from the Others (German: Anders als die Andern) is a silent German melodramatic film produced during the Weimar Republic. It was first released in 1919 and stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel. It was directed by Richard Oswald, and the story co-written by Oswald and Magnus Hirschfeld, who also had a small part in the film and partially funded the production through his Institute for Sexual Science. The film was intended as a polemic against the then-current laws under Germany's Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense. It was one of the first sympathetic portrayals of gay men in cinema. Censorship laws were enacted in reaction to films like Different from the Others and by October 1920 only doctors and medical researchers could view it. Prints of the film were among the many "decadent" works burned by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933. The cinematography was by Max Fassbender, who two years previously had worked on Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray, one of the earliest cinematic treatments of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Director Richard Oswald later became a director of more mainstream films, as did his son Gerd. Veidt became a major film star the year after Different from the Others was released, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film's basic plot was used again in the 1961 UK film Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde.