Richard Oswald’s Different from the Others was a radical silent film produced in 1919 during the Weimar Republic. And it was almost erased from history.
Different from the Others was co-written by Oswald and renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who also played a role in the film and partially funded it through his Institute for Sexual Science.
The film follows a doomed gay relationship between a successful concert violinist and one of his students and explores the impact of homophobia, conversion therapy and the threat of being outed. The film was intended to rally against Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, the 1871 law that criminalized homosexuality.
Different from the Others is considered one of the first sympathetic portrayals of gay men in cinema, and it was praised by audiences. But conservative Catholic, Protestant and antisemitic groups protested the co-writers’ Jewish identities and the film’s thesis that homophobia, not homosexuality, was a social evil.
Different from the Others was censored throughout Germany in 1920 following claims that the film would endanger public safety or turn impressionable young people gay. By October of 1920, only doctors and medical researchers were able to view it via private educational screenings.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they raided the Institute for Sexual Science and destroyed every copy of Different from the Others they could find, in addition to other vital archives related to sex research.
Different from the Others would be lost entirely if it was not for Hirschfeld, who managed to preserve 40 minutes of the film for a documentary feature of his own, 1927’s Laws of Love. That section of the film is the only remaining remnant of it today.
What’s left of Different from the Others has been preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who purchased a fine-grain master positive to create a watchable—albeit incomplete—version that is faithful to the original film and is still relevant today.
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