Different from the Others

Concert violinist Paul Körner falls in love with a male student, but their relationship is threatened by blackmail and Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexuality.

Co-written by Richard Oswald and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Different from the Others was one of cinema’s earliest openly sympathetic portrayals of male homosexuality and an outspoken plea for legal and social change.

Released in 1919, during a brief period of reduced censorship in Germany, the film was banned in 1920. After the Nazis came to power, Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was raided in 1933; its library and archives were burned, and remaining film copies were destroyed. Reconstructed from fragments, stills and censorship records, the film now survives as a powerful act of cinematic resistance.

Different From the Others imagined queer visibility and equality while bearing witness, unknowingly, to the persecution that would soon engulf Germany’s fragile queer world.