Mental Hygiene in Interwar Germany: Public Health Films Between Science and Superstition

During the interwar period, German mental hygienists sought to establish their field as the vanguard of a comprehensive project for the reform and management of society along scientific lines, a project whose advance would crown theirs, in the words of psychiatrist Carl Schneider, as 'queen of the bio-medical sciences'. Specialists in this field identified the future success of their project with a public health campaign intended to eradicate all forms of alternative or esoteric healing, often lumped together under the rubric of 'superstition'. This paper examines this campaign, focussing specifically on the genre of the 'hygienic enlightenment film', and at the tense dynamic that arose between the prohibition of non-licensed forms of medicine on the one hand and the advancement of controversial forms of hygienic doctrine on the other.