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Special Section: Moving Targets: Risk, Security, and the Social in Twentieth-Century Europe
The opening frame of the film Das Erbe (The Inheritance, 1935) shows a door with a sign on it identifying the room within as "Cultural Film Department, Studio 2." From inside, a young woman in a lab coat opens the door and calls to a doctor off screen to join the proceedings. The camera then enters the room, which is revealed to be a laboratory where a group of scientists, shortly joined by the distinguished figure of the head doctor, has gathered to film a battle between two stag beetles. Once underway, the filming of the insects is punctuated by exchanges between the scientists concerning the "Kampf um Dasein" (struggle for survival) that marks existence in the natural world. Subsequent scenes follow this group of scientist-filmmakers as they continue to engage in repartee while filming their animal-subjects or departing for the screening room to watch earlier footage. A key feature of this interaction concerns the exchanges between the attractive female assistant and the male scientists. Throughout the proceedings, the woman is cast in the role of the student, posing questions and receiving instruction from her male colleagues.
Billed as an Aufklärungsfilm or "enlightenment film" on questions of race and heredity, The Inheritance was released in 1935 as part of a campaign, largely overseen by the Nazi Office of Racial Policy, to educate the public about the Third Reich's recently passed sterilization law. In addition to its rather unusual frame device, the film included a mix of elements that were more or less standard in these films: scenes from the natural history of the animal world; family trees (in this case of the notorious Kallikak family) charting the transmission of tainted heredity across generations; footage of healthy individuals at work, at play, and marching, juxtaposed with images depicting the lives of patients in institutions for the "incurably" mentally ill; and statistical tables documenting the cost of caring for the latter. The film concludes with passages from Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny, which had been passed in the summer of 1933 and went into effect January 1, 1934.1
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