Cinematically Transmitted Disease: Eugenics and Film in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Propaganda played an essential role in influencing the attitudes and policies of German National Socialism on racial purity and euthanasia, but little has been said on the impact of medical hygiene films. Cinematically Transmitted Disease explores these films for the first time, from their inception during the Weimar era and throughout the years to come. In this innovative volume, author Barbara Hales demonstrates how medical films as well as feature films were circulated among the German people to embed and enforce notions of scientific legitimacy for racial superiority and genetically spread ＂incurable＂ diseases, creating and maintaining an instrumental fear of degradation in the German national population.

Barbara Hales is a Professor of History and Humanities at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and President of the Houston based organization, Center for Medicine After the Holocaust. She is the author of Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2021). She has also co-edited volumes Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema 1928-1936 for Camden House in 2016 (with Mihaela Petrescu and Valerie Weinstein), and Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema for Berghahn Books in 2021 (with Valerie Weinstein).