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In the early decades of the twentieth century, two intertwined changes began to shape the direction of German society. The baptism of the German film industry took place amid post-World War I conditions of political and social breakdown, and the cultural vacuum left by collapsing institutions was partially filled by moving images. At the same time, the emerging human sciences—psychiatry, neurology, sexology, eugenics, industrial psychology, and psychoanalysis—began to play an increasingly significant role in setting the terms for the way Germany analyzed itself and the problems it had inherited from its authoritarian past, the modernizing process, and war. Moreover, in advancing their professional and social goals, these sciences became heavily reliant on motion pictures.Situated at the intersection of film studies, the history of science and medicine, and the history of modern Germany, Homo Cinematicus connects the rise of cinema as a social institution to an inquiry into the history of knowledge production in the human sciences. Taking its title from a term coined in 1919 by commentator Wilhelm Stapel to identify a new social type that had been created by the emergence of cinema, Killen's book explores how a new class of experts in these new disciplines converged on the figure of the "homo cinematicus" and made him central to many of that era's major narratives and social policy initiatives.Killen traces film's use by the human sciences as a tool for producing, communicating, and popularizing new kinds of knowledge, as well as the ways that this alliance was challenged by popular films that interrogated the truth claims of both modern science and scientific cinema. In doing so, Homo Cinematicus endeavors to move beyond the divide between scientific and popular film, examining their historical coexistence and coevolution.

Berlin Electropolis ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin's transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on three key groups-railway personnel, soldiers, and telephone operators-Andreas Killen traces the emergence in the 1880s and then later decline of the belief that modernity caused nervous illness. During this period, Killen explains, Berlin became arguably the most advanced metropolis in Europe. A host of changes, many associated with breakthroughs in technologies of transportation, communicati

Summary
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.

This paper examines the discursive production of risk and its management in the German "enlightenment film" of the interwar period. From the sexual enlightenment films of the immediate postwar era to the Nazi-era sterilization films, public health campaigns mobilized new ideas about hygiene and the new resources of the mass media. Depicting a world composed of discrete risks (venereal disease, hereditary illness), on the one hand, and supplying information on how to manage such risks, on the other, public officials and experts invested considerable resources in this project of public education. Yet insofar as this project addressed controversial aspects of human behavior, and often proposed controversial solutions, this campaign of state-sponsored enlightenment remained an ambivalent one. Particularly in campaigns against venereal disease, leading advocates were frequently drawn into debates both about film's value as medium of mass instruction and the nature of the public they sought to address, a public perceived in fundamental ways as "at risk." Their efforts routinely provoked charges that enlightenment films on sexual conduct could incite the very behaviors they strove to warn audiences against. By the end of the 1920s, the hopes placed in public enlightenment campaigns seemed to have waned. And yet the enlightenment film underwent a significant revival during the Nazi era. The paper concludes by examining the interconnections between the Nazis' reconceptualization of public enlightenment, risk, and strategies for managing it.