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Different From The Others (German: Anders als die Andern) is a film which was produced in Germany during the Weimar Republic. It was first released in 1919 and stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel.
The story for Anders als die Andern was written by Richard Oswald with the assistance of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who also had a small part in the film and helped fund the production through his Institute for Sexual Science, with the aim of presenting the story as a polemic against the then current laws under Germany's Paragraph 175. Paragraph 175 made homosexuality a punishable offense, causing many men to be placed in the same position as the character portrayed by Veidt.
The cinematography was by Max Fassbender, who two years previously had worked on Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray, one of the earliest cinematic treatments of Oscar Wilde's classic tale of narcissism, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Director Richard Oswald later became a director of some considerable note, as did his son Gert. Veidt of course became a major film star the year after Anders was released, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Anders als die Andern is noteworthy as one of the first sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals in cinema. The film's basic plot was used again in the 1961 UK film, Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde. Censorship laws enacted in reaction to films like Anders als die Andern eventually restricted viewing of this movie to doctors and medical researchers, and prints of the film were among the many "decadent" works burned by the Nazis after Hitler came to power in 1933. Some portions of the film have survived, and can be viewed today as an invaluable glimpse at both cinematic history and homosexual history.
Only one print, a fragmented copy, survives. Other prints were destroyed by the Nazis in the early 1930s.
The role played by Veidt, Conrad was probably the first homosexual character written for cinema.






