Illegal Abortions as Social Poison – Cyankali
Germany, 1930, 85 minutes, b+w
Evan Torner, Associate Professor of German Studies (University of Cincinnati)
Dir Hans Tintner (?-1942), Scr Hans Tintner, Friedrich Wolf Act Herma Ford (Frau Fent), Grete Mosheim (Hete), Nico Turoff (Paul), Louis Ralph (Prosnick)
Struggles over political modernity in the Weimar Republic often took place at the site of the woman’s body. From the women prostitutes of the ‘Straßenfilm’ to the archetypal worried mothers and innocent daughters of the melodrama, the admixture of social policy and economic hardship shaped fictional explorations of the persistent male control over female agency, despite the latter’s recent political emancipation. The title of the agit-prop melodrama Cyankali, slang for the lethal toxin potassium cyanide, invokes poison on both a literal and figurative level to achieve a specific political objective: revocation of Paragraph 218, the infamous law criminalizing abortion in Germany. Both the film and its source material, the 1929 play Cyankali: Paragraph 218 by author, doctor, and abortionist Friedrich Wolf, served as entries in the fierce debate around this law and illegal abortion that emerged in the late 1920s, and remain to this day effective depictions of the helplessness and despair surrounding poverty and unwanted childbirth. Yet one can also situate this roughly-hewn semi-silent film within the latent 1930s socialist film aesthetic – a ‘message picture’ that certainly makes the personal political, while also categorically refusing to reduce national political issues to the level of the individual woman.
Cyankali frames a narrative of a young, beautiful-but-poor woman’s accidental death by poison in her attempt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Hete, the eldest daughter of widow Frau Fent, discovers she is pregnant with the child of her boyfriend Paul, but does not want to keep it due to the outright starvation conditions the family already endures. Her search for a safe-albeit-illegal abortion leads her on an odyssey through the unenviable options available to her. She violently snatches her would-be-rapist landlord Prosnick’s sanitary nozzle to drown the fetus inside her with carbolic soap, but Paul cannot assist her, as he cannot stand the blood. The elitist Dr. Moeller comes to the informal aid of a wealthy woman but invokes Paragraph 218 to avoid helping Hete after her. Finally, she visits midwife Madame Heye, who provides Hete with a bargain bottle of cyankali (cyanide) to poison the fetus. Meanwhile, Paul and his friend Max steal from their work cantina to keep the Fent family alive and are consequently pursued by the police. Frau Fent reluctantly administers cyankali to her daughter, who then becomes fatally ill. The police imprison Paul and, as her daughter dies, also arrest Frau Fent for her role in killing the fetus, as per Paragraph 218.
Despite being an early and socially engaged feature film about abortion, Cyankali has received little exposure for technical and political reasons. Shot by the small Berlin company Atlantis-Film on cheap film stock with intertitles scrawled in chalk, the work takes on the very aesthetics of hunger appropriate to both the film’s content and context, the worldwide Great Depression. Audio on the surviving print cuts out on the second, fourth and fifth reel, leaving the viewer in real silence for much of the film. Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (1932), Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s tale of a Berlin woman coming to grips with her agency, would outshine Cyankali shortly thereafter in its nuance and optimism, though the latter prefigures numerous moments from the former, such as someone committing suicide by throwing themselves into a courtyard, as well as encounters with an unjust legal system. Moreover, other films from the era’s fierce debate about the right to choose – Eine von uns (1932), Frauenarzt Dr. Schäfer (1930), and Der Sittenrichter Paragraph 218 (1929) – have either been destroyed or exist only in fragments. Neither in the Weimar Republic, nor in the Third Reich, nor in either post-war Germany was abortion a desirable topic for an entertainment (or even educational) production. After Cyankali’s stirring premiere at the newly opened Babylon theater in Berlin, it was banned in Bavaria and eventually consigned to the archive as a work neither aesthetically worthwhile nor politically safe to screen, given the controversy surrounding Wolf’s play and his own arrest as an abortionist.
Nevertheless, Cyankali makes several moves of interest. One is its intermedial tension between text and the body. From the shock opening sequence depicting the title emitting from a desperate woman to the newspapers describing the numerous infanticide-suicides throughout Berlin, the film mediates between text that produces and communicates only pain and death and bodies under stress that insist on their own reality. Not only does the text of the written law apply physical pressures on the female body through enforced pregnancy and lack of support, but Hete’s struggle is precisely against becoming just another statistic: one of the 10,000 women who died each year from the estimated 800,000 illegal abortions administered. Another move is the film’s ending, which suddenly introduces synchronous sound at the moment when an anonymous woman with a guitar sings the ballad ‘Pretty gardener’s wife – why are you crying?’ outside Hete’s window, and Hete cries out in pain ‘Mother! Mother!’ The film reverts to silent film conventions again until the police commissioner interrogates Hete and her family at her deathbed. The powerful sequence to follow literally gives voice to the different discourses at play: the self-satisfied legal apparatus persecuting the helpless, the outraged male workers protesting the law, and the women expressing sadness and remorse. ‘The law that makes criminals of 800,000 women a year is not a law!’ Max yells. ‘Don’t deliver a speech’, responds the commissioner. This self-reflexive moment when the film technologically ‘speaks out’ mirrors the socially expected behavior from its audience, namely open discussion of an issue previously restricted to realms of silence and fear. Colorless and odorless, the cyanide solution is exposed on celluloid.
Though legalized in Germany in 1974, abortion remains a contentious issue in many countries, such that Cyankali continues to prove its relevance. Its effectiveness lies in the fact that it, according to Kerstin Barndt, ‘functionalizes the decision-making process of its principal female character to force a broader set of issues into the political arena’.[1] Despite the film’s transparency and simplistic appeals, its call for action could very well contextualize today’s debates about the future of women’s bodies under modern regimes of control.
[1] Kerstin Barndt, ‘Aesthetics of Crisis: Motherhood, Abortion, and Melodrama in Irmgard Keun and Friedrich Wolf’, Women in German Yearbook, 24 (2008), 71-95, pg. 83.