![]() ![]() My discussion and analysis is based on a collection of thousands of newspaper clippings that the physicist Ernst Gehrcke (1878–1960) assembled in the early 1920s. I first sketch the making and content of the film and then clarify some aspects of the public controversy it generated. My main focus here is not the film itself, but to examine how this educational film became a box-office hit and simultaneously the subject of heated public debate. 2 Two of its fascinating aspects are, first, that no other educational film in science reached such a wide audience at the time, and second, that no other educational film in any area was so controversial and discussed by such a broad cross section of German society. 1 This film is virtually unknown today and seems to have been lost: Of the two-to-three-hour film only a thirty-minute excerpt has been preserved. On April 2, 1922, a film entitled “The Basic Principles of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” premiered at the Frankfurt Trade Fair. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |