The Austrian filmmaker Henrik Galeen is one of the beacons of the rightly celebrated expressionism of German film in the 10s and 20s, while his name is wrongly known to very few and mostly goes under the weight of the work of directors such as Fritz Lang or Robert Wiene. His work Alraune shows how exceptional Galeen was at what he did.
Galeen uses the novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers, which anticipated the concept of artificial insemination by decades and addressed it. The director brought the book, and thus the subject, to a wider audience than Ewers' book could.
A Frankenstein-esque professor (the equally gifted filmmaker Paul Wegener, who later became an opportunist through his association with the fascists of National Socialism) plans to create a woman based on the Alraune myth, i.e. The human-shaped plant that symbolizes misfortune and happiness can bring, especially in relation to childbearing. The professor thinks about the breeding of certain types of people in an anti-humanistic manner and decides, to explain his words, to use "degraded subjects of society" for this experiment. The portrayal of the involuntary nature of the participants, the inhuman view of people and human experiments, the lack of ethics on the part of a scholar or doctor are all anticipations of what would soon doom Germany and then Europe and large parts of the world. The result is Alraune (Brigitte Helm), the first human being to use artificial insemination. She grew up in a convent school, apparently an experiment in the perverted educational-theoretical sense of the neo-humanists, looking for the relationship between genetics, i.e. The predestination of human existence, and socialization, i.e. The influences of the environment on the human individual. Alraune escapes from this experiment and ends up at the circus after her anti-social attitude has already been shown several times. Helm plays Alraune really impressive. She vacillates between the experimental malignancy of the being and the incomprehension of one's own being, which triggers sadness in the main character.
The professor can finally find Alraune, but Alraune finds out what kind of machinations she came into being and decides, almost according to her nature, but still understandable for everyone, to take revenge on the professor. This requires an understanding of injustice, through which the wonderful dialectic of the film stands out very clearly. Mandrake may be created from the "corrupt", but the basis of her nature lies in the facets of the human. The professor, on the other hand, came about "naturally" but is himself a being who inflicts suffering on other people - and this without the history of the injustice inflicted that Alraune experienced.
The magical, surreal aspects of the plot now come more and more to the fore through the main character. She seduces the professor and ruins him, especially financially; the human aspect no longer seemed to have played a major role in this blueprint of fascist medicine.
Ultimately, after completing her revenge, Alraune decides against the predestination of the experiment and proves the will of man as the good of his self-determination. The fact that love is the decisive factor here is part of the history of modern educational sciences, which rightly determined that, for example, parental love or friendly affection play an important role in the good development of a human being.
In this way, Henrik Galeen packs a fundamentally humanistic statement into an hour-and-a-half film and inspires with the basic characteristics of expressionist filmmaking. Impressive images, surreal confusion, a spider's web of theses and refutations make this film a classic in film history.
