In her early film career Ellen Richter was often cast as women of foreign and sometimes non-European origin. With her jet-black hair, dark eyes, and relatively dark complexion, Richter’s appearance differed significantly from that of many other top female stars of German cinema in the 1910s and early 1920s like Henny Porten, Ossi Oswalda, and Mia May. The actress to whom Ellen Richter perhaps bears the closest resemblance is Pola Negri, who like Richter rose to fame towards the end of World War I. Both were considered “racy” and frequently cast as “exotic” (read “erotic”) types. In Richter’s case these included the daughter of an Arab cobbler, an Indian temple dancer, and a Japanese geisha. While the majority of these films today are non-existent or inaccessible, it seems reasonable to assume that they were filled with visual and narrative stereotypes. This applies equally to gender roles, as it does to the representation of “race” and “otherness”. Just as Pola Negri had done before her in Ernst Lubitsch’s Carmen (Gypsy Blood, 1918), and Asta Nielsen before that, Richter also played “gypsies” (heavily clichéd representations of Sinti and Roma women). While Carmen indulged in the image of the sexual, rebellious, unassimilable, and ultimately destructive power of the “gypsy” woman, Aberglaube is clearly aimed in a different direction. The film focuses on the prejudice against the Sinti minority, painting a picture of fear and hatred that leads directly to persecution and murder.
The story begins in a circus. A visitor who has just fallen for the “gypsy” dancer Militza is stabbed by a jealous clown, Bajazzo (played by Victor Janson, the “Oyster King” in Lubitsch’s Die Austernprinzessin). Militza escapes to the country village of Marienhagen, finding shelter in the house of a local Catholic priest. (Judging by the landscape and architecture, the film appears to have been shot somewhere in the mostly Protestant regions of Northern Germany.) The priest also falls for Militza. When he is subsequently struck dead by a bolt of lightning one evening during Mass, his mother (Frida Richard, a regular supporting player in Richter’s films) blames Militza and has her cast out of the village. On her way to the city, Militza joins a theatrical troupe. The leader of the troupe is disappointed with the general lack of artistic talent and begs Militza to leave with him. However, since he has a wife and two small children living in poverty, Militza refuses, and instead flees on her own. Onboard a ship, she is surprised to encounter the leader of the troupe again. The ship sinks, taking the man who was so captivated by the “gypsy” with it. Militza, among the few survivors, is rescued by a nobleman who takes her to his country estate. Here she is able to recover from the traumatic events, finding peace and true love with the nobleman. As it turns out, however, her new home is located very close to Marienhagen. When the dead priest’s vengeful mother learns that Militza is now living on the estate, she kindles fear, anger, and superstition among the villagers. She even goes as far to accuse Militza of being a witch and a vampire who must be destroyed. In the end, the peasants, whipped up into an angry mob, start a riot, and Militza is stoned to death.
Despite the fact that the surviving print is missing well over a third of the original length, the story is easy enough to follow. What makes Aberglaube so intriguing in the context of Richter’s œuvre is its social dimension. In the role of the “gypsy”, Richter appears as a woman who is marked as “different” (mainly by wearing large earrings), and by this virtue alone seems to drive all the men around her wild. Through no fault of her own, Militza becomes a scapegoat for all manner of problems and mishaps.
One can draw parallels between the hatred, expulsion, and extermination of the “gypsy” depicted in the film with the enormous rise of anti-Semitic aggression against the Jewish community in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Indeed, the violent mob that swarms in the village street leading to the film’s climactic ending is staging its own pogrom of sorts, with lethal consequences. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that at the time Aberglaube was produced, a number of Jewish filmmakers – among them Ellen Richter and Willi Wolff, who contributed to the script – used fiction films to raise awareness of the historical and contemporary plight of Eastern European Jews who had been persecuted and massacred in pogroms. Aberglaube may lack the artistic refinement of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Die Gezeichneten (1922), a love story set against the backdrop of the pogroms in Czarist Russia. Nevertheless, the similarities between the two films are striking. – Philipp Stiasny

The Preservation  Aberglaube was believed to be among the many Ellen Richter films that are lost until only recently, when an incomplete vintage Dutch release print was identified in the nitrate collection of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in January 2020. A black & white preservation negative and a Desmetcolor print were subsequently produced via photochemical duplication techniques at Haghefilm Digitaal, with funding generously provided by the Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts. In addition, the duplicate negative was scanned at Eye’s Collection Centre, allowing the archive to produce a high-resolution digital version to facilitate access to the film beyond those venues capable of projecting 35mm prints.