In this presentation, I situate Erich Kästner’s famous children’s book Emil and the Detectives (1929) and Gerhard Lamprecht’s eponymous filmic adaptation (1931) within the context of Weimar childhoods affected by the memory of war and the rise of extremist politics. Both versions of Emil gave people confidence in the Weimar Republic and its institutions, and, for that reason, this is not just a story about child autonomy, but one that uses children as symbols of a stable and democratic future. Some critics agree on this point, while others contend that Emil fosters complacency and upholds the status quo. I propose we move beyond this debate and focus instead on how the film addresses a new critical issue at the time: the sexual vulnerability of the child. Ellipsis, symbols, and allusions in the film version make it clear that the villain is no mere thief but rather the embodiment of a new criminal category: the child molester. 

Javier Samper Vendrell (he/him) is Assistant Professor of German and core faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. His research focuses on LGBTQ+ history, literature, film, television, photography, and print culture in Germany since 1890. His research and teaching interests encompass nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and European cultural history; race, gender and sexuality; and youth and popular cultures. His current research focuses on two main areas: homoerotic photography and the cultural history of queer childhood. 

Samper Vendrell’s first book, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic, was published in 2020 by the University of Toronto Press (you can listen to Samper Vendrell talk about the book here). Currently, he is working on a second book Fear of the Bogeyman: Children, Queerness, and Monsters in German Culture.

Zoom link to follow.

The seminar series is part of the project Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.