The period of the Weimar Republic sees the emergence of a peculiarly distinct genre of legal cinema: the ‘paragraph film’. These are films that do not merely foreground “things legal” (Rosenberg 2000), but which explicitly thematize and confront specific paragraphs of the German criminal code, and how these impact the everyday life of the citizen. Today, most of these films have faded into obscurity – unsurprising, perhaps, given their lack of artistic merit and narrow political outlook. Yet despite such shortcomings, they nonetheless constitute a significant historical archive, providing an additional body of texts to inform our thinking about the nature of the contemporary politics of law and justice in Weimar Germany and how this is articulated through and to the popular. Situating the paragraph film as a contingent genre of its historical context(s), this talk pursues two questions: first, why is it that these films appear at this particular moment? And second, how, through their narrative and aesthetic choices, do they involve themselves in the political work of shaping social and individual positionings towards the law?

Steven Howe is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Lucerne, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. He studied German and Comparative Literature at the universities of Manchester, Hamburg and Exeter, and has been a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of The Australian National University in Canberra. Recent publications include essays on legal cinema in interwar Germany, on contemporary British tribunal theatre, and on artistic pre-enactments, as well as a special issue of the journal Pólemos on ‘Law and Art in the Aftermath’. In 2022, he was awarded a grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation to lead the interdisciplinary project ‘Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany’. He is currently co-editing, with Laura Petersen, the volume Law, Politics and the Visual in Weimar Germany (forthcoming, 2026).

The event is free and open to all. Registration link.

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.