Cyankali (play)
청산가리 (희곡)
A 1929 play about abortion by the physician and communist writer Friedrich Wolf. A worker’s pregnant girlfriend, both of them jobless after a lockout, is turned away by a doctor because of Paragraph 218 and dies trying to abort with cyanide. The most successful German-language play of the 1929/30 season, it set off the debate over Paragraph 218, and was filmed in 1930.
In depth
Hete Fent, a twenty-year-old cleaner, is expecting a child by her boyfriend Paul, a stoker, and both want it. When a wage dispute leads to a lockout they lose their income overnight, the workers’ quarter goes hungry, and a neighbour pregnant yet again throws herself from a window in despair. Hete decides on an abortion, but the caretaker who owns an instrument demands sex in return, and the corrupt Dr. Möller, who writes a healthy rich woman a certificate of medical necessity, recites the penal code to the penniless Hete and reproaches her.
Paul, who has broken into the works canteen for food, is on the run from the police; injured by her own attempt, Hete dares not see a doctor for fear of being reported. A paid abortionist gives her cyanide; she and her mother misjudge the dose, the abortion succeeds but the poison kills her, the doctor reports mother and daughter, and after Paul and her mother are led away Hete is left to die alone. The background was the estimate of the German Medical Assembly of 1926: 500,000 to 800,000 illegal abortions a year with some 10,000 deaths. First staged by Hans Hinrich at Berlin’s Lessing Theatre on 6 September 1929, it opened a wide debate on Paragraph 218; critics praised its realistic portrayal of the milieu and its power to rouse sympathy for its characters not only in their suffering but in their revolt.
It was the most successful German-language play of the 1929/30 season; the original production toured Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Soviet Union, and the play was performed in New York, Tokyo, Moscow and Paris. The Austrian director Hans Tintner filmed it in 1930 with Grete Mosheim; submitted to the censors from March to December 1930, it was repeatedly ordered cut and always banned for young people, and it opened in Berlin on 23 May 1930. In February 1931 Wolf and the physician Else Kienle were briefly taken into “protective custody”, accused of performing abortions for profit, and released after mass protests. A second film was made in East Germany in 1977.