Prof. Brook Henkel Publishes New Research on Early Film about Einsteinian Relativity
Brook Henkel, Assistant Professor of German and Film Studies, recently published a peer-reviewed book chapter titled “The Einstein Film: Animation, Relativity, and the Charge of ‘Jewish Science’” in the volume Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema (Berghahn 2020). The chapter reconstructs and critiques the German antisemitic response to Hanns Walter Kornblum’s 1922 educational film, The Basic Principles of the Einstein Theory of Relativity, in which the supposedly destabilizing and disorienting effects of Einstein’s theories are linked to cinematic experience and abstract animation.
