Mädchen in Uniform

 

The original film with this title was made in 1931, and there was a re-make in 1958. Both are now touted as ‘Lesbian Classics’, but that is not, or not primarily, what it’s all about. It’s a presentation — only semi-allegorical — of the conflict between the severe Prussian militarist tradition and the liberal values of the Weimar Republic.

The setting is a girl’s boarding school — I’m pretty sure there’s not a single male character, not even an incidental servant or delivery boy, in either version — presided over by a fierce old headmistress dressed always in black. Were she a man she would have been played by Erich von Stroheim. Among the staff is a young woman who, against opposition from the headmistress and her conservative allies, tries to be gentler and kinder with the girls. In particular, she makes a point of going round the dormitory every evening to kiss the girls goodnight.

What sets the story going is the arrival of a new pupil, played in the re-make by a very young Romy Schneider. Even more emotionally starved than the other girls, she falls in love with the young liberal teacher. The crisis is reached at the party following a student production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’: the well-meaning but rather dizzy kitchen staff have been generous with the rum in the punch, and our new pupil gets very drunk and loudly proclaims her love before falling in an alcoholic stupor at the feet of the scandalized headmistress.

Our young heroine is carted off to the infirmary to sleep it off, and there follows a private confrontation between the headmistress and the young liberal teacher. This would of course be a fairly vital scene for anyone who hadn’t already worked out what the thing was all about, but unfortunately I couldn’t really get it because the English subtitles to the 1931 version were too crass, and I could only find the re-make in a version with the original German soundtrack and Spanish subtitles: I have very little German and no Spanish. Anyway, the upshot is that the young teacher is forbidden any further contact or even speech with her young friend, and told to pack her bags and get ready to leave the school.

Our recovering pupil gets up to learn this, and to find that the headmistress has also forbidden the other pupils to talk to her. Desperate, she attempts suicide, but is rescued by the other pupils and the young teacher, defying the headmistress’s ban. The girl is taken back to the infirmary in a delirious state.

It is here, and only here, that the two films differ: the 1931 version closes with a view of the headmistress, bowed, her confident stride as broken as her spirit, walking away from us — and the school to which she has devoted her life? — down a long corridor. In the re-make, we are shown her, at last remorseful, reaching clumsily out to grasp the hand of the half-conscious Romy Schneider.

I recommend both films. Those who, like me, were first attracted by the titillating prospect of two dozen teenage girls romping around in their nighties, will stay for the dramatization in miniature of the most disastrous  ideological conflict within memory.