Paracelsus, the great Swiss renaissance physician. Who could want a film about him? Adolf Hitler, it turns out. Maybe in the story of the proud loner standing against received wisdom, the tribune of the Volk and all that, Hitler saw a kindred spirit – the Führerprinzip in action before the Führer.
The director was the GW Pabst, who’d been caught in France en route to the USA at the beginning of the war and was then forced to turn out films for the Reich. With a lot of foot-dragging and a determination to keep Nazi ideology as much as possible out of the finished product, the great Austrian made only two in five years – The Comedians in 1941 and Paracelsus in 1943.
He didn’t like the film about the man born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim – who took the name Paracelsus to indicate he was a cut above the Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus (Paracelsus literally means “above Celsus”). Doubtless the naked propagandistic aspect of his film stuck in his mid-century throat, but to 21st century eyes there isn’t that much that is screamingly problematical. It’s not really that far removed from the standard Hollywood biopic.
The Paracelsus we get here is an outsider, scorned by the town’s elite, but whose knowledge of medicine enables him to heal the leg of a local printer that was otherwise for the chop. Lecturing in German rather than the Latin of the cultural elite, and championed by the philosopher Erasmus (Franz Schafheitlein), who just happens to be in Basel at the time, Paracelsus soon wins over the hearts and minds of student physicians at the university and by popular acclaim becomes a power in his own right.
It’s tough at the top though. Paracelsus now calls the shots, but he will be tested sorely by the arrival of St Vitus Dance, an unruly mob of flagellants and the plague – to lock down or not lock down? – among other things. Nor are the old ruling medical elite going to take their defeat lying down.
Pabst paints the main characters unambiguously, getting performances aimed at the back of the room from his leads. The charismatic Paracelsus, played Werner Krauss (a proper anti-semite and ardent Nazi). Rudolph Blümner, as Froben the printer with the leg that the local medical big noise wants to lop off. Fritz Rasp as said big noise, Der Magister (ie the Master) – here is your hissable villain and embodiment of the cultural elite and Rasp is, along with Krauss (for all his sins), the best thing in the movie. Harry Langewisch as Pfefferkorn, a rich local merchant. Annelies Reinhold as Renata, his comely daughter. Peter Martin Urtel, the handsome swain who switches allegiances from the Master to Paracelsus, and who becomes the film’s romantic focus when he sets his cap at Renata.
How come Paracelsus’s remedies work where the Galen-inspired remedies of the Master and his cronies do not? What is the magic ingredient Paracelsus has access to? “Nature” is the vague answer, and in Paracelsus there is a foreshadowing of all the science-sceptics and vaccine-deniers of the social media era. The Master, on the other hand, favours bleeding and the balancing of the four humours, so let’s not get too oppositional about all this.
It is a handsome film, which Pabst does like a Grimm fairy tale – the Nazis loved the Grimms – especially Urtel’s Johannes, coiffed and dressed like the handsome prince and at one point literally called on to release a sleeping beauty from her slumber. At another, Paracelsus is visited by the German warrior/poet Ulrich Von Hutten – the Nazis loved Teutonic knights – who is probably suffering from syphilis (since guiac is the remedy suggested).
As well as an undeniably good-looking and well-acted film, this is also a fascinating one in terms of its ethno-nationalism and its scepticism against received wisdom. Even so, it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, all in all. Either Pabst’s heart either isn’t really in it or he’s being deliberately ideologically ambiguous for the sake of his health. There is no record as to what the Führer thought of it.
Paracelsus – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
