12018-05-22T15:04:14+00:00Sloth / Poster for Laster der Menschheit (The Vice of Humanity)1plain2018-05-22T15:04:14+00:00The 1927 film Laster der Menschheit (The Vice of Humanity) explores cocaine use within a family dynamic, where a mother with an addiction tries to hide it from her daughter by moving in with her drug dealer. One of the promotional posters for the film illustrates a giant spider that has caught a woman in its web and is presumably preparing to eat her, while the bottom of the poster reads “Kokain,” “Opium,” and “Morphium.” The woman in the illustration is limp but not dead. She has dark circles around her eyes denoting her weariness and representing the physical and spiritual effects of drug use. She appears to have given up.
During the Weimar period, especially in Berlin, many Germans turned to drugs following the devastating loss of the war (Ohler 2017, 8-9). Georg Simmel points out that excessive stimuli makes one blasé to the world because eventually they are not physically able to feel what they used to (Simmel 1903, 14). Essentially, their nerves are shot. After excessive indulgence, it takes incredible willpower to defy what becomes “easy” and break the spell of drug addiction. Hardship leads to the need for an escape, which leads to drugs, which leads to addiction. The poster represents this addiction as a kind of resignation or sloth.
Bibliography: Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Simmel, Georg. “Chapter 1: The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Metropolis and Mental Life. From the Blackwell Publishing website. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/bpl_images/content_store/sample_chapter/0631225137/bridge.pdf.
