This clip from the controversial 1930 film Cyankali shows the newlywed protagonist, Hete Fent, pleading with a physician, Dr. Möller, to help her get an abortion because her husband has just lost his job, and the impoverished couple cannot afford to start a family. Möller denies her request, even though he has just prescribed an abortion to his previous patient, a visibly well-to-do woman who almost certainly had paid him a bribe for this service. Möller goes so far as to pull down a bound copy of the German criminal code and have Hete read the relevant passage that punishes the procedure. He also warns her of the dangers of an illegal abortion. Hete nevertheless makes it clear that she plans to get an abortion one way or another, and, in a later scene, visits a woman who gives her a fatal dose of cyanide in a botched attempt to induce a miscarriage. The film had to submit to extensive edits before the censors allowed it to premiere in Berlin on May 23, 1930, and it continued to generate controversy throughout its run.

The movie Cyankali adapted for the big screen the physician Friedrich Wolf’s 1929 theatrical drama of the same name, and it represented one of many cultural productions at the time that addressed the issue of abortion and its illegality in the Weimar Republic. The earlier 1926 film Kreuzzug des Weibes [Woman’s Crusade], for instance, also portrayed abortion as a deadly procedure, and, like Cyankali, it similarly depicted female lay abortionists as incompetent and even villainous. The historian Cornelie Usborne has questioned such representations, however, noting that the (mostly female) lay abortionists achieved roughly the same patient outcomes as the (mostly male) gynecologists did, and the lay abortionists charged less than physicians and tended to approach their clients with greater empathy.

Throughout the Weimar Republic, Germans engaged in heated debates over §218, the paragraph of the criminal code that punished those who received or provided abortions. Several infamous scandals and trials—including one in 1924 that charged 93 women from 17 different villages near Limburg with having gotten the procedure—kept the issue in the headlines. The Reichstag reformed the law in 1926, when it reduced the penalties for women who had received an abortion, and again in 1927, when it legalized abortions for medical reasons, but the government never repealed §218 entirely, despite widespread and ongoing agitation by the KPD and the SPD to do so. Indeed, the author of Cyankali himself, Friedrich Wolf, faced charges in February 1931 for having allegedly helped nearly 100 women to receive abortions. He and his physician colleague Else Kienle, who also stood accused, fled the country before the trial could take place.