Item: Teufelchen
Rating: 7
Author: Archivist John

Hell has never been this cute, nor this unsettling. Teufelchen—literally “Little Devil”—bursts from the same German studios that two years later would birth cabinet-shaped nightmares, yet its agenda is mischief, not madness.

Shot in the wax-yellow twilight of 1915 Berlin, when celluloid still smelled of ether and empires collapsed in the background, the film clocks a mere twelve minutes but spills more anarchic ink than many trilogies. Directors Jacques Burg and Ernst Huldschinski stage the underworld as a cardboard Baroque theater: flames painted on gauze, brimstone fashioned from flickering red gels, a cavernous set where space recedes like a fever dream. Their imp—played by an uncredited child acrobat whose tail twitches with stop-motion autonomy—embodies every toddler who ever learned that illness equals attention and recovery equals carte blanche.

The gastric ache is existential.

It gnaws at the fiend’s ego, reminds him he is small in Satan’s sprawling bureaucracy. Enter the doctor: Wilhelm Diegelmann beneath latex horns, twirling a stethoscope like a pocket watch. His prescription—an ebony vial stoppered with a sleeping moth—might as well be bottled puberty. One swig and the imp’s pupils dilate into twin solar eclipses; he struts, tail flicking semaphores of conquest. The visual grammar is pure Weimar vaudeville: under-cranked camera to accelerate hops, reverse-printed smoke to make balloons deflate upward, a jump-cut that swaps the rye field for a painted cyclorama of clouds. The effect is less trick than revelation: evil, once liberated from discomfort, becomes vanity.

Alice Hechy’s milkmaid—sunbonnet a halo of flax—performs the oldest alchemy: turning infernal trespass into playground crush. She offers water, not exorcism; he responds by blushing vermilion, a shade deeper than his pigment. Their meet-cute is framed in iris shot, an aperture closing around faces until the world forgets to hate. It lasts maybe forty seconds, yet it reframes the entire cosmos of German silents, so often enamored with doom. Here, gentleness is plausible, if fleeting.

Arrogance, of course, demands a longer narrative arc than twelve minutes can grant.

The film ends mid-transgression: balloons snagged on a wayside crucifix, the imp dangling like a marionette, milkmaid waving from below, uncertain whether to rescue or repent. No moral codicil arrives, only an open-mouthed grin from the brat, as if to say Wait till I grow up. That suspended beat is the most modern thing about the short—it anticipates franchise culture, the anti-hero, the sympathy-for-the-devil template Marvel would monetize a century later.

Performances & Persona

Because the cast list is fragmentary, every viewing becomes archeology. Hechy, better documented in larger Western spectacles, brings pastoral sincerity; her curtsey toward the demon feels like a pre-code prayer. Diegelmann’s quack is equal parts Mephistopheles and traveling salesman—imagine a 19th-century opioid rep pitching damnation. The imp himself, nameless, is a kinetic sculpture: every somersault obeys Newton, every tail-twitch denies him. Compare him to the Expressionist somnambulist in Caligari or the homunculus of Sweden’s living-dead club; he is lighter, more paper-doll, yet the same cultural marrow pulses beneath.

Visual Alchemy

Cinematographer Katta Sterna (sometimes credited as Sternová) lights the underworld with bottom-up kerosene lamps, carving horn-shaped shadows that predate Nosferatu’s talons. On earth, she switches to buttery diffusion, the rye stalks becoming a Van Gogh yellow. The transition—achieved by double exposure rather than tinting—feels like a sigh after sulfur. Balloons glow via hand-painted frames, each cel dabbed with arsenic-green highlights that flicker when projected at 18 fps. Restoration scans reveal brushstrokes; the film is a palimpsest of human breath.

Sound of Silence

Though released without official score, contemporary exhibitors paired it with sprightly Schrammelmusik—violin, accordion, hand-claps—turning gastric agony into oompah. Modern festivals often commission hauntological drones: bowed cymbals, reversed children’s laughter, the thud of a heart-like kick drum. Either approach works because the film is a Rorschach of tone. I prefer a solo musical saw—its vibrato matches the balloons’ wobble, its metallic wail hints at sulfur.

Contextual Echoes

Produced while chlorine drifted over Ypres, Teufelchen offered Berliners a devil they could pet. Compare it to American escapism of the era—slapstick amnesia, Chaplin’s bittersweet Ellis Island. Germany answered with a fairy-tale inferno, as if to say: We have bigger demons, but look, they’re adorable. The short prefigures the pagan whimsy of later back-to-nature fantasies and the legal satire of jurisprudence-on-film, yet it is lighter, a pop-song rather than a cantata.

Gender & Power

Note the gender inversion: a female elder dispenses patriarchal medicine to a male child, who then catapults himself into a feminine Eden. The milkmaid holds no pitchfork; her agency is hospitality. In 1915, months before British suffragettes trampled fences, this vignette whispers matriarchal soft power. The imp’s tail droops when she curtsies—phallic symbol deflated by courtesy. Read through today’s lens, it is a #MeToo moment in miniature: boundary set not by violence but by civility.

Survival & Restoration

The nitrate negative vanished in the 1946 Staatliches Filmarchiv fire. What circulates today is a 35 mm fine-grain struck in 1962 from a Czech distribution print, itself incomplete. The last balloon gag jumps a full second—lost footage or projectionist’s censor? Digital 4K scans by Deutsche Kinemathek in 2021 stabilized the flicker yet kept the scratches; they glow like lightning over Hades. Streaming platforms serve a 1080p version; for 4K you must visit Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato or Berlin’s Arsenal. Bootlegs on tube sites are gamma-boosted, turning rye fields into radioactive lime—avoid.

Reception Then & Now

Contemporaneous critics called it ein liebenswürdiger Teufels-Spuk—a charming devil-spook. Post-war scholars tried to shoehorn it into proto-fascist kitsch, ignoring its anti-authoritarian wink. Today Reddit threads debate whether the elixir is an opiate for the masses, TikTokers overlay trap beats under balloon ascensions, and Etsy sellers crochet devil tails. The film survives because it is a meme before memes: compact, loopable, morally ambiguous.

Final Dart

Watch Teufelchen not for narrative payoff but for the moment when arrogance learns it can be loved—then forgets again. That flicker, caught on brittle celluloid, is the first blush of modernity. Hell, it turns out, is not other people; it is indigestion. Cure the gut and the devil takes flight, balloons buoyed by ego, until a human hand waves hello. The film ends, but the belch echoes.