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This movie was featured in a documentary “HITLER'S HOLLYWOOD”. It was implied that “Paracelsus” had anti-Nazi sentiment as approved by Goebbels. The hypothesis offered was that Goebbels had permitted its release as a sop to the intelligentsia.
I think the hypothesis, as asserted as a fact in HITLER'S HOLLYWOOD, is false. I think it is something else entirely.
Werner Krauss is Paracelsus, a man whose enemy is death. He meets his foe on the battlefield of the human body in sickness. His foe is assisted by the forces of the Establishment: the rich, seeking ever more riches through monopolies on the latest panacea, the medical colleges, who think that all knowledge of health is contained in Galen and Avicenna. He struggles, and has his victories, and failures, only to rise again, fighting plague, stupidity, cupidity, and vanity, all in the context of 16th Century Germany. It is an anti-elite movie. Paracelsus emphasizes the main political and social message of national-socialism: class separation is bad for a successful and harmonized society.
Paracelsus was called “a remarkably interesting film” by The New York Times’s Vincent Canby (when it received its belated U.S. premiere in 1974).