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Erblich Belastet (literally translates to "Hereditary Burden"), the 1913 Harry Piel German silent are-there-genes-that-cause-people-to-murder crime romantic adventure melodrama (written by Harry Piel & Luise del Zopp; about the son of an innocent man who is convicted of murder, and the owner of an American publishing company gives him a job as his secretary, but he keeps the young man away from his daughter, because he fears that the father may have been guilty of murder and maybe the son inherited his "murderous" genes, but ultimately, after the young man becomes a newspaper correspondent and travels the world, he is able to prove his father's innocence and win the hand of his adoptive father's daughter!) starring Ludwig Trautmann. We don't know if this movie was ever released in the U.S., and we were unable to find out the cast beyond the one man named above, but we did find a detailed plot summary, which is given above. Also, the movie is incorrectly listed as a short in the IMDb, but it is 49 minutes long, which was quite long for this time. If anyone knows more about this movie, please e-mail us and we will post it here. Note that director/co-screenwriter Harry Piel was a major figure in early cinema. He wrote and directed his first movie when he was just 20 years old in 1912, and he made several movies over the next three years, and then began acting in them as well! He made many movies over the next decades. In 1933, he joined the Nazi party and made movies for them. In 1934, he made Der Herr der Welt, a science fiction movie with robots, but he had actually used robots in a movie he made in 1915! At the end of World War II, he was sentenced to 6 months in jail and banned from the film industry for 5 years. In 1950, he started a new film company, but did not have much success, and he retired in 1953 and passed away in 1961. Unfortunately, almost all the negatives of his silent films were destroyed when Germany was bombed during World War II, so few of his films survive, and that, combined with his Nazi collaboration, has caused him to be largely forgotten, except by major film buffs.
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

If you know who did the art (if any), please let us know.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a very rare "country of origin" poster from Germany from before World War II, which we have only auctioned twice before! There are very few German movie posters from before World War II in existence (because of the massive paper shortages in Germany during World War II), and most of those few are in museums.

Also note that this poster solely has the title and the art (of a man jumping into the Rhine from the Hammer Railway Bridge in Dusseldorf), along with the distributing company in the bottom right corner. This is important, because the movie was remade in 1919, but we know this poster to be from the 1913 version, because that version was distributed by Eiko Film, while the 1919 version was not. So this is definitely an incredibly rare poster from this 1913 movie! Also note that this German poster was printed in 2 sections designed to overlap.

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