“They are trashy stories, familiar to a wide readership from those publications left weekly on the back stairs, however, they also contain aspects of real everyday stories of suffering. After all, the abandoned young girl with her illegitimate child and her social ostracism are facts of Wilhelminian social life and still a prevalent experience in the Weimar Republic. Although actually living according to those same prejudices against which the Porten figures were battling on screen, a broad public could still turn their attentions to these figures with great sympathy, for their fates were presented with feeling, with a super gloss, as a beautiful image.
When Henny Porten repeatedly portrays a passionate, often raging maternal love that overrides all else, she serves not just to domesticate women. She also vividly embodies a force capable of getting around the social order and providing the female viewers, above all, with a confirmation of their being. It also gives a graphic impression of that particular female productivity which not only influenced everyday life at home, but also became a new social factor in the war years”. (Knuth Hicketier, Mütterliche Venus und leidendes Weib, in Helga Belach (Hg.), Henny Porten. Der erste deutsche Filmstar 1890-1960, 1986)