ABSTRACT
In his 1918 book Flimmeritis: What everybody needs to know about cinema, film journalist Egon Jacobsohn defined Flimmeritis as an ‘undeviating desire to become a movie star’ and as ‘a modern epidemic plague, that all of a sudden afflicts normally pretty harmless and sensible citizens and causes boisterous agitation and dangerous insanity’. 1 As early as 1917, Jacobsohn, who was the editor of the German fan magazine Illustrierte Kinowoche, had already published an article in which he made fun of the numerous German women who were seized by Flimmeritis.
