Fräulein Zahnarzt (1919)

Miss Grace Larsen, a dentist, is the daughter of old Larsen, a millionaire. Being the child of wealthy parents, she can easily afford to relieve her patients’ pain without charging them. Her black house servant, Bambula, is always ready to help her. Grace’s fiancé, Kay Roland, has an old-fashioned and very conservative view of women and does not want his future wife to work at all. In any case, he sees her dental practice as nothing more than a passing hobby. He also makes fun of Grace’s generosity and drags his fiancée to the Palace Theater, where a four-act comic farce called “The Husband of a Professional Woman” features a man mercilessly ridiculing his working wife. The woman depicted there is an artist. As she paints on a canvas, everything around her descends into chaos: one child howls, gets splashed with water by another child, and meanwhile the family dog has jumped onto the dining table and is cleaning the plates of all their food. When her beloved husband comes home, all he can do at the sight of this chaos is throw up his hands in despair. Grace is furious that both her fiancé and her father are having a wonderful time and applauding the play enthusiastically. When Roland then claims that she would not have a single patient if she charged for her services, she angrily leaves the theater. Kay Roland smugly assumes that once Grace runs out of money because of her generosity, she will come crawling back to him. In Kay’s brother Erik, who thinks highly of Grace, the young dentist quickly finds an ally. Through an employment agent named Fletscher, Erik arranges 20 patients who want to be treated by Miss Dentist. The plan is to take the wind out of Roland’s sails, but he quickly sees through the scheme and cuts off the flow of money to Grace and Erik, since the patients had been “bought” with his money. Grace is soon broke, as no paying patients come anymore, and her fiancé even has the nerve to have her furniture seized. At least agent Fletscher proves decent and gets Grace out of trouble by offering her a job at his company. After some back and forth, Grace and Kay reconcile, and the story’s reactionary moral suggests that Grace has been thoroughly “cured” of her desire to work: from then on, she intends to be content with the conventional role of a wife and homemaker.