Men Without Work: Imaginaries of Traffickers in Women in the Euro-Mediterranean Space Between Violence and Entertainment, 1920–43

From the 1920s, newspapers frequently published sensationalist stories about the “traffic in women” while the film industry capitalized on public intrigue by producing films that dramatized this phenomenon. One such film, Men without Work, directed by German filmmaker Harry Piel in 1929 and recently restored in 2024, leveraged the popular fascination with human trafficking as a gripping detective story. Set against the backdrop of Marseille – an ethnically diverse city and a “gateway to Africa” – the film follows a detective unraveling an internationally connected trafficking ring. Narratives such as this one often depicted young blonde women being violently coerced into prostitution by cunning pimps and traffickers who transported them to destinations such as South America and North Africa. Similar themes surfaced in the sensationalist reports of the French journalist Albert Londres and the League of Nations’ official investigations into the traffic in women in 1927. The topic of trafficking and the figure of the trafficker continued to play a significant role in the Nazi press and propaganda throughout the 1930s, culminating in the reporting accompanying the roundups, deportations and destruction of Marseille’s Old Port in 1943.

This paper examines narratives about the “traffic in women” in the Euro-Mediterranean space in the German and French movies and press. Special attention is given to the orientalist gaze and the portrayal of Jewish traffickers. The stories about Marseille and North African settings – often featuring oases and the French Foreign Legion – not only provided lighthearted entertainment but also reinforced constructions of Europeanness, whiteness and, ultimately, “racial purity” at the same time. By analyzing these depictions, this paper contributes to an understanding of how media and political discourse framed the “traffic in women” as a reason for moral panic while expressing entangled anxieties about race, sexuality, empire, and transnational crime.