After 16 years' experience on stage, the actor and playwright Curt Goetz (1888-1960) made his debut as a film director and producer with the silent movie Friedrich Schiller - Eine Dichterjugend (1923). Writing razor sharp dialogue was his profession; acting comic parts in the theatre - without having to renounce speech - was his craft. And that is why the silent cinema presented such a special artistic challenge to Goetz, a task whose accomplishment was prompted by a difficult subject: the poet Friedrich Schiller's adolescence. An enthusiast of the spoken word makes a movie about the early life of a powerfully eloquent poet, but has to eschew the cadence of poetry. Under such circumstances, the artistic potential of a film director must prove itself.
In his film version, Curt Goetz shifts the focus away from the poetic output towards the young Friedrich Schiller himself: on the misery of his soul whilst a pupil of the ducal military academy, his opposition to the strict physical drill and the narrow intellectual confines of the "Karlsschule", his juvenile passion for the works of Shakespeare, Klopstock and Lessing, his anger at unjust authorities, his devotion to women, and finally his inability to cope with financial matters. Curt Goetz presumes that these facets of the artist's life are the source of all anger and distress. It is the same affection with which the lead actors in Schiller's debut "The Robbers" confronted the audience at the 1782 Mannheim premiere. The audience acclaimed the play, but in his homeland the young Schiller was banned from writing and was forced to flee.
The director Curt Goetz allows the actors to perform almost without pathos, which turns out to be a suitable cinematic device. The leading roles of the opponents are taken by Theodor Loos (Friedrich Schiller) and Hermann Vallentin (Duke Karl Eugen von Württemberg). The intertitles and Schiller's occasionally colourful behaviour leave no doubt about his Swabian origins. Such characterisation is sometimes achieved by the director's habit of using puns in the intertitles, the kind of jokes audiences enjoyed in subsequent talkies such as the comedies Napoleon ist an allem schuld, Das Haus in Montevideo, or Hokuspokus.

Wunder der Schöpfung is an extraordinary, fascinating Kulturfilm trying to explain the whole human knowledge of the 1920s about the world and the universe. 15 special effects experts and 9 cameramen were involved in the production of this film which combines documentary scenes, historical documents, fiction elements, animation scenes and educational impact. It its beautifully colored, using tinting and toning in a very elaborated way. Some visual ideas in the sequences with a space shuttle visiting different planets in the universe seem to have to be the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In the context of Germany's Kulturfilm phenomenon, Wunder der Schöpfung was among the greatest achievements of the 1920s. The production was constructed, rehearsed, and shot over a period of two and a half years, under the supervision of Hanns Walter Kornblum. The idea to describe the universe and man's place in it well suited UFA's Grossfilm mentality, one year before the Metropolis catastrophe. Hundreds of skilled craftsmen participated in the project, building props and constructing scale models drawn by 15 special effects draughtsmen, while 9 cameramen in separate units worked on the historical, documentary, fiction, animation, and science-fiction sequences. Without star roles or even protagonists, the film's plot is crowded with meticulously structured and skillfully acted single scenes an artful mosaic of small vignettes. No less than four credited university professors ensured the factual background behind the scientific and historical events portrayed.
The film's symbol of progress and the new scientific era is a spacecraft, travelling through the Milky Way, making all the planets and their inspiring worlds familiar to us, with the extravaganza of their distinctive features. The film's educational intentions, however, become steadily more obscure, humorous, or even campy as this popularization project proceeds. With the excuse of presenting the end of the world a not-so-new concept as a new, undeniably scientific truth, the film veers happily along a new path, displaying detailed apocalyptic scenes of the end of mankind. For today's audiences, this amazing film demonstrates how the universe was comprehended in the 1920s, and how that view was sold to contemporary audiences.