After witnessing Fräulein von Bernburg's compassion for the other girls, Manuela develops a passionate love for her teacher.

Shortly after, Ilsa von Westhagen, another student, writes a letter to her parents about the conditions of the school and has a worker smuggle it out.

Upon leaving Fräulein's von Bernburg's office, Manuela prepares to jump from several stories up in the main staircase.

After Leipzig the play was produced on the stage in Berlin as Gestern und Heute[2] with a different cast and a more prominent lesbian theme, which was again toned down somewhat for the film.

The film's original working title was Gestern und heute (Yesterday and Today) but this was thought too insipid and changed to increase the chances of box-office success.

The film was groundbreaking in having an all-female cast; in its sympathetic portrayal of lesbian "pedagogical eros" (see Gustav Wyneken) and homoeroticism, revolving around the passionate love of a fourteen-year-old (Manuela) for her teacher (von Bernburg); and in its co-operative and profit-sharing financial arrangements (although these failed).

The film had some impact in the Berlin lesbian clubs, but was largely eclipsed by the ongoing cult success of The Blue Angel (1930).

The goodnight kiss Hertha Thiele (Manuela) received from Dorothea Wieck (Fräulein von Bernburg) was especially popular.

Despite the collective nature of the filming for which cast and crew received only a quarter of the normal wage, none saw a share of the six million Reichsmarks and Thiele later hinted that the profits had been mostly retained by the producers.

Eventually even this version of the film was banned as "decadent" by the Nazi regime, which reportedly attempted to burn all of the existing prints.

Mädchen in Uniform (1958) was directed by Géza von Radványi and starred Lilli Palmer, Romy Schneider, and Therese Giehse.

Other films that were inspired by the themes in Mädchen in Uniform are Lost and Delirious (Lea Pool, Canada 2001) and Loving Annabella (Katherine Brooks, 2006).

"[7] Many people have refuted this argument however, including Nina Zimink who agrees that the bugle fair does symbolize that not everything is perfect after the departure of the headmistress, states that they signify "optimistic political development" [clarification needed][8] in a world that is quite bleak.

Rich, who championed the film as unabashedly queer, states that "intrusion to the film is an antidote to viewing this all-female space as a "free zone" within a patriarchal society, which can be seen to dominate not only in the concrete form of the staircase or Principal, but in the equally threatening form of external authority that waits just outside the school gates".

On October 1, 1931, a ban was placed on Mädchen in Uniform at the first inspection committee showing which forbad young people from viewing.

During the National Socialist rule in Germany, Mädchen in Uniform was banned by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda.

In 1978, Janus Films and Arthur Krim arranged for a limited re-release in the US in 35mm, including a screening at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco.

Stephen Spender, an English poet and novelist who was a close friend of the writer Christopher Isherwood, was immensely critical of texts like the musical Cabaret, based on Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, stating that "there is not a single meal, or club, in the movie Cabaret, that Christopher and I could have afforded.

"[13] Amanda Lee Koe stated in an essay that accompanied the release of the Criterion edition, that "This film belongs to women who are trying to find themselves—and each other—in spite of repressive structures".