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He is gaunt and feeble, with a number tattooed on his forearm. Thrown into solitary confinement in one scene in 1968, he emerges from the darkness into 1945. Its ingenious flashback structure allows us to see Hans during other spells of imprisonment. It is their enduring bond, their acts of selflessness and sacrifice, that suffuse the film with hope where it might have been simply harrowing. If Hans doesn’t look perturbed by his sentence, that’s because he knows he will be reunited with his old cellmate Viktor, played by Georg Friedrich. A ‘pink list’ of gay men, compiled by the Nazis, was still in use in the late 1970s Meise used Tearoom, William E Jones’s film containing footage of a real-life 1960s sting operation in the American midwest, as a reference point. Shot by police from behind a two-way mirror, the Super-8 footage of his cottaging exploits carries the frisson of a peep show.
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When we first meet him, he is being sent down in 1968 for lewd conduct in a public toilet. In Great Freedom, this is the fate of Hans, played by Franz Rogowski, who spends most of his adult life behind bars. Some men who had been imprisoned in concentration camps were simply transferred straight to prison following the end of the war. But in this case, they were on the same level as the Third Reich.” For me, they’ve always been the liberators – they freed us from fascism. “It’s absurd the lengths the state went to in persecuting these men. “But 175 just continued.” A “pink list” of known gay men, which the Nazis had compiled, was still in circulation by the late 1970s, Meise says. “Other laws were reset after the war to how they had been before the Nazis,” explains Sebastian Meise, the film’s 46-year-old Austrian director, when we meet in a London office. As well as remaining in force for more than a century, Paragraph 175 exposed a tacit accord between the Nazis – who lowered the threshold for punishment while raising the sentence – and the postwar liberating forces.
ALL GAY MEN MOVIES CODE
But as the award-winning new film Great Freedom makes clear, it was in fact a vindictive article of the German penal code that criminalised male homosexuality and blighted the lives of 140,000 men, more than a third of whom received prison sentences. A minor piece of legislation, perhaps, or part of those terms and conditions that any one of us would be forgiven for skimming over.