Sebastian Meise | Große Freiheit (Great Freedom) / 2021

home is where the heart is

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas Reider and Sebastian Meise (screenplay), Sebastian Meise (director) Große Freiheit (Great Freedom) / 2021

 

What most of the world is finally coming to perceive is that along with people of the Jewish faith and Roma individuals, the German Nazi concentration camps of World War II also contained many gay men and some few lesbians (even Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice Toklas, living in France, were at one point also threatened with possible arrest); most of the gay men were arrested on the basis of the German Criminal Code’s Paragraph 175 which criminalized sexual acts between men (not women). The paragraph read:

 

“Unnatural sexual acts (widernäturliche Unzucht) committed between persons of the male sex, or by humans with animals, is punishable with imprisonment; a loss of civil rights may also be sentenced.” 

 

     During the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin, the authorities basically chose to ignore this law unless the behavior between men became particularly notable and publicized and included “intercourse-like acts” (“beischlafsähnlich”) which became difficult for authorities not actually observing those acts to arrest homosexuals. The fact that the city’s numerous gay bars also attracted tourists and long-staying visitors to Berlin, also meant that the local government officials were lax in enforcing this law.

     Moreover, a great deal of literature and commentary by the likes of Magnus Hirschfeld and others called for the Paragraph’s deletion, and many important civic and political groups, including the moderate-left Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei), the radical Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), the pacifist German League for Human Rights (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte), and even the centrist German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei) supported the decriminalization of sexual relations between men.

     But as the Holocaust Encyclopedia notes: “However, there were also groups who advocated for making this statute stricter. Among them were various moderate and right-wing political parties and mainstream religious organizations. For example, the radically right-wing Nazi Party officially opposed any efforts to decriminalize sexual relations between men. Wilhelm Frick, a Nazi member of the Reichstag, stated in 1927 that ‘men committing unnatural sexual acts with men must be persecuted with utmost severity. Such vices will lead to the disintegration of the German people.’”

     With the rise of the Nazi Party other means were sought to target the homosexual community such as the closing of the bars, the arrestment of repeat offenders, and the shuttering of the gay and liberal presses.

     By 1935 the Nazis were able to complete revise the paragraph, which now read: “A man who commits sexual acts (Unzucht) with another man, or allows himself to be misused for sexual acts by a man, will be punished with prison.” In short, now any sexual act as opposed to “unnatural sexual acts” became a cause for arrest.

      Gay men were arrested for the slightest of infringements—even those who looked at or touched another man—and even tortured, at times, until they named other offenders at which time they and the others were sometimes murdered or sent off to the concentration camps.

     Soon after the Paragraph was broken into two parts, “a” and “b,” Part A listing the most egregious of acts: coercing another man to have sex; initiating sexual relations with a male subordinate or employee; having sexual relations with a male minor (under the age of 21); and engaging in prostitution with another man, now all crimes with punishment of up to ten years of hard labor and imprisonment, while Part B focused on bestiality involving men and women.

   We begin this film with another film, captured by secret cameras in public cottages (public bathrooms) much like the activities of various US police forces, particularly in the Midwest (an example reappropriated as a film by William E. Jones in the 1962/2007 Tearoom) during the 1950s and into the early 1960s.

     We thus begin this film with an obvious scene of mutual masturbation, followed by our “hero”  Hans Hoffmann (Franz Rogowski) giving and receiving fellatio, later showing him in anal intercourse with another man, and still later joining a cute boy in a stall presumably where they engaged in intercourse. Hans begins the film, accordingly, proven guilty, as he is sent off to prison.

     But we quickly perceive through plot developments, snippets of scenes from the past sparked by Hans’ being sent into the dark cell of solitary confinement for attempting to stop the harassment of his outside friend Oscar, that Hans had also been confined previously to a concentration camp.

     What most people are not aware of is that unlike the few surviving Jews and Roma people who were released in 1945 by the American soldiers, most of the men jailed for Paragraph 175 were reimprisoned by the Americas who had temporarily taken over the German prison systems. The gay men in the concentration camps were forced to continue their imprisonment under the law, often under men who felt just as hostile to them as had the Nazis.

    Hans Hoffman is just such a being, now brought back to the prison for his crimes in 1957, and again, as a repeat offender (for the crimes we see in the film) in 1968. Gay men were almost perpetually locked up until 1969 when Paragraph 175 was finally struck down.*

    In short, Hans spends most of his life being locked up, tortured in solitary confinement, and wily in his attempts to find sexual release with his lovers Oscar (who later commits suicide) and Leo, a teacher who, in fact, tells police that he was raped by Hans (the police do clearly do not fully believe him since he is now in prison as well). Hans’ crime is simply refusing to abstain from sex, insisting through his silence that he has right as a human being to seek out love.

     In Nolan Kelly’s essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Great Freedom and the Paradox of Desire and Repression,” the best of the essays I have read of this film, the critic describes just how remarkable is Franz Rogowski’s performance of the naïve yet totally aware, innocent and yet knowledgeable, resigned yet determined figure that Hans represents:

“Set almost entirely inside a West Berlin prison between 1945 and 1969, Great Freedom follows Hans as he serves several sentences for the crime of “deviant sexual practices” — gay acts criminalized under Paragraph 175 of the West German penal code. The film jumps around audaciously within these sentences, and the lack of access we have to Hans’s life before or between them effectively renders his imprisonment a constant state. Our best sense of chronology is derived from Rogowski’s physical form, as he goes from svelte and graying to shaven and gaunt and back again, replete with sideburns and a period-appropriate moustache. While the events inside the penitentiary are less a cumulative progression than a series of looped acts, Great Freedom goes to great lengths to maintain its sense of historical accuracy, setting each era apart whenever possible. This upkeep of verisimilitude is important, as the real-life inhumanity toward gay men in 20th-century Germany remains under-discussed to this day.”

    Yet this film is so much more that a true-to-life prison film. The very fact that Hans’ life is spent mostly behind bars reiterates his life outside of prison as well. He had already been imprisoned in some senses before being locked away. And in this knowledge he recognizes, just as Jean Genet had before him, expressed so brilliantly in his Un chant d’amour (1950), that as Kelly summarizes: “prison itself is a fantasy—a site which metaphorically enacts and erotically charges the conditions of homosexual desire in a world of entrenched homophobia. In Jean Genet’s [work]…the prison becomes an ideal setting for his themes of control, repression, domination, and longing — both the obstacle to and impetus for his characters’ furtive hopes of great freedom.

    If Hans often is able to concoct elaborate methods to meet up with his former lovers for sex in prison, he must also face the very forces of brutal male heterosexual homophobia that has made his life a prison. He comes face to face with that man, arrested for murder, in the person of his roommate Viktor Bikt, who, when he discovers his new roommate is there because of his homosexual behavior, he attempts to oust him from his jail cell.

   Guards are called, and Hans returned to Viktor’s neighboring bed. If we might expect further violence, we get a far different reaction when Viktor discovers the concentration camp number on his roommate’s arm.

    Viktor is an underground tattoo artist, and suddenly wonders whether Hans might want him to convert those terrible numbers—even he has heard indirectly from the Yanks how terrible the camps were—into a tattoo, perhaps like his, which is, absurdly, of a crude phallus (“almost identical,” as Kelly remind us, “to the cock that has been scratched into the young prisoner’s wall in Genet’s film). Since Hans works as in prison workhouse sewing bedsheets and Viktor sweats out his days in the prison kitchen, together they find the proper compounds and needles to accomplish the task. And so a kind of pact is made between the two.

   As in the Genet film, the two share not only tattoos, but the symbolic phallus symbols of cigarettes, the awarding and lighting of which become almost sexual events. Over the years, with Hans many returns, the two form a kind of buddy relationship which transcends sex and becomes a truly serious relationship.

    And just as quickly, when we discover that the reason Viktor is in prison is not because in was a Nazi soldier—in the war, he admits, he killed no one—but because when he returned home he killed the man who was sharing his female’s lover’s bed.

    This scenario, in turn, calls up another entire heterosexual/gay figure, the infamous Franz Bieberkopf originally from Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz made famous in cinema through Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 14-part television series from 1980. Bieberkopf, unlike Viktor, killed his female lover not another man, but the entire network into which Viktor is caught up parallels Bieberkopf’s descent into the madness of the Nazi world after his release from jail and calls up many associations including, at one point, Bieberkopf’s willingness to sell gay magazines just in order to survive. And through the influence of that work’s central gay figure, Reinhold, he too eventually embraces a world of homosexuality that would have been formerly unthinkable.

     If Genet’s work is a world of voyeuristic distances, Fassbinder’s film is always about the sinuousness of touch, the need for human sex. The two play off wonderfully in this film with Hans being the kind of fulcrum between the two: the man who refuses to accept the terms of separation the world has created for him. He has found his role in life despite society’s damnation, its attempts

to separate and distance men from one another. Hans is willing to hold his friend close as he vomits the poison out of his bowels, willing to find and destroy his friend’s drug paraphernalia, and finally in the dark of night willing to join his friend in bed, holding him close as he shivers and, presumably offering up the pleasures of sex to which Viktor has now become dependent as a substitute for drugs. Despite the societal attempt to end it, their relationship is no longer a matter even of gender but a product of genuine love.

     He is, finally, almost like the visitor of Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Teorema who, against all odds, has been able to bring spiritual and sexual joy to all those who are willing to accept his encounters.

     Yet suddenly, as the magazine Der Spiegel informs him, the government has once more pulled the rug out of his personal construction of paradise. It is 1969, and Paragraph 175 has been struck down; he is free.

     But what is this new freedom, this final “Great Freedom” all about. He visits a bar by that very name, seeing a man beckoning to him across the room to join him, as the man descends to the basement level of the bar. There, in a sprawling S&M setting is a world of bars, cigarette-smoking men in leather, and individuals playing out their sexual acts in dark corners of the room. This is a world he already knows, and offers nothing any longer to him. It is no freer than the world he has just left, still a world hidden away, that has created its own symbols of imprisonment for sexual titillation.

     Hans leaves the bar, walks down Berlin’s famous streets, picks up a brick, and breaks a window of an expensive jewelry store. He sits on the corner waiting for the police to come pick him up and take him back to prison where he has spent almost his entire and where he know that true love will be awaiting him.

     As Kelly nicely summarizes the situation:

 

“In Meise’s film, the relationship between Hans and Viktor could be read as a stand-in for the entire history of gay men and the straight world — a slow progression from abjection and abuse to negotiation and, finally, compelling mutual interest. The realization is passed, from one to the other, that both are locked up in the same cell of sexuality.”

 

*The various time spans in which Hans is imprisoned, the first with his then companion Oscar (Thomas Prenn), the second with the young man with whom he had bathroom sex in a toilet cabinet, Leo (Anton von Lucke), do somewhat confuse the viewer, who must sort out the different periods and try to comprehend why the basically uncommunicative Hans suffers arrestment again and again. It is only when his cellmate Victor Bix (Georg Friedrich) notices the camp number tattooed on Hans’ arm that we recognize that Hans has been in the camps and continued imprisonment, soon after, with American soldiers in charge.

     Not all viewers completely comprehended the clues. For example, noted critic Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in 2021 on the Roger Ebert site, observes:

 

“The opening credits show Hans taking part in sexual encounters that will become part of his rap sheet. These are imagined by Meise and his co-screenwriter Thomas Reider as mid-twentieth century porno films shot with a home movie camera, which gives them a keepsake quality. Sentenced for violating Paragraph 175, which forbade the expression of homosexual desire, he’s sent to prison, and the movie takes its time revealing that throughout the course of his life, he would keep returning there, being unable to repress who he is.

     We also find out that Hans is Jewish, and that his first sentence for violating Paragraph 175 was handed down immediately after his release from a concentration camp. The tattoos on his forearms become an integral part of one his two most important relationships behind bars. Hans’ cellmate, Viktor (Georg Friedrich), is a virulent homophobe who starts treating him like a pariah as soon as he learns why he’s behind bars. Viktor is an outcast of a different sort, doing time for drug offenses.”

 

   Seitz obviously misses the important fact that Hans was not in the camps for being Jewish (he most certainly might have died had he been), but because he had already at the time he had disobeyed Paragraph 175 and was sent to the camp as a gay man.

    I mention this not to embarrass Seitz but simply to point out that gay history has yet to percolate down to much of the general culture. One did not necessarily need to be Jewish to be incarcerated in the concentration camps, although obviously it was for the extermination of the Jews that the camps were created. But Roma and gay men were also perceived as hereditary degenerates worthy of extermination or often, in the case of gay men, subjected to medical experimentation to determine why they were “perverts.”

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).