While it smoulders with indignation for the injustice that was perpetrated for so many years, Great Freedom is also a love story, a remarkable character study, and an absorbing meditation on what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul. He does so in a slow-burn drama that refuses to take the easy route towards an angry, emotionally manipulative issue film.
Austrian director Sebastian Meise turns his attention to what happened after the war in Great Freedom – in a supposedly open, democratic society that had turned its back on totalitarianism. This shocking chapter of German history was the subject of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 2000 documentary Paragraph 175, narrated by Rupert Everett – though that mainly focused on the Nazi persecution of gay men and women. Though it takes a while to build, patient viewers will be repaid with interest Many lost their jobs and there were dozens of suicides. Between the end of the Second World War and 1969, when the law was tempered by the introduction of an age of consent, more than a thousand men were imprisoned under the provisions of the clause every year. Introduced under the German Empire in 1872, it remained on the statute books all through the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era and the Federal Republic that followed, and was only finally repealed in 1994, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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Paragraph 175 was the section of the German criminal code which criminalised homosexual acts between males.