Imagine a world where love is forbidden by law and punished with imprisonment. What sounds like a dystopia was reality for gay men in Germany till the late 1960s. Paragraph 175 allowed the state to persecute homosexuals, which it did with great effort and meticulousness. This significant historical fact was completely new to me until I read reports about gay men who were liberated from concentration camps by the Allies, but were transferred straight to prison to serve their remaining sentences. Their persecution would not be over for them for decades. This was the starting point of our story. Our main character, Hans, exemplifies the many fates of men who ended up in prison over and over again, whose lives and relationships were destroyed, and whose stories disappeared in the files of bureaucracy. Hans’ story is told based on his imprisonments. The walls and bars become a recurring constant that turns into a never-ending time loop. Hans can’t stop being who he is. He needs to continue because love is the essence of human nature. His very existence is rebellion.

In prison, of all places, Hans finally finds love. And of all the people he could possibly imagine, he finds it with Viktor, a convicted murderer. In a tentative rapprochement, these two men, who could not be more different, learn to respect each other and eventually become confidants. Over the decades, an unexpected intimacy grows between them, and in the end they find themselves in a relationship that eludes definition. These two men, who are stigmatized for life, meet in their longing for love and freedom. A longing that, however strong the oppression may be, will always find a way.

For 123 years, Paragraph 175 criminalized homosexuals. Those convicted were sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. During the postwar years 100,000 men were brought to trial in West Germany alone.

Paragraph 175 allowed authorities to intercept and confiscate love letters and to submit them to the court as evidence as well as to install cameras behind mirrors, encroaching on the privacy of these men, revealing their intimate lives, and exposing delicate personal details to the public. A scenario reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984.

Surveillance, blackmail, denunciation, torture, and murder. What had been imposed and executed by the judiciary during the Third Reich was condoned or tolerated in the postwar years. §175, which gave generations of  gay men a name – 175er meant homosexual – did not continue to exist by oversight but was, over the decades, repeatedly examined, certified, and confirmed.

Thus for homosexuals, the liberation by the Allies did not mean freedom. Paragraph 175 (*1872) was made harsher by the Nazis and adopted unaltered by postwar Germany, so that concentration camp prisoners were transferred directly to prison in order to finish serving their lawful sentences.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that gay men were not very empathetic and kept a low profile in the ’50s and ’60s. Being homosexual was itself a criminal offense. And until 1992, it was officially considered a mental illness.

The total ban on homosexuality remained in place until 1969. But it would take another 25 years for Paragraph 175 to completely disappear from the German civil code in 1994.

On July 22, 2017, Germany rehabilitated the postwar victims of Paragraph 175. Only a few lived to see this day. Depending on geography, discrimination, stigmatization, ostracism, criminalization, punishment, and the killing of homosexuals still prevails: one out of three countries punishes homosexuality.