“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. 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.
