‘Great Freedom’ and the Long Shadow of an Anti-Gay Law in Germany
BERLIN — A turning point arrives for Viktor and Hans, the central characters in the new film “Great Freedom,” when Viktor sees the concentration camp tattoo on Hans’s arm.
It’s 1945, and Viktor has already forcibly thrown Hans out of the cell they share in a German prison after learning that Hans was jailed for having sex with men.
But when Viktor, an ice block of a man with a murder conviction, discovers the tattooed number, he offers to give Hans a new design to cover up the past. “They put you from a concentration camp into the slammer?
Seriously?” Victor (Georg Friedrich) stammers in disbelief, more to himself than to Hans (Franz Rogowski). The fictional character of Hans, liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II only to be sent directly to prison, is based on a chilling and often overlooked chapter in German postwar history.
