By Chris Vognar. As the film explains, the SA had a strong homoerotic element, a disgust with women and femininity they somehow used to justify homosexuality β for a time, anyway. The film never comes out and yells it, but it is also a reminder of the Final Solution tenor that still accompanies much anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric and, increasingly, policy.
The reenactments are strikingly lit and acted, bringing the scene to life and enhancing the specificity of the time and place. The Nazis were nothing if not prolific self-chroniclers. But the film makes its greatest impact through the individual stories weaved throughout the bigger picture, the internal conflicts, the passions shared, the lives destroyed.
Some of the main characters are well-known. Gottfried von Cramm was the pride of German tennis β handsome, blond and blue-eyed, and the No. He was also a bohemian spirit who had a passionate homosexual relationship with Manasse Herbst, a Galician Jewish actor who fled Germany in The Reich was willing to look the other way as long as Cramm played the good Aryan and kept winning. Others here are less famous.
Hirschfeld, a groundbreaking sexologist, both gay and Jewish and therefore a prime target of Nazi Germany, was thankfully not present when his institute was ransacked by marauding Nazi youth here again, there are photos.
An early proponent of LGBTQ rights, he was forced into exile in France, where he died in , before the very worst that his country ultimately committed.
