New
York Times, 9/13/00
'Paragraph
175': Condemned by the Nazis, but Not for Religion
By LAWRENCE
VAN GELDER
To
the growing body of invaluable cinematic literature documenting
for posterity the hideous barbarity of Nazism may now be added
"Paragraph 175."
At once
admirable and deeply unsettling, this film draws upon the
testimony of little more than a handful of the all-but-vanished
ranks of survivors to relate the horror of the Nazi purge
of homosexuals from the life of Germany and the aftereffects
that scar and roil these men as the 21st century begins.
"I am
ashamed for humanity," says one of the survivors as he recounts
his personal ordeal and the horrors visited on those he knew.
"Paragraph
175," opening today at the Film Forum, was directed by Rob
Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Together they won an Academy
Award for their documentary "Common Threads: Stories From
the Quilt," after Mr. Epstein won an Oscar, among many other
awards, for "The Times of Harvey Milk," which will be revived
at the Film Forum, starting on Friday.
This year
their new documentary, to run through Sept. 26, won the grand
jury award for directing at the Sundance Film Festival and
the International Film Critics Association Award at the Berlin
International Film Festival.
"Paragraph
175," using new and archival film, family photographs and
narration by the actor Rupert Everett, takes its title from
a portion of the German penal code enacted in 1871: "An unnatural
sex act committed between persons of male sex or by humans
with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil
rights may also be imposed."
This provision,
expanded by the Nazis, remained law in West and East Germany
until nearly the end of the 1960's. Some of the film's witnesses
were rearrested under this law after the defeat of the Nazis.
During the years of the Weimar Republic, between the end of
World War I and the rise of Hitler, Paragraph 175 was rarely
enforced, and the Berlin of the 1920's was, in the words and
images of the film, "a homosexual Eden."
According
to the filmmakers, who drew upon German records and were assisted
by Klaus Muller, a German historian and the project director
for Western Europe for the United States Holocaust Museum,
about 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality between
1933, when Hitler assumed power, and 1945, when World War
II ended. About half were sentenced to prison; 10,000 to 15,000
were sent to concentration camps, and by the end of the war,
only about 4,000 of those in the camps had survived. Of the
eight known to be alive, six appear in "Paragraph 175."
Because
women were regarded by the Nazis as vessels of motherhood,
lesbians were spared mass arrest. Some chose exile; others
entered into marriages with gay men. Only one woman, who escaped
to England, tells her story in the film.
Mr.
Muller, the film's associate producer and director of research,
notes that he grew up in Germany without ever hearing of the
persecution of its gays.
Among
the male survivors seen in "Paragraph 175," one tells of torture;
another recalls a daring but vain attempt to rescue his lover
from a Gestapo camp by donning a Hitler Youth uniform; a third
remembers his years in concentration camps; and yet another
tells how he was released from prison during the war only
to find that all the men were gone. So, he says, he joined
the German Army because "that's where the men were."
And
one of them tells of "the singing forest," where the agony
of gay men subjected to torture wailed from the poles on which
they were hanging.
For
generations to come, "Paragraph 175" lets them be heard.
PARAGRAPH
175
Directed
by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman; written (in English,
German and French, with English subtitles) by Sharon Wood;
director of photography, Bernd Meiners; edited by Dawn Logsdon;
music by Tibor Szemzo; produced by Mr. Epstein, Mr. Friedman,
Michael Ehrenzweig and Janet Cole; released by New Yorker
Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village.
Running time: 81 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH:
Rupert Everett (Narrator) and Gad Beck, Heinz Dörmer, Pierre
Seel, Heinz F., Annette Eick and Albrecht Becker.
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