There is only one hopeful scene in "Different from the Others," a silent picture from 1919 that is widely considered the first feature film about gay love. In it, a gaunt, handsome man plays the piano in his Berlin drawing room. He is Paul Körner, a violin virtuoso, and, in his silk housecoat, surrounded by heavy drapery and Grecian statuettes, he appears to live a life that is resplendent but lonely.
The film makes another argument: that hatred can fester even in the interstices of liberal democracies. On the surface, tolerance prevailed in Weimar Germany. If you were careful enough, you could evade the shadow of Paragraph 175, an infamous law that forbade “unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or of humans with beasts.
It is not the state that is responsible for Körner’s downfall, at least not directly: in keeping with the subterranean hatred of Weimar Berlin, convictions under the anti-sodomy law often began with extortionists who operated within the demimonde itself. The villain of “Different from the Others” is the smirking Franz Bollek, played by the well-known film star Reinhold Schünzel, who passes Kurt and Paul on a wooded path in a city park.
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