Das Ende des Schweigens

DAS ENDE DES SCHWEIGENS turns the Frankfurt homosexual trials of the early 1950s into a stark portrait of state persecution. At its center is Otto Blankenstein, a frightened young man whose arrest opens the film onto the fate of the men targeted alongside him. When police pick up Otto Blankenstein in Frankfurt in the summer of 1950, the notebook found on him becomes a tool of investigation. Pressured into becoming a crown witness, he gives the prosecution more than 200 names and addresses, and about 100 arrests follow, including that of former journalist Wolfgang Lauinger. The film links staged scenes with interviews from witnesses and experts to reconstruct the atmosphere of the period. It shows how men were pursued under § 175, how brief postwar breathing space in Frankfurt gave way to renewed hostility, and how legal discrimination continued across generations. Statements from Wolfgang Lauinger, who fought for the rehabilitation of men convicted under § 175 and for a reckoning with Nazi thinking in the early Federal Republic, and from historians such as Markus Velke give DAS ENDE DES SCHWEIGENS much of its force. Lauinger himself was denied compensation until his death. DAS ENDE DES SCHWEIGENS is a documentary drama about memory, injustice and hard-won freedom.