Throughout history many people have been criminalised for who they are, the criminality of someone’s personhood has historically been drawn across lines of class, race, gender and sexuality. The LGBTQ+ community itself has a long history of criminalisation. Be it the laws that prohibited people from being seen as dressing in a fashion not belonging to their sex/gender, anti-sodomy laws, and so on. Great Freedom depicts one of these acts of criminalisation, one that is often forgotten in the wider history of human cruelty.
After the liberation of concentration camps at the end of WW2, many were handed back their freedom, but gay men were moved from the camps and straight into prisons to serve out the rest of their sentences. Great Freedom follows Hans Hoffman, one such man, through the years as he finds himself imprisoned again and again for the crime of loving and having sex with other men.
We follow Hans through three sentences in prison, while not chronological as the story is framed and centred around his stay from 1968-69, we’re also given insights into his stays in 1945 and 1957. The focus of the narrative is the relationship between Hans and his first cellmate Viktor. We watch as their relationship develops from hostility and into open affection and possibly love.
In their first meeting, Hans is emaciated and timid, clearly traumatised by his time in the camps. At first Viktor is somewhat enraged to find that his new cellmate is a gay man, seeing Hans’ offense under his name on their cell door, and for a time they keep their distance. This doesn’t last as Viktor comes to learn more about Hans as a person, and his compassion seeps through. While sharing cigarettes Viktor offers to cover up Hans’ camp tattoo.
The instruments Viktor uses to tattoo Hans are found by the prison guards and both of them are punished with solitary confinement, in a dark room with nothing but a bucket and divested of their clothes, a place similar to the one the allies liberated Hans from. He is violently forced to comply and experience that trauma all over again.
Hans’ second stay is in 1957, he is arrested along with his boyfriend Oskar. They are separated and unable to speak to each other. Hans devises a way to communicate through code in a bible, he enlists Viktor to deliver the message – the book – to Oskar’s cell, and in return Viktor requests a blowjob. The message is delivered and they’re able to meet, but Oskar cannot share in Hans’ emphatic optimism and finds that he can’t see a future where they’re free to be who they are.
Oskar jumps from the roof, killing himself. Hans learns of Oskar’s death from Viktor while they’re in the yard and collapses, bereft. Viktor allows himself to show sympathy for Hans, he comforts Hans and berates the guards for trying to punish him for his grief. Hans is dragged into solitary confinement again.
In his last sentence, Hans has been caught on film, as part of a sting operation, having casual sex with men in a public bathroom. While in prison he starts something of a relationship with another young man who was caught with him. Viktor reminds Hans of what happened the last time, and Hans lets the relationship go, helping them to have their sentence overturned and released from prison.
Hans stays behind and, after managing to once again become Viktor’s cellmate, helps Viktor get clean off the drugs he’s become addicted to. Over their time as cellmates, their relationship turns toward romance and even becomes physical. Hans begins to talk of escape and Viktor shoots it down.
In 1969 Paragraph 175, the law that Hans is being held under and which makes it illegal for men to perform ‘homosexual acts’ together, is revised and Hans is released.
After spending so long in prison, under the thumb of criminality, Hans doesn’t seem to know what to do with his freedom. Hans visits a bar that is heaving with men. He goes from room to room, seemingly searching for something, and catches the eye of another. Following the man down into the bowels of the building, moving through the cold stone halls of what appears to have once been a kind of jail, and Hans passes by men in the middle of various sexual acts. Before he catches up with the man he’d been following, Hans changes his mind and leaves.
In the final moments of the film, Hans breaks the window of a jewellery store, pockets whatever he can get his hands on and waits patiently on the curb for the police to arrive as the store’s alarm blares behind him. And as the credits roll we’re left to assume that Hans intends to return to prison and to Viktor, to return to what he knows, understands and can make sense of.
The way criminality, the law and prison has shaped these two men, changing them slowly over time, beating them into the desired shape and cutting off all of the unwanted pieces, stunts and stifles them and their humanity. It is no accident that after so long staying in captivity, Viktor seems far more free and sure of himself than Hans does with his intermittent freedom. But there’s an important difference between them. Viktor knows that what he did was wrong, while Hans knows that who he is cannot be morally wrong. There is a large difference between doing something reprehensible and being punished for it, and being yourself and being told that who and what you are is wrong and that entire parts of you must be suppressed and eradicated. In this sense, Hans has never before felt true freedom, even while outside of prison, and finds that after all this time dreaming for freedom, that he cannot do as the free do.
Great Freedom is an indictment of a society that has criminalised, and continues to criminalise, people for fundamental aspects of their being and the horrific treatment this criminalisation entails. How can you be free, when you don’t know what it means?
The Captive Returns 