Section 175 of the German Criminal Code

Section 175 of the German Criminal Code enters the novel through a newspaper-selling encounter and a public lecture, where it is associated with the injustice experienced by gay people in Germany. Franz Biberkopf’s uneasy response brings the law’s social meaning into view: he hears about discrimination, attends a meeting, and leaves neither fully engaged nor untouched by what he has heard.

The provision and the human-rights appeal

A seller gives Franz a bundle of old magazines, including Women’s Love and Friendship, and points out that its contents concern a struggle for human rights. He invokes Section 175 of the German Criminal Code while directing Franz to a lecture at the Alexander-Palais in Landsberger Strasse. The passage presents the provision in the context of injustice suffered by gay people; it does not set out the law’s wording or explain its operation in detail.

The seller describes the lecture as an account of the injustice endured by a million people in Germany every day. That figure is part of his appeal to Franz, not an independently established statistic in the episode. The scene makes the magazine bundle a prompt for public discussion: Franz has been handed material he does not understand well and is being asked, in effect, to carry it beyond the transaction and hear what its subject means to those affected.

Franz at the lecture

Franz departs uncertainly, troubled by the subject and reluctant to involve himself. Nevertheless, he goes to the meeting. He sits for about an hour in a small room occupied mostly by young men, with a few women present in couples, saying nothing and grinning behind his hat. After ten o’clock he leaves, still treating the gathering as strange and comic. His discomfort is not presented as considered opposition to the people there; rather, the scene shows how unfamiliarity and social distance shape his first response.

As he leaves, Franz hears about a police regulation in Chemnitz, issued on November 27. The speaker says that same-sex couples are forbidden to go out onto the street or into public conveniences there, and that those caught face a fine of 30 marks. The novel reports this as a local police restriction discussed at the lecture, not as the text of Section 175 itself. Keeping the two distinct matters clear, the episode places the criminal-code reference alongside a concrete example of police control over public life.

Sympathy, distance, and the law’s presence

The next morning Franz has the magazines with him and intends to tell Lina what people like those at the lecture have to endure, including the Chemnitz restriction and its 30-mark fine. At the same time, he falls back on the view that the matter is none of his business and that the people involved should go away with their laws. His planned conversation and his dismissive impulse coexist: the lecture has given him facts he means to pass on, but it has not resolved his sense of distance from the subject.

Section 175 of the German Criminal Code is therefore significant here less as a fully explained statute than as the point around which a brief encounter with rights, stigma, and state restriction gathers. Franz’s movement from the seller’s appeal to the lecture, and then back toward ordinary conversation with Lina, makes the provision part of the novel’s street-level world of newspapers, public meetings, and uneven attention to other people’s hardships.