They learned more about posturing. They viewed new forms of self-destructiveness. They saw the way an artwork could create a new vibration in the soul; the way it could play an ignorant game with the ultimate and still manage to evoke its own outline.

The urgency of their sexual focus on one another came and went. They conducted themselves as if, even late at night, they were still on display. They had a saying for it whenever they lingered too long in each other’s proximity: “The drapes are open.”

Their intimacy was based instead on talk about sex. They slumped on their Oriental divan working themselves into a quiet agitation that would thrum through them all night. They talked about the pitfalls of physicality, and how it circumvented reason. The ideal was “friendship love,” which didn’t bear the mark of greed or thoughtless gratification, but instead focused on the willingness to sacrifice and the well-being of the other.

They pursued such insights sitting side by side, with their hands in their pockets.

Their rhetoric came from the Society of Free Spirits, an offshoot of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in opposition to §175, the statute against Contrary Sexual Sensibility. But while Hirschfeld had been convinced that science, combined with the necessary public education, would lead to the repeal—Per scientia ad justiam—the Society had put its trust in strong individuals who measured life’s worth according to their own rules, free spirits who leaped all barriers and lived by their own authority, their goal the creation of a male culture. They would make no effort to generate pity, since that was an unmanly way of attempting to lift the criminal code.

Hans and Wilhelm had joined, though they kept their distance and only occasionally attended round tables on the creation of a lasting and noble society.

Still, they lived under the shadow of §175. Repeal was impossible. Who would even sign the petitions? A few years earlier, one of the Kaiser’s closest friends had been toppled by just the insinuation in a magazine that he deviated from the norm in psychicsexual terms.

They subscribed to Hirschfeld’s Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Tendencies. In the front were scholarly articles. In the back were press reports of convictions under §175, as well as for blackmail. The obituary page had a special subsection for suicides.