An angel against forgetting
An angel with a broken neck: in 1994, Frankfurt received Germany's first memorial to persecuted homosexuals.
On 11 December 1994, Frankfurt am Main received a memorial of a kind Germany had never had before. After a ceremony in St Paul's Church, the "Frankfurter Engel" (Frankfurt Angel) was unveiled to the public on Klaus-Mann-Platz. It was the first free-standing sculptural memorial in the country to explicitly commemorate the persecution of homosexual men and women under National Socialism.
The idea came not from the city but from the community. A small group of activists had launched the project four years earlier and founded an association specially for it. The competition was eventually won by the Cologne-based artist Rosemarie Trockel.
At first glance, her design seems unremarkable. Her model was an old angel figure that once adorned the west portal of Cologne Cathedral. Trockel cut off the figure's head and put it back on slightly offset. The break at the neck remains visible. Anyone who looks closely recognises an injury that can no longer be undone.
On the plinth is a text that still resonates today. The crimes, it says, were denied, the dead were passed over in silence and the survivors were despised. That is no exaggeration. Paragraph 175, tightened by the Nazis, remained in force in the Federal Republic for decades. Only in June 1994, just six months before the unveiling, did it finally disappear from the criminal code.
The location was also chosen deliberately. The small square lies in the middle of Frankfurt's gay quarter, between bars and a cinema. The remembering happens not on the outskirts, but exactly where queer life takes place.
Frankfurt led the way. Cologne followed a year later with the "Rosa Winkel" (Pink Triangle) on the banks of the Rhine, Berlin only in 2008 with the memorial in the Tiergarten. The inscription ends with a warning: men who love men and women who love women can be persecuted again at any time.