A second German lesbian item, _Die Schwester_, is a drama of 1924 which in style shows the influence of Wedekind. The author, Hans Kaltneker, takes care to present in a foreword his convictions about homosexuality: it represents the height of egotism, the antithesis of the Christian spirit, for to love one’s own sex is to withdraw from the common life of humanity and imprison oneself in a futile sterility. He doubtless felt it necessary to voice this reassurance because in the first act of the play his attitude to the heroine appears wholly sympathetic. The homosexual Ruth loves her young stepsister, Lo, but controls her feelings until chance throws them together for a night. She is subsequently cast out by her stepfather, and his daughter is hastily married to the first available man. Ruth then lives with a lesbian artist, whose ‘eyes and mouth were shadowed by black melancholy,’ and who tells her that lasting love is impossible for their sort—they can gain satisfaction only through debauchery. The two visit a homosexual tavern—presented symbolically after the fashion of Wedekind—and Ruth chooses among the commercial dancing partners a girl who resembles her lost stepsister. As she is very drunk, she imagines this is her sister’s spirit, and she “receives a message” that Lo really loves her, but advises her to abandon her vicious way of life and devote herself to helping other lost women. She later learns that Lo had died but a few moments before she received this mystic communication, and takes it for a supernatural revelation. Accordingly she becomes a nurse in a women’s hospital for veneral disease, but her unconcealable preference for the gentler, slim, young patients breeds antagonism, and when she herself becomes infected she is discharged. Too ill to work, she is violated by men and robbed even of her clothing. She ends in a woman’s prison where her dying act is to give her one remaining garment to an ungrateful drunken prostitute. Thus, she is redeemed through having sacrificed herself for others. In 1927 Frank Theiss, in _Interlude_, employed a lesbian episode to explain the failure of his hero’s first marriage. The wife had, at eighteen, been “entrapped” by an older woman highly esteemed in the community. “The enticements and snares must have been cunningly laid, for it was always unthinkable to Kurt ... that Sabina could have been in love with her.”[23] When, after six months or so, the affair came to light, “the furious father would certainly have called on the police authorities if any power of police or judiciaries could have helped,” a subtle thrust at the injustice of legal penalty for homosexual men as compared to none for women.