As tens of thousands of gays and lesbians partied in the streets of Berlin at the weekend and the rainbow flag flew over the local town hall, it looked as if equality for homosexuals had arrived in the city where gay liberation was born a century ago.
The street festival started a day after three of Germany's federal states tabled a motion in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, calling for a complete end to legal discrimination against gay and lesbian couples. The bill would extend to same-sex partnerships all privileges now enjoyed by married couples, including the right to refuse to testify against one another in court and the right to adopt children.
Because gay partners have no special status under the law at present, police frequently decline to inform same-sex partners about an accident and doctors sometimes refuse to discuss medical details with anyone other than the next of kin. Many gay men who lost partners through AIDS have been shut out of funeral arrangements by blood relatives.
The proposal is likely to become law if Dr Helmut Kohl's centre-right government loses office in September's federal election, bringing Germany into line with Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, all of which have equal partnership laws.
But an international forum held in conjunction with the street festival offered a sharp reminder of how much remains to be achieved throughout Europe before equality becomes a reality for gay people. Two parliamentarians from Poland described a political atmosphere in which women politicians were afraid to be identified as feminists, let alone lesbians.
Sen David Norris surprised many of those present when he described the remarkable changes in Irish legislation governing sexual orientation in recent years. During a discussion on violence against gays, however, he said that much still needed to be done to persuade Irish society to accept gays and lesbians.
"Gay people in Irish society were grudgingly accepted as freaks but they were not accepted so readily as neighbours. This is now starting to change," he said.
A short walk from where the forum was held, a grubby little plaque outside Nollendorfplatz railway station commemorates some of Hitler's forgotten victims. A pink marble triangle, it bears the inscription: "Killed with Violence, Killed by Silence. To the Homosexual Victims of National Socialism."
According to Nazi statistics, 50,000 men were prosecuted under the anti-gay Paragraph 175 between 1933 and the end of the second World War, of whom about 10,000 were sent to concentration camps. Despite the flood of academic theses on the Third Reich published since 1945, not a single historian has studied the fate of gays in the camps.
Some of the victims have been identified through archive research undertaken by gay activists. We know, for example, that a shop assistant called Erwin Schimitzek was 23 when he was admitted to Auschwitz wearing the pink triangle and that he was dead five months later.
Most gays were incriminated by informers following raids on gay bars, of which Berlin boasted more than 100 before Hitler came to power, when gays such as Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden came there to find sexual freedom.
Unlike Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and gypsies persecuted by the Nazis, gay victims were not paid compensation by the German government after 1945. Conservative politicians argued that, since homosexuality was illegal both before and after the Nazi era, they were no more than common criminals.
Volker Beck, the Green Party spokesman on legal affairs, told Saturday's forum that he was outraged at the fact that new legislation rehabilitating victims of the Nazi justice system did not specifically identify gays among the victims.
Sen Norris suggested that other countries ought to also make amends for a history of injustice against gays and lesbians.
"Isn't it time there was reparation and penitence for the crimes committed against gay people? These crimes have been committed in every single European country at one level of intensity or another," he said.
