Hamburg boy Hubert Fichte, an aspiring theater actor, meets the writer Hans Henny Jann in 1949, and he takes him under his wing and even wants to adopt him.

The novel “An Essay on Puberty”, which Fichte wrote in 1974, is built on the scheme of a voodoo ritual of evoking the dead and is an homage to Jann and German gays, whose lives in those years were still regulated by a discriminatory law preserved from Nazi times.

Fichte was the first of the German writers with such spoke openly about homosexuality. Then, it seemed, there were no suitable words for this, and Fichte was partly guided by the poetics of Jean Genet. And, like Genet, he was an author who was not ready for compromise.

The rituals of African-American cults, which Fichte studied in Brazil and Haiti, are intertwined with the rituals of homosexuals. Post-war Hamburg in the space of the experimental novel “An Essay on Puberty” is located not far from Salvador, a city where children are sacrificed to the harsh gods and where human life is worthless.