Rosa von Praunheim, a key figure of the New German Cinema movement who made taboo-breaking films about queer life and scandalised the country when he outed German celebrities on live TV, has died aged 83.
German media reported that Praunheim died in Berlin in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just days after marrying his long-term partner at a ceremony in the German capital on Friday.
Born Holger Radtke in Riga in 1942, the film-maker adopted the female stage name Rosa von Praunheim in reference to the pink triangles (rosa winkel) that gay and bisexual men, and other “sexual offenders”, were made to wear as badges of shame in Nazi concentration camps.
After escaping East Germany in 1953, he studied fine arts in Offenbach and Berlin and began to make short films in the late 1960s. His second feature, entitled It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, premiered at the Berlin film festival in 1971 and has since been described as Germany’s “Stonewall moment”, radically breaking conventions in its portrayal of queer life in the federal republic.
Shot as a silent film and overlaid with socio-critical commentary, Von Praunheim’s cine-essay announced its intention “to make gay people more political”, and did so by aggressively criticising gay men who try to copy the lifestyles of heterosexual couples.
The film was broadcast on German public TV in 1973, though not in Bavaria, where regional broadcaster Bayerische Rundfunk showed a car racing film instead.
Rosa von Praunheim in 1984. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
Over the course of his career, Von Praunheim made more than 150 short films, features and documentaries, including on the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, fellow New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and his own mother.
His last film, Satanische Sau (Satanic Sow), screened at the Berlin film festival earlier this year, and was described by the director as “a dream, a parody, a farce of my life: poetic associations with my death, my sex life, my rebirth”.
Von Praunheim caused a major scandal in December 1991 when he went on live TV to out two male celebrities: the chatshow host Alfred Biolek and the comedian Hape Kerkeling. Neither of the two men had been told about his intervention in advance. German newspaper Bild called it a “betrayal”.
The film-maker later said his TV appearance was a “cry of despair at the Aids crisis”, occasioned by a close friend dying of the immunodeficiency virus shortly beforehand.
“I knew what I was doing”, he said in 2009. “People like Kerkeling and Biolek, who are famous and part of a group that is discriminated against, mobbed and beaten up, do not have a private life in the conventional sense. Their private life is always political.”
Kerkeling later told Der Spiegel that while he was initially mortified by the public outing, the German public’s reaction to the news of his sexual identity turned out to be “insanely normal”. Biolek, who died in 2021, later said Von Praunheim’s intervention had been painful but also liberating.
In a post on Instagram, the film-maker announced on Monday that he had married his long-term partner, Oliver Sechting, 50, at a ceremony in Berlin. A picture showed the two men each with a frog-shaped ring on his hand. Sechting had chosen the rings, Von Praunheim told news agency dpa, “because I once told him that I want to be reborn into my next life as a frog”.
