Rosa von Praunheim, the German film-maker whose provocative work broke taboos around queer life and whose 1971 feature was hailed as the country's 'Stonewall moment', has died in Berlin at the age of 83. German media reported that he died in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just days after marrying his long-term partner, Oliver Sechting, at a ceremony in the capital on Friday.
Born Holger Radtke in Riga in 1942, he adopted the name Rosa von Praunheim, a reference to the pink triangles that gay and bisexual men were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps. After escaping East Germany in 1953, he studied fine arts in Offenbach and Berlin and began making short films in the late 1960s. His second feature, 'It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives', premiered at the Berlin film festival in 1971 and was considered a radical break with cinematic conventions in its portrayal of gay life.
Shot as a silent film with socio-critical commentary, the work aimed to 'make gay people more political' by condemning gay men who sought to imitate heterosexual lifestyles. It was broadcast on public television in 1973, though not in Bavaria, where a car racing film was shown instead. Over his career, von Praunheim made more than 150 films, including documentaries on sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, fellow 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 him as 'a dream, a parody, a farce of my life'.
Von Praunheim caused a scandal in 1991 when he outed chatshow host Alfred Biolek and comedian Hape Kerkeling on live television without their prior knowledge. He later said the intervention was a 'cry of despair at the Aids crisis' after a close friend died of the disease. Kerkeling said the public reaction to his outing was 'insanely normal', while Biolek, who died in 2021, called it painful but liberating.
On Monday, von Praunheim announced on Instagram that he had married Sechting, 50. He told the dpa news agency that Sechting had chosen frog-shaped rings for the ceremony because von Praunheim had once said he wanted to be reborn as a frog in his next life.
