Rosa von Praunheim was born in a Latvian prison. 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.
Rosa von Praunheim (1942-2025) Photo: Imago/DepositphotosThe last time Rosa von Praunheim appeared in public—at his wedding to Oliver Sechting on 12 December in Berlin—he stood surrounded by close friends and companions, having proposed in September to the man with whom he’d shared his life. He died five days later, on 17 December 2025, at the age of eighty-three, peacefully, in the city that had been his stage for more than half a century. He was, until the very end, unrepentant.
The news travelled swiftly through Berlin’s artistic circles, reaching the Schloss Bellevue by evening. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in a public message of condolence to von Praunheim’s husband, wrote: ‘The news of Rosa von Praunheim’s sudden death has made me very sad’. It was an extraordinary gesture—the head of state honouring a man who had spent his life dismantling the very structures of propriety and respectability that such offices traditionally represent. Steinmeier described him as ‘one of the best-known, most effective and most committed artists’ in Germany, noting that ‘without his work, the history of homosexual emancipation in Germany would have been different’ . Many people, the President observed, owed von Praunheim a great deal—even if they didn’t even know his work.
This was, after all, the man who had once declared that ‘not the homosexual is perverse, but the society in which he lives’—the title of his 1971 film that exploded post-Stonewall activism in the early 1970s. The documentary, raw and deliberately crude, rejected the assimilationist pieties that had characterised earlier gay rights movements. Von Praunheim wasn’t interested in polite appeals to tolerance; he wanted revolution, and he understood that cinema could be a weapon as effective as any street demonstration.
Born Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky, in 1942 in Riga Central Prison in German-occupied Latvia during the Second World War, his origin story carried intimations of wartime trauma and social marginalisation that would haunt his work like a ghost in the machinery. His biological mother died in 1946 in the Wittenauer Heilstätten, a psychiatric hospital in Berlin. He only learnt these facts decades later, discovering the truth about his adoption when his adoptive mother, Gertrud Mischwitzky, told him in 2000. The quest to uncover his biological mother’s fate, documented in his 2007 film Two Mothers, became one of his most personal works.
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Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
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He rechristened himself Rosa von Praunheim—Rosa for the pink triangle that homosexuals were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps, Praunheim for the Frankfurt neighbourhood where he grew up —transforming his identity into an act of defiant theatricality. In the mid-1960s, he adopted this female stage name to remember the Pink triangle (Rosa Winkel) , making his very existence a political statement.
The films that followed his breakthrough were exercises in calculated offence: garish, campy, politically combustible works that treated homosexuality not as a condition requiring sympathy but as a vantage point from which to anatomise the hypocrisies of heteronormative society. West German audiences, accustomed to the tasteful melancholy of earlier gay-themed cinema, recoiled. Gay audiences, too, were divided—some embraced his confrontational aesthetics, whilst others found his portrayals reductive, even self-loathing.
But von Praunheim understood something essential about activism in an age of mass media: visibility, even scandalous visibility, was a form of power. By 1972, he had helped catalyse the formation of Germany’s modern gay liberation movement, as young activists, energised by his unapologetic stance, organised consciousness-raising groups and direct-action protests. The movement he helped birth would eventually transform German law and culture, though von Praunheim himself remained perpetually at odds with its more mainstream iterations.
He was prolific to the point of compulsion—more than 150 films across his career, documentaries and fictions that chronicled the AIDS crisis (A Virus Knows No Morals, 1986), explored the lives of ageing drag queens, and excavated forgotten queer histories. The Guardian wrote in 1992: ‘Silence = Death and Positive: The best AIDS films to date’. His aesthetic never mellowed; even in his later work, he favoured stark lighting, non-professional actors, and a kind of Brechtian anti-naturalism that kept viewers at an uncomfortable distance. Beauty, for von Praunheim, was always suspect—a bourgeois distraction from the urgent work of political consciousness.
He was a co-founder of the German ACT UP movement and organised the first major AIDS benefit event in Germany. During the height of the AIDS crisis in 1991, he caused a scandal by publicly outing several German celebrities, including Hape Kerkeling and Alfred Biolek, against their will on television. He later justified the action as ‘a cry of despair at the height of the AIDS crisis’, though the ethics remained contested.
President Steinmeier noted that von Praunheim had accomplished something few artists could claim: ‘He actually changed social reality, especially through his films’ . The acknowledgement was not the President’s first; in 2017, Steinmeier had congratulated von Praunheim on his 75th birthday in the form of a public acknowledgement. But this final tribute carried a particular weight—a recognition that provocation and patriotism, properly understood, need not be opposing forces.
From 1999 to 2006, von Praunheim was professor of directing at the Film University of Babelsberg, where he taught at various film schools, including San Francisco Art Institute. His influence extended beyond his own films; former students ,including Tom Tykwer, Chris Kraus, Axel Ranisch, Robert Thalheim, and Julia von Hein,z made the film Pink Children (2012) about their mentor.
He died in Berlin, in his flat, surrounded by decades’ worth of film canisters and protest ephemera. The obituaries, dutiful and vaguely embarrassed, struggled to contain him within conventional narratives of progress—the brave pioneer, the movement elder. Steinmeier concluded: ‘Rosa von Praunheim was incomparable’ . But von Praunheim had never been interested in being a monument. His films remain what they always were: abrasive, uncompromising, impossible to ignore. They document not the triumph of identity politics but its messy, contentious origins, when liberation meant not acceptance but the right to live without apology.
He married the man he loved, and five days later, he was gone—leaving behind a body of work that continues to disturb, provoke, and liberate in equal measure. The Deutsches Theatre in Berlin wrote in tribute: ‘Rosa’s flat was a living studio; he was always working and on many things at the same time. He was a restless spirit who analysed, constantly poeticised and constantly sang about our present with polemics and curiosity, sharpness and wit’ . It was, perhaps, the only legacy he ever wanted: not admiration, but unease; not monuments, but questions that refused to be answered.
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